"The federal government on Thursday acted to put an end to gender-related care for minors across the nation, threatening to pull federal funding from any hospital that offered such treatment...."

"The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth. If finalized, the proposed new rules, announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a news conference Thursday morning, would effectively shut down hospitals that failed to comply.... The new rules come one day after a divided House of Representatives voted to approve legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors.... Another [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] rule would prevent Medicaid from paying for the treatments for minors. And the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was issuing warning letters to 12 manufacturers of breast binders, tight garments used to flatten and masculinize chest appearance under clothing, for 'illegal marketing' of the products to children as a treatment for gender dysphoria.... Mr. Kennedy cited [an HHS report] to argue that the treatments do not meet professionally recognized standards for medical care...."

From "Trump Moves to Prevent Access to Gender-Related Care for Minors/Proposed new rules would pull all federal financing from hospitals that continue to provide gender treatments for adolescents" (NYT).

The NYT expresses worries about denying "the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth," but recognizing the existence of transgender persons does not dictate the belief that they require medical treatment or that the currently proffered treatments are ethical. There are many phenomena that are recognized but not treated. That's the basis of the old credo "First, do no harm." 

"We should be facilitators and enablers."

“They had a patient coming in saying, ‘I want to look like Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ ”@LeorSapir spent over 100 hours going through footage of gender conferences.

In the videos obtained exclusively by The Free Press, gender doctors acknowledge they… pic.twitter.com/Jm00RUKFhh

— The Free Press (@TheFP) December 3, 2025

Here's the article: "'We’re All Just Winging It': What the Gender Doctors Say in Private In footage obtained exclusively by The Free Press, gender doctors acknowledge they perform life-altering procedures on vulnerable youth with no supportive evidence—and they are proud of it."

"In truth, Republicans may have more cards to play in an all-out redistricting war in 2026 than Democrats do."

The NYT concedes in "California Democrats Look to Redraw House Map to Counter Texas G.O.P./As a Texas senator summoned the F.B.I. to round up Democrats, the redistricting war that began in Texas was spreading, with California aiming at five Republican House seats."

... House maps and redistricting laws in Democratic states present significant hurdles. Illinois, for instance, is already so skewed to Democrats that flipping even one of the three Republican seats left would be extremely difficult for mapmakers.

That's a funny use of the passive voice: "is already so skewed." In other words, Democrats have already done what they could to advantage themselves in Illinois. They've already used the practice they now want to condemn as nefarious.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker is quoted saying: "If they’re going to cheat, then all of us have to take a hard look at what the effect of that cheating is on democracy. That means we all have to stand up and do the right thing. So, as far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table."

"If they’re going to cheat..." — as if the Republicans started it. You've just accused your own party of cheating. What is the "right thing" — cancelling the other side's cheating? You are essentially crediting your adversaries with doing the "right thing."

Meanwhile, in California, Gavin Newsom is also talking about the "right thing":

Unlike in Texas, where politicians control the process, California’s congressional districts have been set by an independent commission that is not allowed to consider partisanship in drawing the lines. Mr. Newsom has proposed putting that system on hold for the next three elections to help Democrats counter the Republican plan in Texas. He wants the California plan to contain a provision saying that it goes into effect only if Texas approves new maps mid-decade.

“It’s triggered on the basis of what occurs or doesn’t occur in Texas,” Mr. Newsom told reporters on Monday. “I hope they do the right thing, and if they do the right thing, then there’ll be no cause for us to have to move forward.”'

But if they don't do "the right thing," then Newsom is ready to do the wrong thing. But can he? The system he is talking about putting on hold is a matter of state constitutional law. To amend it, he would be asking the people to vote on a ballot initiative to undo the reform they voted for in 2008 and 2010. 

Imagine the campaign against that reform, so recently touted as the right thing to do in California: We're doing it right, but if Texas is doing it wrong, we've got to seize the power to do it wrong like the way we did in the bad old days.

"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"Definitely a boundary violation, but, hey, what do I know?"/"This seems like scope creep. In my area, a therapist can't bill insurance and do this type of practice."

Comments on the NYT article "Unpacking the Past (and the Groceries) With Your Therapist/Mental health professionals are meeting clients in the kitchen to harness the therapeutic powers of cooking."

From the article: "Ms. Borden begins each session by asking her patients what they’re bringing to the table, literally and figuratively. 'They might say, "Oh, well, you told me to get salad,"' she joked. 'No, "How are you feeling right now?"'After getting a sense of the client’s mental mise en place, the work begins. One of Ms. Borden’s signature dishes to cook with clients is a zucchini noodle salad with feta and olives. The olives, with their soft fruit and hard pit, are particularly ripe with therapeutic metaphor, Ms. Borden said. She likes to ask clients: 'What is the pit in your stomach?'"

Ugh! Don't get me started on "pit in your stomach." I covered this topic back in 2021. It's a corruption of "pit of your stomach," which means the bottom of your stomach. The pit is the location of the bad feeling, not a tangible item that's causing discomfort. Also "What is the pit in your stomach?" assumes there is a bad feeling in the stomach. The presence of the olive created an opportunity for clever repartee that took precedence over listening to the client's expression. Does the client rise to the prompt and enumerate ways she's like that damned olive?

Do you want your therapist in your house and cooking with you, using food metaphors to pry into your emotional innards? 

Prompt for Grok: "Tell me about the psychiatrist Brian Wilson kept in his house."

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

"An honour to have my IQ questioned by you Mr VP. But your attempts to speak for Christ are false and dangerous."

"Nowhere does Jesus suggest that love is to be prioritised in concentric circles. His love is universal."

Said Rory Stewart, a podcaster, quoted in "JD Vance says Rory Stewart has ‘low IQ’ in Christian values clash/The US vice-president copies Trump’s playbook with response to the former minister’s claims that his rhetoric was ‘false and dangerous'" (London Times).

Vance's original statement was: "There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that."

When Stewart disagreed, Vance came at him with: "Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years. Rory Stewart thinks he has an IQ of 130 when it’s really 110.'"

It's not a question of what Rory really thinks but what Jesus really said. What IQ does Vance ascribe to Jesus?

"People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an 'inherently vulnerable community'...."

"... They 'wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity'.... They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. 'And if you have morality around it, you say "no."'... [I]n my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, 'The one thing I hear again and again, largely from women, is "He was always nice to me. He was always a gentleman."' The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. 'He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,' she says, 'but also made him seem very harmless.' Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his 'sex slave': 'He read it aloud and said, "Well, no." He’d be very demure.' But there were some who saw another side of the author....."

From "There Is No Safe Word/How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades" (New York Magazine).

That's a long article, and you are probably blocked by the paywall.  Here's Gaiman's answer (on his website). Here's the NYT article about it, "Neil Gaiman Responds to Explosive Report of Sexual Assault/'I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone,' said the best-selling author in response to allegations in New York magazine":

"Are Hollywood film crews getting good footage of fires for use in later movies?"

I asked Grok.

Answer:

There is evidence suggesting that Hollywood film crews might be capturing footage of current fires for potential use in future movies. Several posts on X have indicated that filmmakers are taking advantage of the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles for this purpose. Users on the platform have expressed concern or cynicism about the ethics of filming such disasters, suggesting that some crews are indeed out capturing footage of the fires, especially given the proximity to iconic locations like the Hollywood sign.... There's no direct confirmation from official sources or news articles within the web results provided that Hollywood is currently exploiting these specific fires for footage, although the idea aligns with past practices in film where real-life events have been used for authenticity or stock footage.

Let's read WaPo's "note from our owner": "The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media."

I need to force myself to read this — by Jeff Bezos. He kept WaPo from publishing an explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris, who is all too obviously implicitly endorsed by WaPo every day. So I'll live-blog my reading of it. Let's go....

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

He's calling it a "profession," so it should have a system of ethical principles that must be followed, even if the polls don't go your way. 

"As prisoners arrived, they were stripped, searched and deloused, a process overseen by Dr. Zimbardo, who played the role of prison superintendent."

"Initially there were a few giggles among the participants, but as the guards began enforcing rules, the mock prison began to feel very real. Though critics have accused Dr. Zimbardo of coaching the guards to act sadistic, he told the guards only to 'create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear and a "sense of powerlessness,"' according to a defense of the study on his website. They were, he said, given no 'formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.' Within a day, the guards had become abusive and were engaging in psychological torture: making the prisoners defecate in buckets, waking them up repeatedly through the night, forcing them to simulate sodomy. Several prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns. But Dr. Zimbardo kept the study going...."

From "Philip Zimbardo, 91, Whose Stanford Prison Experiment Studied Evil, Dies/ His provocative research made him a popular figure on campus. But his exploration of how good people can turn evil raised ethical questions" (NYT).

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

"My concern is this is instrumentalizing the dog. This is not giving the dog any choice in the matter."

"If your dog wants to rub itself in coyote scat or fox scat, that’s the dog’s choice. But if it gets a spray of Dolce & Gabbana on it, that is not its choice. We need to be far more respectful of dogs and their wishes."

Said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine, quoted in "Dolce & Gabbana Has New Dog Perfume. Veterinarians Turn Up Their Noses. An extravagant scent might seem like the height of pampering for your pup. But veterinarians are raising red flags: 'Overall, it’s a very bad idea'" (NYT).

Grok tries to help me analyze the "ethicality" of attaching a camera to your baby's head and deviously distracts me with the question of gluing hair onto the head of one's 3-year-old.

Here's my screen shot (and I'll tell you in a minute why I was asking this question):

 

I don't know why Jim Gaffigan had his question, but I had my question because I was reading the NYT article "From Baby Talk to Baby A.I./Could a better understanding of how infants acquire language help us build smarter A.I. models?" 

We read about a 20-month-old girl who wears "a soft pink hat" with a "lightweight GoPro-type camera... attached to the front." This particular child is only wearing the camera once a week for one month, but scientists are asking...

"In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called 'The Ethics of Belief.'"

"In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,' Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, 'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'"

From "The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care" by David Brooks (NYT).

Here's the essay "The Ethics of Belief."

And here's Hilary Cass's study (discussed in the Brooks column), "Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People."

"To make 'thoughtfulness' a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege."

"That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom. The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right...."

Writes Andrea Long Chu, in "Freedom of Sex/The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies" (New York Magazine).

Note the suggestion that puberty is nature's sexual assault upon the child. The author doesn't quite say that, but she put the thought into my head. It would prove too much though. We wouldn't ask whether any given children can consent to take puberty blockers; we would ask whether all children should be required to take puberty blockers.

Also in this article is an acronym I'm seeing for the first time: TARL. This is a "trans-agnostic reactionary liberal":

"Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S."

Gallup reports.

"When [Hugh Hefner] died of cardiac arrest at 91, [his last wife] at first protected his reputation."

"She writes about how, before he died, Mr. Hefner made her promise to 'only say good things.' Ms. Hefner’s resolve to keep that promise began fading in 2019, she said, when she started therapy after watching 'Leaving Neverland,' the documentary that details sexual-abuse allegations from two men who had long-running relationships with Michael Jackson. Looking back at their marriage now, Ms. Hefner said, evokes feelings of regret and disgust. She is still learning how to build healthy relationships and break the codependent tendencies she developed during her relationship with Mr. Hefner. 'When I started dating again, that was hard,' she said, 'because with Hef, he just wanted me by him all the time.' It was only recently, she said with a nervous laugh, that she learned the concept of setting boundaries. 'I didn’t have any when I was at the mansion,' she said. 'If you wanted to be there, you couldn’t have boundaries.'"

From a NYT article with such an off-putting headline that I almost avoided clicking, even though Hugh Hefner is a very longstanding interest of mine: "No More Bunny Business/In a tell-all memoir, Crystal Hefner recounts her former days as a Playboy model and the third (and last) wife of Hugh Hefner."

One of the boundaries you can set in your life is to see yourself as not bound by a promise you made to someone else. Another person can make you feel bound as he sets his boundaries to hold you in. She wanted to be inside that boundary. On balance, at the time, it felt worth it to her. But how can that bind her for life? He could have set it up with enough of a financial penalty that she would have chosen to keep quiet for the rest of her life, but it seems he just "made her promise to 'only say good things.'"

It's almost a generic death-bed wish: Speak well of me when I'm gone. Remember the good. It was good for you too, my darling, wasn't it?

"The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it had issued an ethics code for the justices...."

"In a statement by the court, the justices said they had adopted the code of conduct 'to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the members of the court.' 'For the most part these rules and principles are not new,' the court said, adding that 'the absence of a code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.' Left unclear was how the code will be enforced."

The NYT reports.

Is it unclear? It seems clear to me. The Justices agree these are the "rules and principles." That's it.  

Obama is doing something now, in saying that. Does it "move" anything "forward"? Is this, too, "complicit"?

I'm reading "Obama Urges Americans to Take in ‘Whole Truth’ of Israel-Gaza War/The former president said everyone was 'complicit to some degree' in the current bloodshed and acknowledged the points of view on both sides of the conflict." (NYT).

We're not given the full sentence with the phrase "complicit to some degree," just the phrase. It appears in the opening sentence to the article:

Barack Obama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between Israel and Gaza, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.

If we are "complicit," what did we do? What could we have done? But Obama, who was President, doesn't even know what he could have done:

“I look at this, and I think back, 'What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?' But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?'"

He's doing something now, in saying that. 

He goes on: