The Crowhill Journal

For the next couple weeks we’ll be assaulated with analysis of the Barbie movie. Is it too woke? Are the people who say it’s woke haters of one kind or another?

I expected it to be woke garbage, and I suspect that’s the reality. But I don’t particularly care — except for a slight concern than any socially significant media event might tend to push things in the wrong direction.

My overall reaction is that I’m tired of adults agonizing over children’s stories and toys. Stop trying to analyze Barbie. It’s just a toy for girls.

But as soon as I say that, I realize how wrong-headed that is. Children’s stories and toys are precisely where we fight for the next generation. Kids who grow up assuming that girls should be Barbie and boys should be G.I. Joe will make a very different society than kids who grow up believing girls and boys can just swap roles and clothes and private parts.

Prediction: there will be a new version of Mr. Potato Head where the kid can decide if it’s Mr. or Mrs. by swapping out some plastic parts.

As much as I hate the thought of it, yes, people probably should agonize over Barbie.

Why did it take so long for somebody to do this?

Mayor tells school board to resign or face charges.

As you would expect, the swamp creatures pushed back.

An Ohio mayor’s threats to criminally charge school district employees was ‘reckless’ and ‘irresponsible’, prosecutor finds

Still, this is exactly what needs to happen. And if it’s in his power, he should fire the wimpy prosecutors. Keep up the pressure!

Of course I say this as someone who actually wants the government-run schools to collapse. But as long as they exist (as the blight on humanity that they are), we need to keep trying to impose some level of sanity and stop the monsters who are trying to indoctrinate children.

… making Biden among the worst presidents ever.

INTERVIEW | Kimberley Strassel on Why Biden Presidency Looks a Lot Like Jimmy Carter Administration

I hope that you recoil in unbelief when you hear stories about a deep government conspiracy to traffic children for sex. It seems so outlandish that your natural reaction should be to dismiss it.

But then you hear about Epstein and his apparent suicide, you see coordinated efforts to keep people from watching “The Sound of Freedom,” and media efforts to assure us that sex trafficking isn’t such a big deal, and you start to wonder what the heck is going on. Isn’t everybody against child sex trafficking? It’s certainly possible (actually, likely) that the numbers aren’t as bad as the advocates want us to believe, but they’re certainly bad.

In a similar vein, I was speaking with a family who had a child in the hospital. After he got out of the ER, there was a mix-up about medicines, which lengthened his hospital stay for several days. Someone questioned whether the “mix up” was intentional to keep him in the hospital longer so they could make more money.

I scoffed at the suggestion. Doctors and nurses are trying their best to help these kids. But the skeptic reminded me that doctors and nurses are promoting so-called “gender affirming care” for children precisely because it’s such a big money maker, and the pharmaceutical companies are promoting vaccines for children (who don’t need them) so they can make more money.

Last night I listened to a recent Tucker Carlson speech where he mentioned a similar phenomenon. He (like most of us, I hope) doesn’t want to believe that people are tampering with our elections. But a friend said, “look, people kill each other over insurance claims, certainly they cheat when it comes to who runs the free world.”

The pattern is the same in all these cases. We want to believe that people are basically decent, and that complicated, evil conspiracies don’t happen.

But then we keep getting evidence that people very clearly are doing dastardly things, and it makes it harder to laugh away the conspiracies.

Politicians and tobacco companies misled people about smoking, something similar happened with sugar, the government intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, and the medical establishment experimented on black people with syphilis. And as much as I hate to credit Alex Jones with anything, he might be at least partially right about how chemicals are affecting frogs.

The bottom line is that people lie to us all the time to promote their agendas, or to make money, and that these lies are often supported by people in power. But most of us are usually reluctant to believe it.

Consider so-called “forever chemicals.” It’s at least possible that we’re being poisoned by near constant exposure to plastics. Almost everything you eat and drink has been in contact with plastics, and there’s some evidence that it’s very bad for you.

But if you’re a news organization, and you start to run a story about that, guess what happens?

Yes, it is hot, but here are a few things to keep in mind as you read the breathless articles about the recent heat waves.

• When they say “hottest on record,” you should be curious what “record” they’re talking about. If it’s the thermometer record, that only goes back a little more than 100 years. There are other records — like ice core data — that tell a different story.
• The planet has been warming for 10,000 years because we’ve been transitioning from a glacial period to an interglacial period. It’s not a straight line trend, but the trend is clear over that time frame.
• Don’t be fooled by graphs that mix proxy records with thermometer records. IOW, they reconstruct / estimate past temperatures using proxies, but then append the thermometer record at the end. That’s a trick. If they start with proxy data, the whole chart should be proxy data.
• We’ve done this before. Ice ages have glacial and interglacial periods. The last interglacial was called the Eemian. It was from about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. It was most likely warmer during the Eemian than it is today.
• Nobody knows whether — when this interglacial is over — we will plunge back into a glacial period or come out of the ice age altogether.

By the way, we are currently in an ice age, which is usually defined as a time when there is ice at both poles. For lots of Earth’s history there has not been ice at the poles. And in other times, the whole Earth seems to have been covered in ice. (“Snowball Earth.”)