Tucker Carlson and his Putin Interview
This interview does confirm that it is in fact Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is holding up a ceasefire. But hatred of Russia runs deep in Ukraine so Zelenskyy probably has his people behind him. Sad that the deaths have to continue, though. An armistice ended WWI, why not one in this war?
In his post-interview video, Carlson noted that “Putin is not someone who does a lot of interviews.” In fact, his last interview with an American journalist came in October 2021, when he spoke with CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at an energy event in Moscow.
“He’s not good at explaining himself,” Carlson observed. “He’s smart, there’s no question about that. But he’s clearly spending a lot of time in a world where he doesn’t have to explain himself.”
Carlson concluded, “He didn’t lay out his case very coherently.”
Reflecting on Putin’s answers, Carlson noted that the Russian leader became animated when discussing the United States and the West’s approach toward his country.
“He’s very wounded by the rejection of the West,” Carlson said. “The U.S. government doesn’t like Russia. And like a lot of Russians, he expected the end of the Cold War would be Russia’s invitation into Europe.”
Yet despite this tension, Carlson said it was “striking” that Putin admitted he wanted a peace deal.
“Maybe he’s lying in ways I didn’t perceive, but he kept saying it. I don’t know why he would say it if he didn’t mean it,” Carlson said.
During the interview, Putin accused former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of scuttling previous negotiations, “saying it was better to fight Russia.”
Russia’s Aims
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted worldwide condemnation, yet Putin brashly accused Ukraine of starting the war in 2014 and claimed Russia was attempting to stop it.
Asked by Carlson if Russia had achieved its aims, Putin said, “No. We haven’t achieved our aims yet because one of them is denazification. This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements.”
The Russian leader then turned his ire on the United States, saving some of his harshest criticism for Biden.
“I talked to him before the special military operation,” Putin told Carlson. “And I said to him then, by the way, I will not go into details, I never do. But I said to him then, ‘I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away.’”
Carlson pressed Putin on why he wouldn’t call Biden today.
“If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons,” Putin replied. “It will be over within a few weeks. That’s it. And then we can agree on some terms before you do that, stop. What’s easier? Why would I call him? What should I talk to him about? Or beg him for what?”
The conversation about Ukraine dominated the two-hour interview, including a revelation that Putin suspects the CIA is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline attack in 2022. Putin also praised his “friend” Xi Jinping of China, and boasted about the growing cooperation between the two countries.
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Team Biden Told Banks to Surveil Republicans
Americans have long suspected their in-store and online transactions are being monitored by companies to aggregate and adapt to our shopping trends and preferences.
After all, who hasn’t had an Amazon ad pop up on their screen to peddle a product they were looking at earlier that morning or talking about a couple of days ago? It’s a little creepy and somewhat invasive, but what’s the harm of an algorithm luring us into buying a new Keurig?
Until recently, we often dismissed so-called conspiracy theories that access to our shopping habits would be useful to Big Brother, but now we know for a fact that the federal government is not only tracking our spending but monitoring our political beliefs. As The Daily Wire reports: “Documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government showed that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had flagged the terms as part of its investigation related to the January 6 riot. Banks were also told to look at transactions involving the purchase of religious texts and outdoor sporting goods stores like Cabela’s.”
Because, you know, people who shop at Cabela’s might be insurrectionists, right?
It might be funny if it weren’t such an outrageous and dangerous overreach of government power to keep track of citizens’ political leanings. Imagine if President Donald Trump, the guy Democrats think is a threat to our sacred democracy, had allowed FinCEN to generate a list of the limousine liberals who shop at Whole Foods.
You guessed it. There would be calls for impeachment, which they did anyway. Twice.
Now, if you buy a MAGA coffee mug online or dare go into Dick’s Sporting Goods to look for a compound bow, you might end up on a growing list of extremists compiled by the federal government.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, for one, is taking this very seriously. Scott, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, penned a letter with Kentucky Representative James Comer to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in which they wrote: “Federal government efforts to target individuals and entities based on their political views is a blatant and egregious violation of our Constitution.
Additionally, reported actions like these disrupt confidence in federal law enforcement and raise significant questions regarding the independence of federal financial regulators.”
More specifically, they highlighted Treasury’s role in instructing financial institutions to monitor financial transactions that included specific keywords or search terms. The Treasury Department reportedly searched through Zelle transactions to look for terms such as “MAGA,” “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” and “Trump.” Even more chilling, it identified people purchasing religious books or other materials considered extreme.
Scott also refreshed Yellen’s memory about how this all started when then-President Barack Obama used the powers of the Justice Department and “Operation Choke Point” to pressure financial institutions from providing services to businesses with political positions the Obama administration opposed.
Over in the House, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan wrote a letter to Noah Bishoff, former director of the Financial Crimes Network (FinCEN), stating, “In particular, your testimony will help to inform the Committee and Select Subcommittee about federal law enforcement’s mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process.”
Jordan has already written a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray about information indicating the intelligence organization’s personnel had contacted Bank of America with specific search terms in its customers’ financial transactions.
During a House hearing this week, Missouri Republican Ann Wagner asked Secretary Yellen if the Treasury had directed financial institutions to monitor purchases in order to identify what might be considered extreme viewpoints or whether FinCEN or the FDIC had pressured financial institutions to do the same. Yellen’s response was evasive: “Well, we received the letter from you, I believe, on this topic, and we intend to investigate and to respond.”
Don’t expect Yellen to come back anytime soon and admit an egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and their freedom to choose their political candidates without fear of retribution. And while the letters from Scott and Jordan are a good first step, it’s not enough.
As our own Nate Jackson wrote recently, “Jim Jordan’s a great guy and a tenacious former wrestler, but sternly worded letters and dour lectures for the cameras in a congressional hearing aren’t going to fix this problem.”
Our only hope is that the GOP holds onto the speaker’s gavel in the new Congress. Because if Democrats wrestle back control of the House this November, they will have gotten away with another Orwellian abuse of power.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104281-team-biden-told-banks-to-surveil-republicans-2024-02-09
********************************************Medical malpractice lawsuits on behalf of detransitioners harmed by experimental treatments euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care” will yield multimillion-dollar judgments, a lawyer filing such suits predicts.
Ron Miller helped found the law firm Campbell Miller Payne, which represents people who formerly identified as transgender, underwent medical alterations, then rejected their transgender identities, and now lament the harm done to their bodies.
These detransitioners are suing their doctors and medical providers for damages in a novel kind of medical malpractice claim.
“A troubled youth—typically with either a bad family life or suffering from several psychological comorbidities, such as autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, anorexia, dissociative identity disorders … will show up to a practitioner stating that they’re uncomfortable with their body or [that] they have odd feelings,” Miller tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
These troubled young people may find “the wrong practitioner,” one who is “focused on this transgender ideology,” he explains. “After 30 to 45 minutes in the first visit, they will diagnose and issue a prescription.”
For a girl, a doctor would prescribe testosterone “at an unusually high dosage because they have to counteract the body’s own production of estrogen in a female, or they’ll issue the testosterone in addition to a ‘puberty blocker’ that will stop the production of estrogen.”
“Doing this, obviously, after only a 30-minute visit, means they have not ruled out any other potential avenue,” Miller notes. “Doing so obviously ignores the fact that maybe this child was suffering from depression, anxiety; maybe this child is just suffering from normal teenage angst that accompanies puberty.”
The practitioner “never presents psychotherapy as an option” in Miller’s cases, the lawyer notes. Instead, doctors rush patients “straight to the prescription of the drugs and then eventually on to surgeries.”
These medical interventions don’t just change a person to resemble someone of the opposite sex, they carry long-term side effects, the lawyer notes. Even when a person rejects a transgender identity after only receiving cross-sex hormones, that person will still need to receive injections of the hormones his or her body would naturally produce, because the intervention interrupted initial growth.
“You’re looking at lifelong medical issues that are going to require pharmaceutical drugs and therapies and treatments that just will never end,” Miller says.
Of a female detransitioner, he says, “She’s going to have bone-density issues because she went through a period of her development where her bones were just affected by a cross-sex hormone that just did not work with her body [in its natural development]. That creates long-term development issues that will have to be treated by specialists and medications. So, you’re looking at a lifelong medical bill, but then you’re also looking at consequences like … infertility.”
“How do you assign a value to the pain and the lost opportunity to have a child?” the lawyer asks.
“It’s a really difficult thing to predict,” and juries will have to settle the matter, he notes. “What is it worth to a person to have that taken from them? Our court system, unfortunately, is limited in only being able to provide compensation for these kind of injuries in the form of dollars, and so, every jury has the very difficult task of translating these kind of intangible, lifelong injuries into a monetary figure that could compensate.”
When pressed to assign an approximate dollar figure, Miller says, “It would be in the millions, I think, for sure. I would say, based on our research, we expect a jury verdict to come back anywhere from $10 [million] to $20 million.”
Medical malpractice law varies from state to state. In some states, a detransitioner would have to bring a lawsuit one year after the harmful activity, and “often the detransitioner isn’t even aware of the deception that they were subjected to within this one-year period,” the lawyer says. For this and other reasons, legislatures will have to alter the law to enable detransitioners to sue for medical malpractice.
