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“Harm reduction” programs often cause terrible harm. But sometimes they also are beyond absurd. Like this example: Canadian prisons are going to distribute paper straws to inmates for use while snorting drugs. From the National Post story: The Correctional Service of Canada has confirmed that paper straws will soon be distributed in federal prisons to facilitate safe snorting of drugs. This week a social media post included photos of a memo distributed to Corrections staff stating that paper straws were being newly “introduced” for “safer snorting” and “intended for inhaling substances in powdered form or inhaling vapor from heated substances.” Don’t take drugs while imprisoned, but if you do, use a paper straw! Good grief. How will paper straws reduce harm exactly? Read More ›

JAMA Pediatrics has published a depressing study that shows that girls ages 10–14 have caught up with boys of that age when it comes to suicide rates: In 2017, the suicide rate of 10-to-14-year-old boys was twice that of girls (male-female ratio=1.98). By 2024, however, the suicide rate among boys was only 4% higher than that among girls in this age group (ratio=1.04). Gender disparities in suicide trends since 2018 appear to be responsible for the narrowing gap, as the suicide rate for boys decreased by 35% from 2018 to 2024 while the suicide rate for girls increased 13%. From 2007 to 2024, the suicide rate for 10-to 14-year-old girls [per 100,000] more than quadrupled (from 0.51 to 2.28) while the suicide rate Read More ›

The Ethicist column in the New York Times — a high-brow Dear Abby — has blessed adultery if one’s spouse is permanently incapacitated.

The questioner is a woman who married an older man. Her husband is now incapacitated by advancing Alzheimer’s. She is raising their child alone and has to earn a living. She still wants intimacy and asks whether it is okay for her to date. The Ethicist’s unethical response:

It’s obvious that you’ve had a lot to carry for a long time, not least caring for your husband as his Alzheimer’s has progressed. And you do owe him continued stewardship as his spouse. But given that his condition has evidently left him unable to sustain a reciprocal emotional and marital relationship, these obligations don’t mean you have to give up emotional and physical intimacy for the rest of his life. Fidelity, in a situation like yours, involves a duty of care, but with the effective loss of a companion, you’re entitled to care for yourself as well.

Anthony Conwright argues in the New York Times that the Civil War should not be called by that name because it never was so called during its fighting.

Conwright is angry that back on the anniversary of Appomattox, President Trump marked the event by quoting Ulysses S Grant’s magnanimous statement that the “rebels are our countrymen again.” Never mind that Grant was carrying out Lincoln’s explicit policy of magnanimity toward the rebels as a means of reuniting the country (“with malice toward none, with charity for all” and all that).

Even more ridiculously, Conwright argues that calling the conflagration the “Civil War” somehow diminishes the evil of slavery abolished after the North’s victory. From “It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War:’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion“:

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

A pro-illegal immigrant advocacy article in the New England Journal of Medicine urges doctors to protect undocumented patients by impeding law enforcement in the context of the physician/patient relationship.

First, the authors complain that enforcing immigration law has engendered an environment of fear:

The current climate echoes that surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, when fears of surveillance, deportation, and the effects of new public-charge policies drove immigrant communities to avoid necessary care, which led to increased morbidity and mortality. As erosion of trust in institutions again drives patients away from clinics, confronting their needless suffering also exacts a toll on physicians, who may experience moral distress, feeling complicit in a system that’s failing marginalized groups. [Citations omitted.]

I recently wrote critically about a Quebec town that granted “rights to trees.” These include the rights “to life, to natural growth, to integrity, and to regeneration.” The new law has gotten a lot of media attention. Now, the New York Times has entered the fray, publishing a relatively objective story about the resolution and the nature rights movement’s history, with only one critic quoted — yours truly, from my NRO article (I was not interviewed). There is more to say about this than I included in my original post. So, let’s dig a little into the Times’ story: The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees Read More ›

The Lancet just published an editorial that essentially supports unlimited migration — although it doesn’t use that term — and makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. From, “Migration a Reality, Not an Emergency:” Migration is among the oldest facts of human life, yet it is treated as one of the newest emergencies: anti-immigration protests have intensified in the UK and immigration raids have swept US cities. As we mark World Refugee Day, the follow-up Review to the 2018 UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health, published in this issue, renews the Commission’s call for action and asks whether, in a climate shaped by fear, evidence can still drive policy. The editorial ignores international and national laws. In the United Read More ›

The “nature rights” movement continues to advance. Now, a bill has been presented for consideration in the U.K. House of Lords by a member of the Green Party to redefine “nature” as a “subject” with enforceable “rights.”

The “Nature’s Rights Bill 2026” is as radical as it is long. It recognizes “Nature” (capital N) as “a legal subject and rights bearing entity” that essentially includes everything that exists on the planet:

“Nature” means the interconnected community of living organisms, ecosystems, habitats, species, landscapes, seascapes, geological processes, waters, soils, atmosphere, climate systems and natural cycles, including the evolutionary and regenerative dynamics of life on Earth.

The putative rights of Nature are all-encompassing:

(1) Nature has the following inherent rights—
(a) the right to exist, persist and evolve;
(b) the right to maintain and regenerate ecological integrity;
(c) the right to restoration and regeneration where harm has occurred;
(d) the right to be free from pollution, contamination and degradation that threatens ecological integrity, resilience or health;
(e) the right to maintain natural cycles, functions and processes, including hydrological, climatic, geological, soil, nutrient, reproductive, evolutionary and ecological processes;
(f) the right to maintain ecological connectivity, diversity, abundance and resilience; and
(g) the right to exist, regenerate and flourish within safe ecological limits, including Planetary Boundaries and Earth System Boundaries so far as applicable.

Did the women’s movement get hijacked? Former Cosmopolitan writer and Subverted author Sue Ellen Browder says yes, and she says she helped do it. In this eye-opening conversation, Sue shares what she witnessed inside Cosmopolitan during the height of the sexual revolution, how media narratives helped reshape American views on sex, marriage, motherhood, and abortion, and why she believes the women’s movement became fused with abortion politics. We discuss the influence of figures such as Betty Friedan, Larry Lader, Simone de Beauvoir, and Kate Millett, the origins of modern feminism, the role of propaganda in shaping public opinion, and what Sue uncovered in her research into Roe v. Wade. Was the sexual revolution an organic cultural shift or a carefully Read More ›

Environmentalism is growing increasingly radical and irrational, epitomized by the “nature rights” movement that seeks to declare geological features, flora, and fauna to be rights-bearing beings. Nature rights activists proselytize neoearth religion. Advocates often invoke mystical beliefs of indigenous peoples as justifications for their advocacy, including the invocation of “Pachamama,” the Incan earth goddess. Some activists even claim that the earth is alive. Now, an article in the environmental journal PLOS Climate claims that “glaciers are more than human beings” — what I guess we could call glacier exceptionalism: In the context of accelerating climate change and widespread ecological degradation, there is growing academic and legal interest in reframing natural entities—such as glaciers—as more-than-human beings. This conceptual turn challenges anthropocentric Read More ›