Friday, May 14, 2021



Here’s the new US Army ad drawing controversy as ‘woke’ or ‘great to see’

A quite idiotic depiction of the typical American soldier but it is probably harmless as long as recruitment standards are maintained

The United States Army released a new series of recruitment advertisements titled “The Calling” last week, including one featuring an LGBT rights parade and lesbian wedding that has been slammed as “woke” or praised as “great to see.”

“This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems,” the ad begins as an animated female soldier called “Emma” appears on screen. “It begins in California with a little girl raised by two moms.”

“Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality,” Emma says, as images of a “Pride” demonstration are shown. “I like to think I’ve been defending freedom from an early age.”

The female soldier goes on to tell the story of one of her moms becoming paralyzed after an accident, but then working hard “to get back on her feet, eventually standing at the altar to marry my other mom.”

Emma then says she graduated at the top of her high school class, attended university and joined a sorority, but felt empty.

“Sure, I’d spent my life around inspiring women, but what had I really achieved on my own?” she asks, later adding, “I needed my own adventures. My own challenge. And after meeting with an Army recruiter, I found it.”

“A way to prove my inner strength and maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way,” she says, before introducing herself as U.S. Army Corporal Emma Malonelord.

“And I answered my calling” she adds.

The advertisement ends with the words “What calls you?”

The advertisement became the subject of mockery on Twitter, with one user pointing out its similarities with the recent “woke” Central Intelligence Agency recruitment advertisements.

“Wow. First it was the woke CIA ad, now it is a super-woke woke animated army recruitment ad featuring a lesbian wedding, an LGBT rights parade and women “shattering stereotypes” by joining the world’s largest killing machine,” Mint Press News staff writer Alan MacLeod tweeted.

Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh also lambasted the “woke” ad, asserting it makes America appear weak.

“Army ad about a woman with two lesbian moms who joined the Army to ‘discover her inner strength’ and ‘shatter stereotypes,” Walsh wrote on Twitter.

“We are the laughing stock of the world,” he added.

Others praised the ad, saying it was “great to see” the military embracing LGBT advocacy.

“Great to see the military embracing – and soldiers being able to enjoy – the freedom and individual liberty it’s always claimed our armed forces are there to fight for and defend,” one user tweeted.

“A lesbian woman enlisting to defend her right and freedom to marry and have a family with another woman – against those who would forcefully deny her this, would be an actual legitimate reason to fight, and for the military to exist,” the user continued.

“We WILL defend ourselves, and our freedoms.”

The CIA has released a similar series of recruitment ads over the last several months as part of a series dubbed “Humans of CIA,” including ads featuring an agent who described herself as a “cisgender millennial,” a man who “[grew] up gay in a small Southern town,” and a blind employee who talks about the agency’s push to “create a more inclusive environment.”

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Biden Administration Is Mocking Age-old Wisdom

Human nature stays the same across time and space. That is why there used to be predictable political, economic, and social behavior that all countries understood.

The supply of money governs inflation. Print it without either greater productivity or more goods and services, and the currency cheapens. Yet America apparently rejects that primordial truism.

The United States is more than $28 trillion in debt—about 130% of the country’s annual gross domestic product. The government will run up a $2.3 trillion budget deficit for 2021 after a record $3.1 trillion deficit the year before.

The Biden administration still wants to borrow more—another $2 trillion in new social programs and “infrastructure.”

In the crazy last 100 days, the price of everything from lumber, food, and gas to cars and houses has soared. Yet many interest rates are still stuck at or below 3%.

Jobs are plentiful; workers are not. Is it a surprise when government handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay cut to go back to work?

After being freed from 13 months of quarantine, Americans are splurging. But this huge pent-up demand is causing shortages. Producers fear the Biden administration’s loose talk of higher taxes, greater regulation, and cutbacks in energy development.

Are the old principles really obsolete? Should we be printing money while expanding government debt? Is it wise to keep interest rates close to zero and to discourage employment, production, and thrift? This dangerous behavior used to ensure inflation, followed by ruinous stagflation.

After George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, some U.S. cities slashed police spending. Police response times have slowed in many places, perhaps because officers are worried about being fired for using force.

The result? In major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, homicide and violent crime rates have increased by double digits.

State and local governments believed they were exempt from primeval laws of deterrence that warned when criminals assumed they would not be caught and punished, then they committed more crimes.

The same dangers of ignoring unchanging human nature apply to foreign policy.

Aggressive opponents such as Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia expect that the Biden administration will ignore their brinkmanship. They assume the administration will cut American defenses. And President Joe Biden sounds to them more critical of Trump foreign policy than of America’s enemies. Why not take previously unwarranted risks?

So, Russian troops predictably mass on the Ukrainian border. China steps up its harassment of Taiwan. North Korea launches more missiles. Iran hazes U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. And now, rockets from Gaza pour into Israel.

Apparently, the Biden administration did not believe that dictatorships and theocracies would interpret its virtue signaling as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be returned in kind.

The old dictum of the Roman writer Vegetius—if you want peace, prepare for war—was just too much of a downer to take seriously.

