A professor at Yale University has recommended that the elderly should take part in a “mass suicide” by disembowelment. This is how the left works. They use academia, then media to seed abhorrent ideas into the national landscape, norm them and then enact them (i.e. sexual mutilation, chemical castration of children).
Yusuke Narita, 37, an assistant professor of economics at the Ivy League school, gained hundreds of thousands of followers on social media as he touted the controversial solution in multiple interviews and publications
Once government was put in charge of the nation’s healthcare system, they can and will do anything they want. A predicted consequence of Obamacare. Refusing treatment to unvaxxed patients, for example.
My colleagues and I warned our readers at the time. And many Americans knew. They rose up at the time against socialized medicine. They went to town halls, protested en masse. The movement, appropriately named the Tea Party, was widely defamed and smeared by the enemy media. It was called racist and AstroTurf and all manner of things that the Democrats are guilty of. They were smeared into oblivion. When our people warned of death panels and that no government program should determine when the plug is pulled, we were tin foil hatters and conspiracy theorists.
They got their Obamacare socialized medicine and took down the best medical system in the world.
A Yale professor recently proposed euthanasia as a solution to aging populations. Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics, stated: “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear … In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” He also stated on euthanasia that there’s a “possibility of making it mandatory in the future.” His comments are stirring debate over the direction that medically assisted death is taking, and whether the end result could be democide.
On February 3rd, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous industrial chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio causing a severe environmental emergency.
Vinyl Chloride and butyl acrylate were among the chemicals on board. Large quantities were released and burned to prevent an explosion authorities feared could be even worse. The toxic plumes of smoke and the chemicals released into the water have caused one of the worst eco-disasters in U.S. history.
Families were evacuated and others told to drink bottled water. Fish are dying.
The response by some authorities was muted and delayed, particularly in the case of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who remained silent on the train disaster for a prolonged period. Media coverage has been subdued as well.
Buttigieg “focused on racial disparities in construction during a Monday conference” and ignored the Ohio emergency. It appears we have a Transportation Secretary who thinks the job is about politics, rather than safe and efficient transportation.
Michael Regan, Biden’s EPA administrator, hasn’t even showed up to look at the site. As CFACT’s good friend Steve Milloy noted on Fox’s Jessie Watters program last night “What’s he doing? He’s hocking electric buses, electric cars and environmental justice. This is an environmental catastrophe, it’s his job…but he’s too much of an empty suit to care.”
CFACT’s Marc Morano pointed out that the chemical mess in Ohio underscores the very real danger of allowing climate to hijack the environmental movement. The singular focus on demonizing CO2 tends to blinker government institutions, NGOs and the media and leaves solid issues such as chemical cleanups and transportation safety out of view.
CFACT calls for an all-in government and industry response to safeguard people and the environment in Ohio.
While industrial chemicals need to move by road and rail (rail is safer), the derailment in Ohio also reminds us that gas and oil often do not. Pipelines are the safest, cleanest and most affordable way to move gas and oil. The Biden Administration should approve Keystone XL and other pipelines and responsibly lessen the likelihood of future hazardous spills.
Attention EPA Administrator Michael Regan: Cleaning up and preventing this kind of toxic spill is actually what EPA is supposed to be all about.
Attention Transportation Secretary Buttigieg: Are air brakes sufficient on trains transporting hazardous chemicals, or are more expensive electric brakes needed? We don’t know, find out. Should trains carrying these chemicals be designated “high hazardous material trains?” as Ohio Governor Mike Dewine is demanding? We don’t know, find out. Expedite and approve pipelines for oil and gas and transport these essential fuels safely and efficiently.
Step away from your political agendas and do your jobs.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2023-02-17 08:54:522023-02-17 09:02:36VIDEO: Ohio’s Train Derailment Chemical Disaster
A whistleblower report, originally provided to Congress in January of last year, accused the military of ignoring or failing to take seriously accounts of COVID vaccine injuries among service members. You will recall the Defense Department mandated the vaccine for all service members and denied most claims for exemptions.
COVID vaccine injuries reported by military personnel included vertigo, chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, and tinnitus. An Air Force reservist had a stroke after being vaccinated and suffered career-ending eye problems after a second dose. An Air Force fighter pilot instructor was diagnosed with heart inflammation. The instructor had applied for an exemption due to previous adverse reactions to other vaccines, but was told no. Another service member was told, “The chief medical doc on base literally told me, ‘While you’re the perfect candidate for an exemption, we’ve been directed to deny all medical requests.’” Others were told “there’s no way the vax caused their symptoms.” The military even harassed soldiers who refused to get vaccinated.
The military stuck its head in the sand despite a June 2021 DOD study finding high rates of heart inflammation among previously healthy male service members who were vaccinated. Also, an Army medical officer noticed big increases in a military medical database of cancers, tumors, blood clots, male infertility, and other problems coinciding with COVID vaccination in 2021. The Defense Department went back and changed the numbers in earlier years in the database to make 2021 look normal, the whistleblower alleged.
Critics accuse the military of minimizing and covering up COVID vaccine injuries to protect the Biden administration’s phony narrative the vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.
The military is not the only agency pushing the ‘safe and effective’ narrative while covering up contrary information.
The CDC knew adverse event reports were flooding in, but waited 15 months before doing its first safety signal studies on the data.
The FDA found possible heart problems with a COVID vaccine in early 2021, but waited five months to reveal the information to the public and ten more months to submit a study for publication.
The FAA loosened its standards for acceptable heart performance among pilots, but refused to release the data behind its decision when a media outlet asked for it.
The CDC found a safety signal for stroke in the elderly receiving the Pfizer vaccine, but then unidentified officials said the signal disappeared after the agency used a different statistical test. A medical professor criticized the CDC’s flip-flop, saying “you can’t just run different stat tests until you get the result you want.” A CDC official then offered the excuse the agency didn’t want to publicize the stroke signal because it could “fuel anti-vaccine sentiment….” Ya think? The CDC won’t respond further or explain why it’s withholding the safety signal data.
The FDA also performs safety signal studies, using a different statistical formula. It won’t release records showing the results of their data mining, claiming the results are just preliminary deliberative discussions and, therefore, not disclosable – a common agency argument in Freedom of Information Act cases.
These agencies are hiding behind statistical hogwash when a published critique put them on notice their methodologies were flawed and failing to show obvious safety problems with the COVID vaccines. The critique was brought to the CDC’s attention, but the agency ignored it.
Which brings me to my own FOIA suit in federal court. I want the records showing what decisions officials high up in the CDC, FDA, and overall HHS leadership – including the cabinet secretary – made about whether or not to study the obvious safety problems with COVID vaccines. The Justice Department is fighting me tooth and nail, but I will stay on the case until I get the records I want or the court decides I can’t have them.
“Renewables” are the most expensive, least effective and most destructive forms of energy on the planet.
How many pipelines and energy projects were stopped dead in their tracks over some innocuous environmental concern or obscure fish “endangerment.” Further proof of how full of garbage these cretins are.
These same destroyers are banning our cleanest forms of energy like natural gas and nuclear power.
Whale carcass washed up on a beach in Manasquan, NJ
The whale is the ninth dead whale to wash up in the NY-NJ area since
A dead whale was found on a New Jersey beach Monday — the ninth one to wash ashore in the New York-New Jersey area since early December in what activists are calling an alarming uptick.
The massive marine mammal ended up on Whiting Avenue beach in Manasquan after it was tossed around in the surf, according to Point Pleasant Mayor Paul Kanitra.
Clean Ocean Action, an environmental conservation organization, said that the high number of whale deaths in a roughly two-month period has not been seen in the region in about 50 years.
The group said it believes off-shore wind energy projects could be the culprit of the rising fatalities.
“This alarming number of deaths is unprecedented in the last half century, the only unique factor from previous years, is the excessive scope, scale, and magnitude of offshore wind powerplant activity in the region,” COA said in a statement.
Electric cars threaten environmental disaster – report Demand for lithium – the precious mineral needed to create electric-car batteries – could lead to water shortages and environmental destruction, according to a landmark study.https://t.co/L6dXv6wiLP
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-02-16 08:05:322023-02-16 08:05:32WIND TURBINE SLAUGHTER: Another Dead whale Washes Onto Jersey Shore — 9th One in NY-NJ Area in Just 2 months
A Democratic politician has received massive backlash after she called the scientifically attested belief that children suffer less abuse in nuclear families “dangerous and un-American.”
“Extremist group Family Heritage Alliance said this morning that the safest place for kids are in families that have a married mom and dad. What a dangerous and un-American belief,” tweeted State Representative Erin Healy (D) on Monday.
She had apparently been triggered by testimony offered on behalf of the natural family by the South Dakota family policy council. “In committee we made the claim that the home of a married mother and father is statistically the safest place for a child, and we stand by it 100%. We know that a strong, nuclear family is the safest, most beneficial place for a child to be. Research confirms our claim,” Family Heritage Alliance Director Norman Woods told The Washington Stand.
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“Children living with two married biological parents had the lowest rate of overall Harm Standard maltreatment,” according to the most recent, congressionally mandated survey of child abuse, conducted in 2010. “This rate differs significantly from the rates for all other family structure and living arrangement circumstances. Children living with one parent who had an unmarried partner in the household had the highest incidence of Harm Standard maltreatment.”
Studies as far back as 1985 found toddlers living with a stepparent were 40 times more likely to be abused than those living with “two natural parents.” Children living with an unrelated parent were 50 times more likely to be killed than those living with their biological parents, according to a 2005 study by University of Missouri researchers Patricia Schitzman and Bernard Ewigman published in the journal Pediatrics. Four years later, Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that “families in which the mother was living with a man who was not the biological father of all children … were significantly more likely to be contacted by [Child Protective Services] than those in which she was living with the biological father of all resident children.”
Children from fatherless homes are more likely to do poorly in school, join a gang, commit crimes, and be imprisoned, multiple studies show. In addition, “boys who came from a home without a father were more likely to use drugs than boys who came from a home where a father was present,” according to the Minnesota Psychological Association.
The science attesting to the success of the natural family “is well established, uncontroversial, and obviously not un-American to believe. How sealed does one’s echo chamber have to be to tweet something like this?” replied Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation.
Yet Healy had lobbed multiple epithets at the defenders of the natural family. Three hours earlier, she complained, “The grip from fundamentalist groups who only believe in nuclear families is strong at our state legislature today. I am disgusted by the extremist opposition we heard today,” she said, adding she was “disappointed” a House committee voted down a “simple, important bill” (H.B. 1092) that would redefine marriage as any union “between two persons.”
Live-in boyfriends are not the only threat to children’s safety. The tweet came the same day South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) signed the Help Not Harm Bill (H.B. 1080), which bars the transgender industry from administering puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or committing surgeries “for the purpose of attempting to alter” the child’s gender identity in a way that is “inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” It allows children affected to sue the doctors and medical establishment involved.
“This bill is extremism at its finest,” Healy said, adding, “We know that kids are going to die because of this bill. We know that most Republicans realize that this bill and its testimony is full of lies and misinformation.”
The assertion that children suffering gender dysphoria will commit suicide without lifelong hormone injections or permanently life-altering surgeries is itself misinformation. Multiple surveys show that individuals who go through with gender-reassignment procedures have the same, or higher, risk of suicide as those who do not. Whistleblower Jamie Reed, who identifies as a lesbian supporter of “trans rights,” explained that employees of gender reassignment surgeries regularly use high-pressure tactics to convince parents to go forward with the controversial, and highly profitable, transgender procedures. Reed’s former clinic is now under multiple investigations for prescribing experimental cancer drugs to children and disregarding parental consent.
“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children. By enacting this legislation, South Dakota has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp. “Science and common sense tell us that children aren’t mature enough to properly evaluate the serious ramifications of making certain decisions; the decision to undergo dangerous and likely sterilizing gender transition procedures is no exception.”
Ironically, Woods’s organization — and Woods personally — has also taken heat from Kristi Noem after Woods wrote a letter asking her to take action against a “kid-friendly” drag show sponsored by South Dakota State University. Noem responded by instructing the organization to “find an executive director” who does not “attack the most conservative governor in the country.”
Woods says his organization will continue advocating for nature and the natural family. “Any child who grows up without a mother has lost something. Any child who grows up without a father has lost something,” Woods told TWS. “We will not ignore this loss, no matter the political consequences.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-02-15 18:56:032023-02-15 19:03:35Democrat Calls Advocacy for Natural Family ‘Dangerous and Un-American’
Free speech and a free press. It’s American as apple pie…or so it used to be.
In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant, declared: “Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees for the security of free thought, free speech, a free press.”
But today the left seems to have free speech in America by the throat. We see this in the recent example of corporate giant AT&T cutting off the conservative network Newsmax from satellite distribution through DirecTV, about which I commented recently. This appears to the tip of the iceberg.
Today there is ongoing debate on free speech. One headline proclaimed, “Analyst with PhD discovers conservative podcasters are out there, just saying whatever they please!”
“Free speech for whom?” writes law professor Jonathan Turley about Congressional hearings of fired Twitter executives grilled for their censorship of conservative speech. Elon Musk observed that in buying Twitter, he ended up with “both a social media platform and a crime scene.”
Examples abound. For instance, the Washington Examinerreports on the secret major push by the left to de-platform conservative voices in the media—in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
The Daily Caller directs attention to President Biden’s former press secretary declaring: “Psaki Urges MSNBC Viewers To ‘Think Of The Danger’ Posed By Free Speech.”
The Media Research Center keeps track of the ongoing censorship of conservative perspectives. They have thousands of examples to report.
World is a conservative, Christian magazine that has served its readers for at least three decades. Last week they opened an office in Washington, D.C., and had a speech for the occasion delivered by Dr. Peter Lillback, the founding president of Providence Forum (now a division of D. James Kennedy Ministries, for which I serve as the executive director).
Dr. Lillback said, “May the deadening force of monolithic Leftism with its cancel culture, ad hominem irrationality and suppression of reason and logic never find a foothold here, because the great freedom of the First Amendment is celebrated and defended.” Hear, hear.
But what happens when a free society is completely taken over by the forces of totalitarianism, dedicated to complete squelching of opposing viewpoints? Can citizens in such a society still find ways to communicate light in the darkness?
Bring the Nazis into any argument today, and you may be fulfilling “Godwin’s law,” which says, “the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.”
However, what follows are examples of communicating despite an imposed blackout from the actual Nazis. My wife is from Norway, and I’ve been able to visit there multiple times.
From April 12, 1940 to May 8, 1945, the Nazis occupied Norway, though the Norwegians resisted the best they could.
When the Nazis took over Norway, a country full of “pure Aryans” (in the Nazi mind), they expected the Norwegians to fully participate in their attempts to glorify the “master race” and purge the “undesirables” from humanity, such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.
The Norwegians would have nothing to do with this and with the curtailing of their freedoms.
In Oslo there is a museum dedicated to the resistance of the brave Norwegians against the Nazis during that time. The exhibits show the creativity of the Norwegians to communicate even as the Nazis controlled all levers of the press. The Nazis made shortwave radios highly illegal because through them one could receive the BBC or other forbidden sources of more accurate information—as opposed to the pervasive Nazi propaganda.
I took photos in that museum, showing such things as:
Microfilm hidden inside cans of fish, loaves of bread, the heels of shoes, metal containers to go in bodily cavities, etc.
Secret radio receivers with headphones hidden inside birdhouses, phone books, varnish cans, irons used to press cloths, and even dentures.
Home-made newsletters hidden inside logs.
The museum has a sign that says in English, “On all military fronts Hitler and his allies won great victories. In Norway Nazi ideology was defeated by the democratic forces rooted in a national, Christian culture.”
Obviously in modern America we’re still a long way from that kind of scenario. But the same impulse that silences free speech for the “greater good” can take us in unexpected directions. Once we have lost the true value of free speech—even for speech we find abhorrent—we have put the logical mechanism in place for propaganda to rule the day and dissenting speech to be punished. That punishment may begin as mere economic penalty—but it rarely stops there.
We live in a free society—for now. We need to stand up against those who claim to believe in “free speech,” but in reality they hold to “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jerry Newcombehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Newcombe2023-02-15 18:42:252023-02-15 18:48:03Communicating When Free Speech Is Curtailed
A whistleblower’s explosive account reveals that the transgender medical industry uses high-pressure techniques, employs its own cadre of “experts,” and lies about the impact of puberty blockers and other drugs to convince parents to authorize lifelong “gender-affirming care” that effectively, or literally, castrates their children. When the parents refuse, at least one transgender clinic disregarded the will of the custodial parent, the insider’s testimony states.
Allegations of illegal activity come from an affidavit and accompanying article by Jamie Reed, a far-Left LGBT activist who worked for four years at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The affidavit attests doctors in the university’s transgender clinic prescribed experimental drugs to young children, ignored the children’s physical and mental health concerns, and may have committed Medicaid and insurance fraud. Her heartrending report has touched off separate investigations by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) and U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).
Yet her record of the pediatric gender clinic’s actions during her 2018-2022 tenure also contains damning information about the way the industry overcomes wary parents’ concerns and traps children into decades of costly, harmful “treatments.”
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The facility referred young people reportedly suffering “gender dysphoria” for an evaluation with a psychologist chosen from on a list of doctors they “knew they would say yes” to the gender transition, Reed states. One psychologist at the hospital was particularly “known to approve virtually everyone seeking transition,” she writes. If no outside psychologist signed the letter, the center referred the child to their two in-house psychologists, who would certify that the child should begin the gender reassignment process.
For the youngest patients, this meant beginning puberty blockers before administering a lifetime of cross-sex hormones. “The Center tells the public and parents of patients that the point of puberty blockers is to give children time to figure out their gender identity,” she writes. But in reality, the center uses those drugs “just until children are old enough to be put on cross-sex hormones. Doctors at the Center always prescribe cross-sex hormones for children who have been taking puberty blockers.” (Emphasis in original.)
The doctors’ insistence, rather than the children’s persistence, may explain another discrepancy: Left to their own devices, approximately 85% of children with gender dysphoria will identify with their birth sex by the time they reach adulthood. But nearly 100% of children placed on puberty blockers continue the gender transition process, notes Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at the Family Research Council.
Doctors lie to assure parents will approve the puberty blockers, Reed reveals. “The doctors at the Center tell the public and tell parents of patients that puberty blockers are fully reversible. They really are not. They do lasting damage to the body,” says Reed. Those damages include “sterilization, reduced bone density, cognitive problems, increased body fat percentage and body mass index, decreased lean body mass, and arterial hypertension,” writes Bauwens.
Reed describes meetings between concerned parents, who wanted answers to the scientific findings they had uncovered about the dangers of puberty blockers, and gender clinic employees, who sought to sell them a lifetime of medical interventions. “The clinicians would dismiss the research that the parents had found and speak down to the parents,” Reed testifies. The facility exhibited a thorough “lack of regard for the rights of parents,” as “doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.” Clinic employees “would also malign any parent that was not on board with medicalizing their children,” says Reed.
That echoes the experiences of relatives in the documentary “Dead Name,” especially Helen, who was told to “celebrate” her child’s transgender identity after her former lesbian partner had introduced Helen’s four-year-old son, Jonas, to transgender ideology. Helen recounts that a parade of preschool officials and therapists presented her preschooler’s decision as a fait accompli. “They never said, ‘We need to talk about this,’” Helen says. “It was always edicts by email.”
Parents who resisted received the ultimate high-pressure sales tactic: “Experts” said they must approve their child’s gender transition or witness the child’s suicide. “A common tactic was for doctors to tell the parent of a [girl], ‘You can either have a living son or a dead daughter.’ The clinicians would tell parents of a [boy], ‘You can either have a living daughter or dead son,’” Reed testifies. The employees made these comments “to parents in front of their children,” which “introduced the idea of suicide to the children” — something that equally violates known research and medical ethics, Bauwens says.
“It is entirely inappropriate and unethical for anyone in my profession to plant the idea that an inevitable outcome will be suicide (even in the absence of expressed suicidal ideation) if the clinician’s counsel for gender-affirming care is not followed,” Bauwens told Nebraska legislators last week while testifying on behalf of Bill 574, the Let Them Grow Act, which would protect minors from transgender injections and surgeries. “This is blatantly manipulative and has no part in promoting psychological or relational health.”
When parents still refused, or withdrew consent for, the procedures employees at the gender transition clinic continued the treatment, Reed alleges. They would even intervene in custody disputes against parents who disagreed with plans to transition their children. “One of our doctors actually testified in a custody hearing against a father who opposed a mother’s wish to start their 11-year-old daughter on puberty blockers,” Reed notes. But they also ignored the judges’ orders and sided with anyone who brought a child into the office for a gender transition. “I was told not to ask for custody agreements because ‘if we have the custody agreement, we have to follow it,’” Reed notes in legal documents.
To make matters worse many, perhaps most, of the young people who entered the university’s gender clinic had not experienced gender dysphoria at all, Reed states, but a form of social contagion. During her four years at the center, the total number of calls the center received increased between 400% and 800%, and girls began to outnumber boys. Traditionally, most cases of gender dysphoria involved males who identify as female. When she began, she heard about 10 calls a month from teenage girls who identified as male; that had increased five-fold by the time she left, with this cohort making up 70% of the center’s calls.
“It became clear that many children coming to the Center had gender identities that were likely the result of social contagion,” Reed writes. A 2018 study from Dr. Lisa Littman found that rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) can be “initiated, magnified, spread, and maintained via the mechanisms of social and peer contagion,” including peer pressure via online platforms. Reed concludes, “Social media is at least partly responsible for this large increase in children seeking gender transition.”
Yet the center lobbied these minors to begin puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones (typically testosterone injections) and ignored the side effects, Reed writes. “The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome,” she says.
The industry is big business. “Certainly pubertal blockers could run thousands of dollars per month in out-of-pocket expenses,” says Dr. Michael Haller at the University of Florida’s department of pediatrics. Transgender surgeries are “a huge money-maker,” said Dr. Shayne Taylor of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health in 2018.
The problems Reed identifies affect all cases of transgender identity, because ideological considerations have narrowed the medical standards and available “treatments” for gender dysphoria, Bauwens told The Washington Stand. “A multitude of treatments have been researched to help children through depression. Yet when it comes to gender dysphoria, there’s only one path currently being prescribed: that is to try to become someone else,” she told Nebraska lawmakers.
“These interventions are being endorsed based on consensus, not evidence: Practices were voted on rather than standing on the merits of solid research findings addressing gender dysphoria,” Bauwens noted. “The success rates for nonintervention for gender dysphoria already exceed most psychological interventions.”
Children need to be “protected from misdiagnosis and scientifically unsupported, highly invasive, and potentially irreversible interventions that will impact the rest of their lives.”
Surprisingly Reed — who says, “I support trans rights” — agrees. “Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria,” Reed concludes.
Lawmakers promise to act on the legally actionable items in her whistleblower testimony. “Accountability is coming,” Senator Hawley has promised.
But investigations and prosecutions cannot bring wholeness to the lives permanently altered by the gender transition industry.
“It’s important as others are affirming a false identity that we need to go out of our way, as parents and as a community of believers, to affirm our young people in who they are,” Bauwens told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” last fall. “Transing a child is never the answer.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-02-14 15:22:252023-02-14 15:23:29Whistleblower Explains How the Transgender Industry Convinces Parents to Mutilate Their Kids
The Missouri Attorney General is investigating a transgender clinic in St. Louis for allegedly harming hundreds of children after a whistleblower published an account of shocking revelations there. The whistleblower, who worked at the clinic in question, self-describes as “a queer woman … politically to the left of Bernie Sanders… married to a transman…..”
The whistleblower provided a sworn affidavit alleging children are being given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without an individualized assessment of their particular cases, while telling parents such assessments are being done. Children, in some cases, are being given these drugs without parental consent or even after consent has been revoked. Drugs continue even after patients report adverse effects from taking them. An unstudied pancreatic cancer drug is being prescribed because it can grow breasts, even though it can and does poison the liver. In some cases, the clinic proceeds with transitioning even where it is clear the parents are pressuring the child into it. The whistleblower provided documentation the clinic has been billing state healthcare programs unlawfully.
Clinic personnel told parents their children would probably commit suicide if not allowed to transition. “We lied to them all the time,” the whistleblower said. “These doctors would push, and push, and push … and somehow the doctors thought that was a true good consent.” True consent was also lacking because the clinic failed to inform kids about the foreseeable adverse consequences of transgender drugs and surgery. There are words in the law for these actions, words like ‘undue influence’ and ‘fraud’. To show you the kids didn’t really understand what they were getting into, the whistleblower recalls one girl who had her breasts removed and then, three months later, asked for them to be put back on.
The clinic’s actions actually made impressionable mixed-up kids more suicidal. “I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children,” the whistleblower said. “Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.” The clinic doesn’t track negative outcomes so they don’t have to report them to new patients, the whistleblower believes. How convenient.
The whistleblower described the atmosphere as “cult-like”, with doctors hell-bent on transitioning kids and unwilling to listen to contrary facts. It’s a good bet the same mentality and unethical practices prevail in other gender clinics, so the whistleblower is calling for a nationwide halt to the procedures. Britain ordered its only transgender clinic closed last year after similar allegations were documented there.
The word ‘cult’ was also used by a lesbian mother who led her 4-year-old son to transition into a girl and ended up regretting it. The whole phony transgender narrative began to unravel for her when her other son, who previously showed no signs of confusion, started asking to be a girl, too. The mother questioned her own assumptions and ended up raising her sons as boys. “This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation,” the woman wrote. “I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.”
She might be out, but the transgender lobby is still working to rope more people in. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is fighting state bills banning sex change drugs and surgery for minors. There’s big money at stake: the market for transgender surgery grew to over $2 billion last year.
So there are powerful forces at work, but they can be beaten. A university health system in South Carolina shut down its gender clinic after government records requests exposed the fact the clinic was treating children as young as four.
Four-year-olds? This is sick. All so that some people can make a buck and pursue their left-wing political agendas. The Left is in a very dark place. And, as far as the Left’s phony narratives go, transgenderism is a particularly weak one, but it’s having ruinous consequences, consequences we should not allow.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Skirmish - Liberato.UShttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Skirmish - Liberato.US2023-02-13 17:40:152023-02-13 17:40:15Blowing the Lid Off the Transgender Lobby’s Pack of Lies
A pediatric gender clinic is under criminal investigation after a whistleblower charged the center with potentially defrauding Medicaid and private insurance to prescribe transgender hormones to children as young as 11. The sworn affidavit states the St. Louis facility administered cross-sex hormones to mentally ill children, sometimes against their parents’ wishes, and ignored children’s worsening physical and mental health conditions — including at least one suicidal teenager.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) announced Thursday night that his office and two other agencies had opened an investigation into The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “We have received disturbing allegations that individuals at the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital have been harming hundreds of children each year, including by using experimental drugs on them,” said Bailey, citing an affidavit from a former employee, who switched to another area of the hospital after becoming convinced the center is permanently hurting the people it swears to help.
The whistleblower, Jamie Reed, describes herself as “a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.” She says she is married to a woman who identifies as a male and affirms, “I support trans rights.” Reed details in her affidavit and in an article at Bari Weiss’ website, The Free Press, that she began working as an idealistic case manager at the center in 2018. By the time she left last November, she left convinced the center’s actions are “morally and medically appalling” — and is likely a systemic problem in the nation’s 100 pediatric gender clinics. “By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm,’” she wrote.
“I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment,” said Reed. Yet she kept her concerns private for months, because “anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
Reed states the center provides outside psychiatrists with a “template” form letter attesting that a child identifies as transgender. If the analyst will not sign it, the center uses in-house psychiatrists, Dr. Dr. Alex Maixner and Dr. Sarah Girresch-Ward, to confirm a child’s “gender dysphoria” after a one-to-two-hour consultation, rather than a full 10-12 hour assessment. They then begin children on a pipeline that results in lifelong hormones and potentially permanently disfiguring surgery before the age of 18.
She exposed potential perjury, as surgeons at the center testified before the Missouri legislature that transgender surgeries for minors are not “on the table” at their center. “This was a lie,” said Reed in the affidavit. She said the center claimed it provided minors with referrals to surgeons who are willing to remove teenagers’ healthy breasts and genitals “for educational purposes,” but they “were in fact referrals.” And Dr. Allison Snyder-Warwick performed at least one gender transition surgery in the hospital, apparently contradicting the doctors’ testimony.
Doctors at the center prescribed teenagers the prostate cancer medication Bicalutamide, which she says caused liver toxicity in a 15-year-old boy. (His mother agreed not to sue the center but warned her son’s condition “could be a huge PR problem.”) She related horrifying tales of physical and mental harm, including a graphic description of intense vaginal bleeding caused by the side effects of “gender-affirming care.”
Reed paints the picture of a center ignoring the real needs of its patients, and the real harms inflicted by the transgender regimen, in order to maximize its profits.
“[N]early all children who came to the Center here presented with very serious mental health problems,” including autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma histories, OCD, and serious eating disorders, she said. Some erroneously identified as suffering from other psychosomatic maladies, such as Tourette Syndrome or blindness. “Privately,” the doctors recognized their other psychosomatic illnesses reflected “social contagion” … but not their gender dysphoria, even when groups came from the same high school. Others used pronouns identifying as a “mushroom” or a “rock”; one patient told employees she identified as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non-binary.” Despite these serious issues, the center “would not treat these mental health issues. Instead, children were automatically given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”
The center also ignored indications of parental coercion of physical abuse, Reed said. In one case, a parent was “forcing” a boy to dress as a female, but the center administered cross-sex hormones, as well. In another, a 17-year-old boy brought to the center by an unrelated male and given hormones upon turning 18. His mental health deteriorated, yet staffers continued administering hormones — even after it turned out the man who brought him to the facility “had been sexually and physically abusing” him.
The experimental nature of many of these drugs set children up for a lifetime of infertility, early menopause, bone thinning, and — contrary to their advertisements — worsened mental health. “I witnessed the Center cause permanent harm to many of the patients,” said Reed. “I doubt that any parent who’s ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes.” She added “clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals.”
When parents or doctors would describe worsening mental health outcomes, the center ignored them and continued the hormones, she said. One mother, in a letter revoking consent for her son to receive hormone blockers, said her child “is a shell of his former self riddled with anxiety.”
The center even ignored pleas that their actions might contribute to a potential suicide. In one case, “a psychiatrist called the Center’s endocrinologist and explained that a child, who had already tried to commit suicide by threatening to jump off a roof, should not be given cross-sex hormones because the child was struggling with serious mental health issues,” Reed attested. “I witnessed the endocrinologist yell at the psychiatrist on the phone and speak down to this provider.”
“The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome,” she said.
The center’s actions often lead to lifelong regret, Reed noted. A black teenager from a troubled family began receiving hormones at the facility at age 16 and had a double mastectomy at age 18. Three months later, she told the surgeon she would return to her birth gender, adding, “I want my breasts back” and asked a surgeon to have them “put back on.” Reed wrote, “The last I heard, she was pregnant. Of course, she’ll never be able to breastfeed her child.”
These are the same concerns that motivated Chloe Cole, the teenage detransitioner who now embraces her biological identity, as nearly nine out of 10 children with dysphoria eventually do. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to fully carry a child,” she told Florida legislators last July. “And because I do not have my breasts … I am not able to breastfeed whatever future children I have. That realization actually was one of the biggest things that lead to me realizing that this was not the path that I should have taken.” She’s now suing the Permanente Medical Group and the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan for breaching appropriate standards of care.
Even removing parental consent was not enough to stop the ideologically motivated doctors at the center according to Reed, who testified, “On several occasions, the doctors have continued prescribing medical transition even when a parent stated that they were revoking consent.”
The center also fudged the billing codes for many of these prescriptions, Reed said, sending erroneous invoices to private insurance and sometimes state or federal programs. Employees falsely claimed that one child who received puberty blockers was experiencing precocious puberty, Reed wrote.
The whistleblower’s comments have triggered a statewide investigation from the Missouri attorney general, the Missouri Department of Social Services, and the Division of Professional Registration. Sheila Solon, the director of the Division of Professional Registration, promised her agency will “take any necessary action against the licenses” of Missouri doctors involved in the center’s work that violates the “health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of Missouri.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-02-13 15:18:202023-02-13 15:25:08St. Louis Transgender Clinic Under Investigation for Using Experimental Drugs on Kids, Medicaid Fraud
The Cost of Ignorant ‘Expert’ Policy Makers During COVID.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
The Cochrane Library recently updated its 2020 systematic review of physical interventions to reduce respiratory illnesses. The update included an additional 11 randomized controlled trials, bringing the total number of RCTs included to 78
As in its 2020 review, they found no evidence to support the use of surgical face masks or N95 respirators to prevent influenza or COVID-19 infection
The relative risk reduction of using surgical masks in the general population (within hospitals and communities at large) to reduce symptoms of flu-like/COVID-like illness (not lab confirmed) was a statistically insignificant 0.95
The same goes for reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza and COVID. Here, the relative risk reduction was 1.01 with a confidence interval of 0.72 to 1.42. In other words, it’s a wash. On average, it raises your risk of lab-confirmed infection by 1%. Range-wise, it may lower your risk by 28% or raise it by as much as 42%
The review also found “no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators”
The question of whether we should wear face masks or not to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has been a hotly contested issue ever since our so-called health authorities came out with the recommendation in early 2020. Some of us were quick to point out the obvious, namely that masks cannot filter out viruses due to the virus being far smaller than the holes in the fabric.
Surgical masks have only ever been used to prevent droplets of saliva to drip into open wounds during surgery, potentially causing an infection. That’s all they were ever designed to do.
Numerous studies looking at mask-wearing during cold and flu season in years past came up empty, showing masks are not a viable prevention method. Yet the narrative we were fed was that masks will somehow prevent respiratory infection, and not wearing one meant you had no regard for the health and safety of others.
Never mind the fact that a healthy person cannot transmit disease in the first place. The asymptomatic spread fallacy was still used to reinforce the idea that everyone had to wear a mask, regardless of whether they were ill or not. You couldn’t even debate the issue. The propaganda angle was the only viewpoint allowed to circulate.
Today, three years later, mask policies are cropping up yet again, especially in schools,1 and health care facilities. In December 2022, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) submitted a final rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Office of Management and Budget for review which, if approved and implemented, would make universal masking in health care facilities a PERMANENT rule.
The largest nursing union in the U.S., National Nurses United, is also pushing to include permanent rules for “screening and testing of patients, visitors and staff, measures ensuring optimal PPE, exposure notifications for healthcare workers and paid leave for those exposed or infected with COVID-19,” according to Health Care Dive.2 All of this despite the fact that the scientific underpinnings are now even shakier than they were in 2020.
The AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) is even going so far as to claim mask wearing can help prevent heart attacks!3 Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo had the following to say about the AARP’s attempt to invent benefits for mask wearers:4
Gold-Standard Scientific Review Published
The latest of these studies is a meta-analysis and systematic review by the Cochrane Library,5,6,7,8,9 an independent research organization that has been reviewing the use of physical interventions to reduce respiratory illnesses since 2010.10
Cochrane reviews have long been recognized as the gold standard in evidence-based health care as their analyses look at the whole body of published science, and every few years, reviews are updated to include the latest research findings.
For example, reports on “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses” were published in 2010, 2011, 2020 and January 30, 2023.
In the video above, Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist, health researcher and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, reviews11 the latest Cochrane review, which added 11 new randomized controlled trials (RTCs) and cluster-RCTs to their previous 2020 analysis.
That brings the total number of RCTs included in the systematic review to 78. Six of the 11 new RCTs were conducted during the COVID pandemic and looked at the spread of COVID-19 specifically.
Still No Evidence to Back Surgical Mask Recommendations
The Cochrane investigators concluded that, while there’s “uncertainty about the effects of face masks” due to trial bias and low adherence by participants, the pooled results of randomized controlled trials (RTCs) “did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.” Here’s an excerpt from the review:12
“Medical or surgical masks — Ten studies took place in the community, and two studies in healthcare workers.
Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu‐like illness/COVID‐like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people).”
The relative risk reduction of using surgical masks in the general population (within hospitals and communities at large) to reduce symptoms of flu-like/COVID-like illness (not lab confirmed) was 0.95.
A value below 1 indicates the intervention improved outcomes, whereas a value above 1 shows it made it worse. So, here, surgical masks was associated with a relative risk reduction of 5%.
However, it’s not statistically significant, as the confidence interval ranges from 0.84 to 1.09.13 So, it may lower your risk by as much as 16% or raise it by 9%. As noted by Prasad, the most accurate way to describe this finding is that “we have not proven there is an effect.”
This is conclusive … This is the reality … You just don’t have credible evidence [for masking], and the science didn’t change … This is what the science has always shown. ~ Dr. Vinay Prasad
The same goes for reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza and COVID. Here, the relative risk reduction was 1.01 with a confidence interval of 0.72 to 1.42. In other words, it’s a complete wash. On average, it raises your risk of lab-confirmed infection by 1%. Range-wise, it may lower your risk by 28% or raise it by as much as 42%.
So, masking really has no effect on confirmed infection rates (which, by the way, is more important than reports of perceived symptoms). As noted by the authors, the analysis “suggests that wearing a medical/surgical mask probably makes little or no difference compared to not wearing a mask for this outcome.”
“This is conclusive,” Prasad says. “This is the reality … You just don’t have credible evidence [for masking], and I want to tell you this: The science didn’t change … This is what the science has always shown.”
The review also found “no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators.” As detailed by the authors:14
“N95/P2 respirators — Four studies were in healthcare workers, and one small study was in the community. Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu‐like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).”
Public Health Experts Simply Lied
So, in conclusion, none of the new studies that were added made one iota of difference. Masks were unable to prevent influenza transmission before the pandemic, and they still fail to prevent respiratory infections, be it the flu or COVID.
But, if there was no evidence to back masking in the first place, how did we end up with mask mandates? In short, our public health authorities started lying. As noted by Prasad: “Anthony Fauci told the truth on ’60 Minutes’ — the first time. The second time when he said you have to wear a cloth mask … he was lying.”
Yet somehow, they managed to convince everyone that the truth was the lie and the lie was the truth.
A clip from Fauci’s “60 Minutes” appearance is featured in “The Jimmy Dore Show” video above, as are some of his later public announcements where he suddenly promotes mask wearing and defends mask mandates.
Population-Wide Mask Mandates ‘Never Made Sense’
In a February 3, 2023, article in The Spectator,15 lead author Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and former editor-in-chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, explained why the 2020 Cochrane review was unable to influence public health policy on masking:
“This is the second update of the review since the start of the pandemic. The first update was delayed by seven months due to unexplained editorial decisions. It was too late when it came out in November 2020 to make a difference to national COVID policy; by then, activism, low-quality observational evidence and government policy had set the agenda for mask mandates, and the damage had been done.
Often these government policies relied on observational studies on mask usage and the spread of COVID. But there are lots of flaws in observational evidence.
For example, in the absence of a study protocol setting out methods before the study is done, it is possible to shift the dates of an observational analysis to suit the rise and fall in infections. So if you time your analysis near the peak of infections, the results will favor mask interventions as the infection rate quickly decreases.
But when we pointed out in November 202016 the troubling lack of robust evidence on face masks and the problems with observational studies, we were shouted down, removed from Facebook and put on the government’s secret watchlist …
Mandates that affected the whole population never made sense … even in high adherence populations such as Japan, they have not stemmed an inevitable rise in infections. Part of the problem may be that during the pandemic the government had to be seen to be doing something. Interventions like handwashing and vaccines are invisible, but masks acted as a visible sign of compliance.
What we have witnessed in this pandemic are strong beliefs about what works and what doesn’t … Several policies such as mask mandates, restrictions, and unproven interventions now seem absurd in hindsight. And as the culture of fear has lifted, the population has become all too aware of their detrimental effects.
We failed to follow an evidence-based approach during the pandemic. We are now left with the human, social and economic aftermath of evidence-free policies.”
Public Health Agencies ‘Steeped in Failure’
As noted by Prasad in an accompanying Substack post:17
“Who should we be angry with? Obviously there is a class of twitter expert that doesn’t understand how to read evidence. Some of them have even been promoted to be deans for public health schools. So much for public health.
But the real failure is NIAID [National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. It is Tony Fauci.
Fauci controlled NIAID budget. He could have run 10 RCTs of masking — different masks, different ages, different settings. He chose to run zero. Instead he went on TV 1,000 times and lied about effectiveness of cloth masks …
CDC and AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] are also steeped in failure. These agency forced 2 year olds to mask. Against the advice of the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
The Cochrane review fails to identify any data that pertains to 2 year olds. The CDC should be ashamed of themselves. Tens of thousands of people working from home, and no one inside the organization with the ability to stop this policy.”
Scientists Censored by Propagandists
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this masking debacle has been the massive censorship and shutting down of healthy scientific debate, not just among laypeople but among scientists themselves.
Only the yes-men were ever given room to air their perfectly scripted views, while those who had concerns were silenced, regardless of their credentials. YouTube even censored a roundtable discussion with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and several medical experts. Why? Because in multiple instances, the doctors said children didn’t need to wear masks, and this position violated YouTube’s “COVID-19 medical misinformation” policy.
In a February 6 Substack article, Jefferson describes the propaganda effort to twist the findings of the 2023 Cochrane review on masking and other physical interventions against COVID-19:18
“We, the co-authors of the Cochrane review … have received several … ‘can I please check the main facts and, by the way, tell me what your review says because I cannot be bothered to do my job’ type of messages. However, we recently got another query … This request comes from a very powerful press syndicate:
‘I’m reaching out because I’ve been seeing some posts [links redacted by TJ] spreading widely on social media that seem to be misrepresenting the conclusions of your recently published study on physical interventions and respiratory viruses.
Do you think it is a misrepresentation to claim (as the tweets I link to above do) that your study definitively proves that masks don’t work in preventing the spread of viruses such as COVID-19 and the flu? If so, I’d be interested in debunking these claims to set the record straight and would love to speak with you more about the study.’
The disturbing aspect of this request is as follows: the stringer is making contact with one of us. After exchanging pleasantries, he/she will ask a few superfluous questions.
We have an abstract, a plain language summary, TTE [Trust the Evidence] posts and a podcast, and Carl and I have written a Spectator piece covering the review. If you are a real masochist, you can read all the 300-plus pages of the review …
So there is nothing to explain or fact-check. But the stringer is not really interested in checking facts. What they want to do is to write truthfully that they have spoken to one of us and then put the spin required in the release to ensure the ‘misinterpretation’ of twitterati is set straight. ‘Debunking’ is the term used, and it will be actioned if the stringer thinks the Twitterati have ‘misinterpreted’ our findings …
What disturbs me … is the idea of ‘debunking’ or ‘normalization’ of the information flow. We have done the tough work over two decades, reporting results separately from our interpretation, as in all Cochrane reviews. The studies’ results are the results reported by the authors of the single studies included in the reviews.
Our interpretation is one you can — and should if you want — challenge. However, successfully challenging our interpretation requires hard work, elbow grease, graft, focus, and application. So picking up the phone and speaking to someone, then deciding how to ‘debunk’ or normalize the message, is so much easier.
The reach of this particular press syndicate is global and powerful. I wonder why the stringer wanted to ‘debunk’ the interpretation of the twitterati mentioned in the text. To ensure ‘truth’ triumphed? Or to ensure no more waves in the official narratives were made by a bunch of academics or Twitter dwellers?”
While Jefferson now avoids interactions with the mainstream media, he did agree to an interview with investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, which you can read here.19 He also granted an interview with Paul D. Thacker, which you can read on Thacker’s Substack.
Pro-Maskers Guilty of Creating Massive Pollution Problem
In addition to the many health problems associated with prolonged mask wearing, which I’ve addressed previously, mask policies have also created a massive pollution problem. Ironically, many pro-mask activists also claim to be environmentalists, yet they completely ignore the environmental effects of mask mandates.
According to UNICEF, the world used and discarded an estimated 2.4 billion masks in 2020.20 Another estimate, calculated by the University of Southern Denmark,21 put that number at 129 billion face masks EACH MONTH. As reported by Business Insider:22
“Since the very first lockdowns of 2020, these plastic-based coverings have … been an environmental disaster in the making … [The] rapid adoption of face masks … means their waste can now be found everywhere …
Discarded masks have seeped into every corner of our lives, from city sidewalks to solemn niches of the internet.23 They’ve washed up on the shores of Hong Kong’s deserted Soko Islands and cloaked octopi off the coast of France.
Scientists and environmental advocates expressed alarm24 about this tsunami of waste … They foresaw the dire ecological ramifications of our mask waste — especially once those masks made their inevitable way into the earth’s waterways.
Elastic loops pose entanglement hazards for turtles, birds, and other animals. Fish could eat the plastic-fiber ribbons that unfurl from a discarded mask’s body. Then, there is the untold menace to human health that would likely present, at the microscopic level, once masks began to disintegrate.”
The global consumption of other single-use plastics also increased by a whopping 300% in the last three years, further adding to the problem of plastic pollution. You’d think governments that claim to be so concerned about “saving the planet” would address the issue, but no. As noted by Business Insider:25
“[W]orld leaders have ignored the problem. And once the immediate public-health emergency superseded ecological concerns — the heads of Big Plastic made sure it stayed that way.”
Medical Masks Are Hazardous Waste
Research26 from Swansea University in Wales reveals single-use masks readily disintegrate when submerged in water, releasing both micro- and nanoplastic particles, even after relatively brief periods of submersion.27
As if that’s not bad enough, the masks also release nanoparticles of heavy metals like lead, cadmium, copper and arsenic. Not only can this mask litter result in contaminated drinking water, but the particles can also disrupt entire marine food chains.
Nanoparticles are particularly troublesome as they can penetrate cell walls and damage DNA, and this is true not just in animals and humans but also in plants. As reported by Business Insider:28
“Recent research29 on silicon nanoparticles, in particular, has shown that if a particle is very small in nano scale, it can act almost as a tiny, carcinogenic bomb. Multiply that by a minimum of several hundred per mask, at a rate of 50,000 masks disposed per second, and the scope of the dilemma grows vivid.”
According to research30 published in Science of the Total Environment in September 2021, the polypropylene in medical face masks could be recycled either by mechanical or thermal means, and biodegradable mask options are also available. Yet no one in a position of power is advocating for these solutions.
High Time to Discard False Mask Narratives
It’s time to put an end to the false narratives that mask wearing lowers infection rates and/or that it “protects others.” They protect no one. Not the wearer and not those around the wearer.
And, as noted by Prasad in the featured video, the burden of proof lays on the proponent of a given intervention. In this case, those claiming we should mask up to protect others are the ones who have the responsibility to prove they’re correct. The burden of proof is not on those who object, based on logical and existing evidence.
Universal mask wearing is also resulting in environmental pollution that is completely unnecessary and avoidable. So, please, just stop wearing disposable masks. It’s time. The record has been set straight. There are no benefits, and plenty of risks and negative impacts.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2023-02-13 07:47:592023-02-13 07:47:59Do Masks Protect You? Here’s the Conclusive Evidence
Dr. Terry Adirim during a briefing event at the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, DC last 2019.
The former senior defense official behind the unconstitutional military vaccine mandate will step down from her current position as executive director of the electronic health records modernization program inside the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), according to FedScoop.
Dr. Terry Adirim will step down on February 25 to “pursue other opportunities” outside the department, according to an internal memo sent by VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy to employees.
According to the internal memo, the position will be filled by Dr. Neil Evans, who is currently a senior consultant for the Office of Information and Technology, until a candidate is identified.
Adirim has served as the VA electronic health record modernization program director since December 2021.
Investigative reporter Jordan Schachtel of The Dossier reported that Adirim signed an order requiring all service members to receive the emergency use authorization (EUA) COVID vaccine while serving as acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs after being appointed by Joe Biden.
“While she was in the Pentagon as the acting assistant secretary of defense for health affairs (serving as a Biden Admin political appointee), Dr Adirim, signed her name to an order forcing service members to take the emergency use authorization (EUA) vaccine. Adirim’s memo attempted to justify mandating EUA shots as if they were FDA approved, which was not the case at the time, and remains the same today. The mandate led to countless vaccine injuries, the worst recruiting crisis since the formation of the all-volunteer military, and thousands of service members discharged for refusing to take the mRNA experimental gene serum,” The Dossier reported.
More from the outlet:
As The Dossier has reported, Adirim is a devoted democrat political activist and, as a medical doctor, advocates for “gender-affirming prescriptions” for “transgender” children.
“Terry Adirim, the former senior defense official who may have sidestepped the law to implement the [DOD’s] vaccine mandate, appears to have tried to sidestep the law again — this time by liking a tweet soliciting political donations, in potential violation of the Hatch Act.”
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2023-02-12 12:27:412023-02-12 12:27:41AWED MEDIA BALANCED NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.
Pauli Murray, a nonbinary Black activist, lawyer, Episcopal priest, and poet, will be featured on a quarter in the next round of the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters Program, making Murray the first Black queer person to appear on U.S. currency.
Throughout the 1930s, the Pauli Murray Center writes, Murray “actively questioned” her gender and sex, repeatedly asking physicians for hormone therapy and exploratory surgery to investigate her reproductive organs.
Pauli Murray wrote about her gender identity and sexuality throughout her life. In her journals, Murray wondered if she was “one of nature’s experiments; a girl who should have been a boy.” Partially because of this struggle, Murray suffered breakdowns and was hospitalized throughout her twenties and thirties. Murray sought medical treatment and consulted doctors concerning what she called “an inverted sex instinct,” including asking doctors to test her hormone levels for any imbalance and attempting to find doctors that would agree to give her testosterone.
Though Murray was married to a man briefly, she wrote “Why is it that when a man makes love to me, something in me tries to fight?” She fundamentally felt that she was a man trapped in a woman’s body, an expression of gender dysphoria. Pauli Murray wrote less about her gender identity after feeling that her medical options had been exhausted and after attending Howard where she experienced the dual oppressions of sexism and racism in Washington, D.C. Alongside Betty Friedan, Murray was a founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), and she wrote extensively about the importance of women’s equality under the law.
We truly believe that it won’t be long before our government will start targeting Christians who refuse to accept gender neutral and sexual nonbinary persons.
When our government puts these folks on money, you can bet that they will start looking to persecute any who defy their stance. Think not?
Just yesterday, Newsweek carried an article that showed an FBI report that listed Catholics as extreme terrorists.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2023-02-11 13:10:022023-02-11 16:56:13Biden’s Treasury Department Issuing Nonbinary Pauli Murray Quarter first U.S. ‘Queer Quarter’ – Not Political Satire
President Joe Biden continues his pursuit of the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels. He has a short memory of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years. America now represents a mere 4 percent of the world’s population.
The world’s population explosion was not just based on the discovery of oil alone a couple of hundred years ago. We have learned that crude oil is useless unless it can be manufactured into something usable. The 8 billion now on this planet are dependent on the oil derivatives and fuels that are manufactured from crude oil.
Today, the societies and economies within the diverse 8 billion people, are now dependent on more than 6,000 products in their daily lives, as well as manufacturing the fuels for 50,000 jets moving people and products, and more than 50,000 merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space program.
Ridding the world of oil, without a replacement in mind, is immoral and evil, as extreme shortages will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths, necessitating lifestyles being mandated back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800’s, and could be the greatest threat to the planet’s eight billion residents.
President Biden should be advised of the old proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” which tells us that you can’t rid the world of fossil fuels and continue to enjoy the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels.
Under Biden’s watch, nine refinery closures in America have occurred in the last several years, the same manufacturers that are providing the derivatives for products and fuels for transportation that are the basis of a thriving economy. Those closures have resulted in the United States losing nearly 1 million barrels per day of oil refining capacity, with more set to be shuttered in the next few years.
Calcasieu Refining, Lake Charles, Louisiana: Capacity: 135,500 bpd
The same time that Biden is diminishing the supply of manufactured products and fuels, he was emphatic during his State of the Union speech that products for the American economy would be “Made in America” and the “Supply chain begins in America” to support our growing economy. Logic and economics have proven that increased demands concurrent with reductions is supply, will be the catalyst to shortages and inflation in perpetuity.
Life without oil is NOT AS SIMPLE AS YOU MAY THINK as renewable energy is only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine and NEITHER wind turbines, nor solar panels, can manufacture anything for society.
Climate will continue to be a challenge, like it has for billions of years, but now, we have 8 billion on this planet that we didn’t have a few centuries ago, that we need to maintain healthy and productive in the decades ahead. Depriving them of the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels, could be a much greater threat to mankind, than any climatic challenges facing humanity.
Restricting the supply of oil feedstock to be manufactured by refineries into usable products for society is not helpful in meeting the growing demands by society. Further, Biden seems oblivious to one in five oil refineries that are expected to cease operations over the next five years which may another 20 refinery closures in America, President Biden’s plans to reduce emissions from manufacturing fossil fuels into usable products is a commendable objective, but he has no plans for the replacement of what is now manufactured from fossil fuels, which are supporting the 8 billion on this planet.
In addition to the refinery closures occurring under Biden’s watch, the future does not bode well for the 80 percent of the world’s 700 refineries that are located outside of America. Projections are that 20 percent of the 700 worldwide refineries are expected to close in the next 5 years. Further inflation and shortages in perpetuity are guaranteed, as refineries manufacture crude oil into the derivatives and fuels for the world’s 8 billion.
President Biden could enhance his energy literacy by viewing a short 1-minute video produced by Epoch Times TV about renewables that only generate electricity, but manufacture nothing for society. The video has already been viewed by more than 800,000 on social media.
Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2023-02-10 14:57:492023-02-10 15:03:24Biden Admits He Has No Plans To Replace America’s Oil Infrastructure
During his State of the Union Address Tuesday night, President Joe Biden called on Congress “to restore the soul of this nation” by making abortion legal nationwide until birth and passing a bill that would force religious employers to hire people who identify as transgender. His administration’s focus on pushing polarizing social issues clashes with Republicans’ more mainstream views of abortion and gender identity, a contrast that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) said gives Americans a clear choice “between normal or crazy.”
“Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose,” said Biden, an apparent nod to the “Women’s Health Protection” Act, which would erase 1,381 pro-life protections including parental notification requirements. “The vice president and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive healthcare and safeguard patient privacy.” He went on to chide states for enacting “extreme abortion bans” and threatened to veto any national pro-life legislation.
The president also urged Congress to “pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.” The bill, a longstanding goal of the LGBT lobby, would amend landmark civil rights acts to equate sexual orientation and gender identity with race, sex, and religion. It effectively places homosexuality and transgender status above religious liberty by denying protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The extreme bill, once supported by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, “would eradicate freedom of thought, conscience, and belief — resulting in the penalization of anyone who disagrees with the ideologies,” wrote Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council.
Passing such social legislation, Biden said, would enhance “the power of our example. Let’s remember the world is watching.”
Biden symbolically gestured toward left-wing social issues with his guest list, which included Gina and Heidi Nortonsmith, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit foisted same-sex marriage on the state of Massachusetts by judicial fiat in 2004. The couple also spoke at the signing ceremony of the so-called “Respect for Marriage” Act, which struck down marriage protection laws nationwide.
Biden also invited Amanda and Josh Zurawski of Austin, who say doctors denied them medical treatment for a miscarriage due to confusion over the state’s Heartbeat law. SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser says the president has weaponized their “tragic” story to further his “deeply misleading” allegations. “Every pro-life law in the country allows necessary and timely medical treatment to save the life of a pregnant woman in an emergency,” she said. “There are no laws in any state that prevent timely and compassionate care for a miscarriage,” added the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). “Denying proper healthcare to patients facing miscarriage complications is not complying with the law. Miscarriage care is not abortion.”
Some members of Congress made statements of their own, with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) inviting acquitted pro-life activist Mark Houck, who found himself swarmed by federal agents at his home in front of his family for allegedly violating federal laws against blocking access to an abortion facility.
Even as he discussed bipartisanship, Biden tied conservatives and Republicans to civil war, insurrection, and the attack against Paul Pelosi by a hammer-wielding man with a mental illness. “Two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War,” he said, referring to the January 6 riot. “Today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken,” apparently quoting the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” He claimed Pelosi’s assailant had been “unhinged by the Big Lie.”
“This kind of provocative rhetoric has only served to fuel the spread of violent attacks on churches and pregnancy help centers since Biden took office. While ignoring these attacks and their victims, the Biden administration has openly weaponized the federal government against pro-life Americans like Mark Houck and his family,” said Brian Burch of CatholicVote.
Biden also proposed a massive federal intervention into the way families raise children by “providing access to pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds,” a proposal repeatedly made by President Barack Obama during successive State of the Union addresses. Multiple studies have found Pre-K attendance inflicts a number of harms on young students, and polls have found most mothers would like to stay at home. “No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue,” saidJames J. Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist frequently cited by those who support universal pre-K.
Those references aside, Biden’s 70-minute-long address largely focused on economic issues, showing uncharacteristic “restraint,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. Biden “tried so hard to seem like a 1980s Democrat but it’s just not believable.”
The president often cited his economic success by comparing his results to the worst days of the 2020 recession, caused by a government-mandated shutdown to “slow the spread.” Biden said he had “created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years,” he said.
Biden has added 2.7 million jobs over the prepandemic high of 152.4 million reached under President Donald Trump. By comparison, Trump added nearly 5 million jobs in his first two years in office, and 13.4 million in the 22 months rebounding from the COVID-19 lockdown. The labor force participation rate under President Biden remains below prepandemic levels (62.4% this month compared to 63.3% in January 2020).
“The state of our union is miserable, and the blame rests squarely with President Biden and the Democrats,” said Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chair of the Tea Party Patriots Action. “Whether it’s record deficit spending causing the worst inflation in four decades, an ‘open borders’ policy causing a record stream of illegal immigrants crossing our border, or a weak foreign policy emboldening China and other adversaries, President Biden is always doing the wrong thing and American families always end up paying the price.”
President Biden urged Congress to “pass the PRO Act, because workers have a right to form a union.” The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a sought-after legislative goal of labor unions, would strike down all state right-to-work laws and compel workers in a unionized shop to pay union dues, even if they do not want to belong to a union. Federal legislation has protected workers’ right to join a union since the 1936 Wagner Act. Yet only 6% of the private sector workforce belonged to a union in 2022, while one-third of government employees have unionized, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor unions contributed $65 million in union dues to Democratic candidates during the 2020 election cycle, including $27.5 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. The president was also the top recipient of campaign donations from teachers unions.
At two points, Biden paused mid-speech as Republicans opposed his caricature of their platform, accusing Republicans of wanting to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. A legislative proposal to that effect, from Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.), received little legislative support.
Biden made a brief reference to the border, which has seen record-breaking levels of illegal immigration and virtually non-existent deportations during both of his years in office. “America’s border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts,” particularly “if you won’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform,” which includes a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, he told lawmakers.
On foreign affairs, Biden pledged continued financial and military aid to Ukraine despite flagging public support, and boasted of a supposed hardline against China. “Before I came to office, the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was falling in the world. Not anymore,” he said. “As we made clear last week, if China’s threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” Biden shot down a Chinese spy craft this weekend after it had completed its surveillance of areas that included U.S. nuclear installations.
Biden gave a nod to COVID-19, which defined the first few months of his presidency. “We have broken COVID’s grip on us,” he said. “And soon we’ll end the public health emergency.” Biden announced the federal government would end its emergency in May, shortly after the House of Representatives passed legislation ending the government’s state of emergency immediately. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) invited as his guest a U.S. serviceman briefly dismissed from the military for refusing to take the COVID shot.
“Biden’s comments aimed at the need for a world ‘solution’ on certain topics (which understandably concern people) continue to imply the legitimacy of world power centers like the UN, WHO, and the like. Yet this takes power further from the people that true democracies are supposed to represent. If we have a ‘crisis of democracy’ as some think we do, such ‘solutions’ only exacerbate the problem,” Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “To the extent that the Biden administration’s priorities (like abortion or gender transitions for minors) are injected into these centers of world power, we will be exporting spiritually harmful activities to other nations. Social liberals’ intended solutions for these young people only keeps them imprisoned … and they need to find true freedom from the clutches of the enemy of their souls,” Weber said.
The spiritual condition of America figured prominently in his remarks. “Because the soul of this nation is strong, because the backbone of this nation is strong,” he said. Americans “are a good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea: that all of us, every one of us, is created equal in the image of God.”
“I appreciated the president’s affirmation that everyone is ‘created equal in the image of God.’ Unfortunately, for two years the president has demonstrated that he really doesn’t believe that,” David Closson, director of FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview, told The Washington Stand. “Against the moral teachings of his own church, President Biden has pursued the most radical pro-abortion agenda in our nation’s history, and he made it clear tonight that he remains beholden to the abortion lobby by indicating he would veto any federal efforts to protect unborn life.”
“When it comes to protecting life, I wish the president’s policies matched his rhetoric,” said Closson.
“Americans want common sense from their leaders, but in Washington, the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy,” said Governor Sanders.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-02-08 12:45:142023-02-08 12:48:29Biden Urges Congress to ‘Restore Soul of This Nation’ by Expanding Abortion, Transgenderism in SOTU
