Two wrongs don't make a right

In today's world, more than ever, "neither of the above" is frequently the best option

I have written a weekly column for over two decades. People ask me all of the time, “How do you come up with something to write about every week?” They are asking the wrong question. The right question is “how do you sort through what to write about every week?”

It's a target-rich environment out there for any op-ed writer worth her, his or its salt. If you have to struggle to find things to write about, you are either not paying attention or dead. You literally trip over topics at every step of your journey from one deadline to the next.

This week, for instance, I considered writing about Scott Smith — the Loudoun County, Virginia, father who was arrested, prosecuted, jailed and used to make a case at the behest of the National School Boards Association (among others), with the Department of Justice and FBI to agitate for a federal response to alleged incidences of domestic terrorism at school board meetings.

Smith was angry over the fact that his daughter had been raped in a school bathroom by a “gender fluid” individual — a young man wearing a skirt. At the school board meeting where Smith was gang-tackled by police, a member of the school board denied that any such attack had ever taken place well after the fact. I'd have been pissed, too. So, probably, would you.

The Loudoun school board was more interested in developing statements to protect transgender students than in dealing with a known predator whose psychological profile, according to the judge who recently handed down an unusually harsh sentence for the youthful offender, was “among the most disturbing I've seen.”

The school board also seemed to consider relevant, as a reason for ignoring the facts of the case, the victim's previous relationship with her rapist. I guess that “no means no” only applies if it's useful to the woke narrative.

This story is an under-reported but significant cog in the recent upset Republican election victories in Virginia. A lot of parents knew what was going on in Loudoun County because local media were on top of it even if the narrative in the national media was that what happened in Virginia was a right-wing epidemic of white fragility and the revenge of the MAGA.

I also thought about critiquing a recent study by researchers at Columbia University (in collaboration with others) that concludes that there's no evidence showing that cannabis use during pregnancy causes subsequent cognitive developmental problems in children. The article in question borrows heavily from an article in “Frontiers in Psychology” in which the authors canvassed previous studies using statistical methods to determine that an expecting mother's choice of plastic drinking bottles might be more deleterious to her developing fetus than cannabis use.

I'm going to cut the Columbia researchers some slack. I'm sure that their answers to reporters were more nuanced than what appeared in print. It's likely that context is missing and possible that their statements are not even quoted accurately. That happens to me all of the time. In dozens of interviews with the media on scientific topics, I've never once been quoted correctly. Not once. Sometimes even my columns are edited in a manner that takes a statement that is factually correct and turns it into one that is not.

But let's assume that at least the gist of this story is on point. Cannabis users are one of the most over-the-top, out-where-the-buses-don't-run cults out there. Cannabis users will hype to the moon any study, no matter how obviously flawed, that supports their use. That also means that they will ignore the fact that the study in question is flawed on several levels.

The federal government considers cannabis a schedule I drug — which means that it's effectively nearly impossible to conduct proper studies about its effects. Each of the studies they studied could have been, and probably were, inhibited by this constraint. That's very likely why the authors of the study in question researched other studies instead of conducting one of their own.

The second problem with all studies of this type is foundational: