The Pairodocs Sunday Brunch
A new weekly compendium of things we find weird, wonderful, disturbing, funny, and maybe even uplifting in the world of science, medicine, and anything else we happen to find interesting
Here at the Pairodocs household, we do a lot of reading and thinking. We share things with each other—articles, podcasts, videos, tweets, memes, quotes, scientific studies and other odds and ends—and then sit around discussing them for disturbingly long periods of time. Sometimes heatedly. Chris is usually wrong—he is, for example, a Montreal Canadiens fan—yet here I am still married to him after 30+ years!
I’m kidding, of course. We are both wrong much of the time but we like to think we become less wrong—and maybe a little closer to the truth—in the course of bouncing our ideas off each other.
Much coffee—and occasionally wine—is consumed in the course of these conversations and sometimes an idea for a new Substack post is spawned. But alas, for every idea that results in a fully developed essay, there are dozens that interest—or infuriate—us but which just don’t quite make the cut for a full Sub.
So we’ve decided to start a weekly compendium of everything we’ve found noteworthy during the previous week, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the downright terrifying, topped off with a few of our favourite quotes and memes.
Let us know in the comments what you think of the format—and the title. It’s a work in progress.
A Giggle and a Tickle. But We’re not Laughing.
An Australian appeals court this week upheld a lower court’s decision against Sall Grover, the woman who founded “Giggle for Girls” (a female only networking app) for excluding a big hairy man who calls himself “Roxanne Tickle.” The court awarded the big hairy man $20,000 (AUD) in damages plus up to $100k in legal costs—to be paid by Grover. The court found that Grover “directly discriminated” against Tickle under the Sex Discrimination Act which was amended in 2013 to include “gender identity” and to remove definitions of “man” and “woman”. Ironically, this amendment was brought about by Australia’s first and only female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.
I believe this is an example of what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (and later Carl Jung and still later Iain MacGilchrist) called “enantiodromia” — the idea that when an idea or tendency is taken to its extreme, it naturally becomes its opposite. This is feminism come full circle and become the destroyer of women. This is the logical endpoint of the idea that differences between men and women are socially constructed, and that biology is irrelevant: an idea the feminists have been pushing for decades. Just as the anti-racists have become the worst racists and the anti-fascists have become the most ardent fascists, the feminists (at least the ones who insist on taking their underlying premise to its logical conclusion) have become the undisputed champions of destroying women’s sex-based rights.
The Twitterverse was not amused:
Safer snorting
When I was a kid, they taught us that drugs were dangerous and that we should “Just say No.” Now Ontario school kids are being taught how to safely snort coke.
Meanwhile, Canada’s new Chief Public Health Officer, sporting a dead-eyed stare and creepy monotone straight out of the zombie apocalypse, refused to even acknowledge that “injecting fentanyl is bad” when pressed to do so by Conservative MP Dan Mazier. Take your fentanyl kids, it’s good for you! Or at least not bad. It’s complicated. What was it George Orwell said? There are some ideas so absurd, only an intellectual could believe them? You have to hand it to them for their consistency, though. These are the same people who believe killing mentally ill people is “health care” and aborting an eight month old fetus is just another choice, like deciding which brand of cereal to buy. Death cult all the way down. The moral relativism is breathtaking. Life? Death? Meh, whatever. We’re all just inconsequential bags of chemicals on an inconsequential speck of dust in a dead mechanical universe anyway. So whatever.
Berenson v Biden—A Victory for Free Speech in Medicine!
In wonderful news for us fans of free speech in medicine, former New York Times journalist and now popular Substacker Alex Berenson won his lawsuit against the US Government (in which he alleged that they violated his 1st Amendment rights during the dark days of the COVID pandemic.) Berenson argued that the government pressured Twitter into suspending his account back in 2021 for saying things the government didn’t like (things which were quite reasonable and turned out to be true, but that’s beside the point). Not only did they award him a cash settlement, they agreed to admit wrongdoing. A quote from the actual settlement:
The United States Government. . . has acknowledged and conceded that the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantive coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.
The Free Press (conspicuously unlike the mainstream media which hardly covered it at all) does a good job of summarizing the story here.
This is one of the Tweets that got Berenson banned. Does it make you feel nostalgic?
Meanwhile, back here in Canuckistan,
we not only don’t have a First Amendment to protect our freedom of speech, but the government is trying to gain access to everything we say and do on the internet. If the proposed Bill C-22 passes, tech companies will be compelled to share all of your now private data with the government. Thankfully, although Canadians don’t seem to be grasping the potential of this Bill for facilitating authoritarian overreach, the tech companies are saying “no way, not happening.”
From the Canadian Press:
MONTREAL, May 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As international scrutiny intensifies around Canada’s proposed Bill C-22, a growing coalition of global technology leaders, cybersecurity companies, and international lawmakers are warning that the legislation could severely damage Canada’s digital economy.
Prominent Canadian technology entrepreneur and investor Yanik Guillemette states that the debate surrounding Bill C-22 has evolved far beyond privacy concerns, rapidly becoming a defining economic issue for Canada’s future competitiveness in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
Meta and X (along with Apple and Signal and various VPN providers) are strongly opposing the bill due to severe threats to user privacy and encryption.
Key concerns driving the opposition include:
Encryption Backdoors: Tech giants warn the bill would allow the government to force providers to break end-to-end encryption. Meta stated this would “conscript private companies into service as an arm of the government surveillance apparatus”.
Mandatory Data Retention: The bill enables regulations forcing service providers to retain user metadata for up to one year.
Platform Pullout Threats: Companies like Signal and various VPN providers have threatened to leave the Canadian market entirely rather than compromise user privacy.
And to add a bit of icing to the cake, the US Congress has also voiced its displeasure:
The Lab-leak Saga Continues
The mainstream media is finally coming around to admitting that the “crazy racist COVID lab leak conspiracy theory that could get you banned from Twitter and Facebook” is not only true, but that Fauci et. al. deliberately covered it up and should be held accountable. This is a headline from the Wall Street Journal:
The intelligence community long ago figured out that the COVID virus most likely came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But in a sad comment on just how corrupt formerly prestigious medical journals have become, the Lancet has never retracted the nefarious February 2020 letter which supported mysterious “natural origins” and condemned alternative theories as "conspiracy theories" — even after it became obvious to anyone paying attention that the real purpose of the letter (orchestrated by Teflon Tony himself) was to cover the butts of the people who had supported and funded gain of function research in Wuhan. And they wonder why people don’t trust The Science™ anymore?
Say his name: Henry Nowak
Just when you thought the UK couldn’t descend any further into self-destructive absurdity, a murder trial this week makes you wonder if you’re actually asleep and about to awaken from a nightmare.
The facts according to the decidedly-not-right-wing BBC:
A first-year university student was stabbed to death by an attacker captured saying “I am a bad man” moments before inflicting the fatal wound, a court has heard.
Henry Nowak, 18, from Chafford Hundred, Essex, was killed as he walked back from a night out in Southampton on 3 December.
A trial at Southampton Crown Court heard that alleged attacker Vickrum Digwa, 23, was filmed by Nowak carrying a shastar – the Punjabi word for weapon or knife – which had a 21cm (8in) blade.
The attacker was allowed to carry the deadly knife (the UK has strict laws about carrying knives) because he is a Sikh and, well, multiculturalism and all that. But the worst part of the story is this: Instead of immediately arresting the attacker, the police handcuffed the bleeding British boy after Mr. Digwa claimed (without evidence) that the boy had made “racist comments.” After which, the boy lost consciousness and succumbed to his wounds. Again, the Twitterverse was not amused:
Whew. Heavy stuff. Let’s end on a lighter note:
Memes of the week
Quote of the week
“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Pairodocs addendum: “Or a woman can get fined $120,000 for saying a big hairy man is not a woman.”