In the old days, the greater the impediments to crossing a nation’s border—walls and the enforcement of laws—the less likely was illegal immigration. Here too, the Biden administration apparently rejected the ancient warnings.

Stopping construction of the border wall, promising amnesties in advance, and damning the tough enforcement of the previous administration has only led to more illegal immigration.

Refusing to call the chaos at the southern border a “crisis” did not mean it was not a disaster.

Wisdom of the ages also warned that humans’ first allegiance was to their own tribe, as defined by race, ethnicity, or religion. That existential danger is why multiracial nations always wisely sought to tamp down tribal differences, and to emphasize common ties of citizenship and transcendent common interests. Otherwise, a diverse country ended up like Lebanon, Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia, where tribal feuding turned bloody and barbaric.

Yet for three months, the Biden administration has emphasized racial differences rather than our melting-pot commonalities. It has stereotyped America’s white population—hardly uniform in terms of class and ethnicity—as somehow uniformly enjoying unearned privilege and acting systemically racist.

Amid such talk, the danger is that racial tensions will increase, hate crimes will spike, racial demagogues will dominate, meritocracy will vanish, and tribal solidarity will replace it. And the ancient idea of America will unwind.

When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all too predictable future becomes terrifying.

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Swedish Hospital Bans Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones for Gender Dysphoric Youths Under 16. We Should, Too.

Sweden, arguably one of the most politically and socially liberal countries in the world, has nonetheless taken a giant step toward protecting gender dysphoric minors and their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine reported on Wednesday that the Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Hospital—an arm of the one of the most renowned hospitals in Sweden, the Karolinska University Hospital—recently released a policy statement that included new guidelines for the care of youths with gender dysphoria under the age of 16.

The guidelines, which took effect April 1, are profound: They contradict many of the assertions of the transgender lobby, which encourage parents and children to accept that cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are normal, healthy treatments for minors with gender dysphoria and should be pursued with little hesitation.

In the unofficial English translation of the original Swedish text provided by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, the statement from the Children’s Hospital reads in part:

In December 2019, the [Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services] published an overview of the knowledge base, which showed a lack of evidence for both the long-term consequences of the treatments, and the reasons for the large influx of patients in recent years.

These treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences, such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.

This makes it challenging to assess the risk/benefit for the individual patient, and even more challenging for the minors and their guardians to be in a position of an informed stance regarding these treatments.

The guidelines appear to lean on the U.K. High Court’s Dec. 1 ruling in the Keira Bell case, saying it “established overarching problems associated with puberty-blocking treatment,” adding:

Further, the ruling specifically establishes that it is highly unlikely, if at all possible, for an individual under the age of 16 to give informed consent to this treatment.

Influenced by that ruling, the Children’s Hospital said that “it has been decided that hormonal treatments (i.e., puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormones) will not be initiated in gender dysphoric patients under the age of 16.”

Patients between the ages of 16 and 18 may only receive treatment within clinical trial settings approved by the Ethical Review Agency/Swedish Institutional Review Board. The Children’s Hospital said it would be doing a “careful individual assessment” of patients currently receiving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to determine whether those treatments should continue.

Those new guidelines mean the Children’s Hospital has stopped following what the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine called the “Dutch Protocol,” which it says “allows for administration of puberty blockers at age 12 (and increasingly, as young as 8-9, at the early stage of puberty known as Tanner 2), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16.”

Even to liberal Sweden, that seemed astoundingly young.

The new protocol also makes Sweden the first country to officially deviate from World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidance, which continues to promote puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on children under age 16.

It’s hard to fathom that left-wing ideology in American culture, dragging the medical community with it, has ceded so much ground to LGBTQ activists that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are even discussed as options—let alone healthy ones—for children.

For years, medical professionals didn’t even know what puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would do to a child. Little research was available because it had rarely been tried, tested, and evaluated, yet now the medical community—bolstered by leftist ideologues—push them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics endorses a “gender-affirming” approach that includes supporting insurance plans that include coverage for, “when appropriate, surgical interventions.”

Caution seems far more prudent when it comes to a child’s growing body, especially through puberty, but when it comes to transgenderism, prudence, research, and facts have been actively cast aside. Patience, talk therapy, and time are rarely discussed as viable options within the LGBTQ community.

On this issue, much of the medical community, and culture with it, has surrendered to the pressure of the LGBTQ lobby, which usually suggests that the only “cure” to gender dysphoric symptoms a child has is a medical transition via cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Unfortunately, often the end result is akin to that of someone like Bell, whose case the Children’s Hospital guidelines alluded to (but without mentioning her name). She began a transition at the behest of medical professionals, and now lives as a biological female without breasts and regrets her decision.

Lawmakers, concerned parents, and medical professionals who seek to err on the side of caution need to come together and push for statewide bans of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children under 18 years of age.

As the new Swedish Children’s Hospital guidelines stated, the medical evidence against utilizing these treatments is compelling. They are drastic treatments that deliver irreversible, life-altering results.

In April, Arkansas became the first state to ban cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors. Other states should follow suit. Children’s minds and bodies must be protected before it’s too late.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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