Typically, a malpractice plaintiff will have to “establish that some medical standard of care was not followed or was neglected or was ignored in providing the medical treatments that ultimately caused the client harm,” Miller explains.
Yet, “there really is no agreed-upon standard of care nationwide or in any of the states,” the lawyer notes. The pro-transgender group the World Professional Association of Transgender Health has released “standards of care,” but WPATH admits that document is merely a set of guidelines for doctors to follow. Even WPATH encourages doctors to wait at least one year before medicalizing patients.
Miller says he relies on “the general standard of care … , which is to ‘first, do no harm,’ and second, do what’s in the patient’s best medical interest.” In most cases his firm takes up, the practitioners failed to satisfy either of those basic standards.
Miller says he was a commercial litigator before founding Campbell Miller Payne. He describes himself and his partners as “believers” seeking to help “the least of these,” as Jesus suggests in Matthew 25:40.
“When a person decides to pursue this course, they become transgender,” he explains. “Now, they’re already a societal outcast to some degree. But when they choose to detransition, now they’re leaving that already ostracized group. So, they’ve become the smallest and most ostracized of either group.”
He describes detransitioners as “the most alone” kind of people.
Miller says his firm is representing detransitioners such as Prisha Mosely and assisting with the case of Chloe Cole, perhaps the most well-known detransitioner.
When medical practitioners face malpractice suits, they often claim that putting minors on the experimental “treatments” immediately was necessary to prevent them from committing suicide.
“Our clients are living proof that’s just not the case,” Miller says.
When his firm represents a detransitioner, it only charges a contingency fee.
“The clients never pay for any of the cost expenses or any of the attorney fee time that’s put into the case until any award is received from the outcome of the case, whether by settlement or by verdict,” he explains.
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What Is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria and Why Does It Matter?
Studies have suggested that the number of young people who identify as transgender has exploded in recent years. While activists claim that these people are just discovering a latent truth suppressed by society, some scientists have set out to question what lies behind a phenomenon they term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”
Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has worked with Lisa Littman, a doctor who first coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria and laid out her hypothesis in the medical journal PLOS One. Sapir joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to break down what ROGD is, why some activist scientists have failed to disprove it, and what he and Littman have done to advance the theory.
“Gender dysphoria” refers to the condition of persistently and painfully identifying with the gender different from one’s biological sex, and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” refers to a new, third form of gender dysphoria. Current literature recognizes adult and childhood gender dysphoria, but ROGD refers to a form of gender dysphoria that often emerges in adolescence and may be a social contagion.
Sapir explains that the phenomenon emerges among “adolescents who do not have a childhood history of gender nonconformity or gender distress or issues with their sex.” These people “don’t have issues with being boys or girls, and these problems seem to develop only in adolescence.”
“They have co-occurring mental health problems, anxiety, depression, autism, [obsessive compulsive disorder], eating disorders, history of trauma, you name it,” he adds. “They are predominantly, although not exclusively, but predominantly female, right, and they belong to peer groups where some of them are male or female. The kids come out as trans in clusters.”
Sapir describes these facets as “indicators of symptoms” that have emerged “in the medical literature in the last few years.”
He does not claim that ROGD is “settled science,” but he insists that it is a scientifically rigorous hypothesis to explain the jump in transgender-identifying youth in the past few years. The hypothesis suggests that therapy, rather than invasive medical interventions often referred to as “gender-affirming care,” might be the proper path forward for youth who struggle with gender-identity issues.
Sapir and Littman recently defended the ROGD hypothesis against an attack from Dr. Jack Turban, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. Turban and others published a January 2023 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health claiming to debunk ROGD by analyzing the U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015.
Sapir and Littman responded with a December letter to the editor in Archives of Sexual Behavior and in an article on Sapir’s substack, Reality’s Last Stand.
Sapir tells “The Daily Signal Podcast” that Turban didn’t come close to disproving the ROGD hypothesis, and he explains how Turban tried to manipulate the data to suggest that people cannot get rapid-onset gender dysphoria because transgender people do not reveal their identities right away, but keep them secret for years.
“They did a lot of gymnastics” to suggest that teens today do not have rapid-onset gender dysphoria, Sapir explains.
Sapir says the 2015 study asked people who identify as transgender three questions: (1) at what age did you start to feel that your gender was different from your sex?; (2) at what age did you begin to feel that you were trans, even if you didn’t have a word to articulate it?; and (3) at what age did you disclose a trans identity to a family member or somebody else in your life?
Rather than relying on question No. 2 as a proxy for when people realized they were transgender, Turban chose question No. 1. Sapir says that question is more subject to “recall bias,” when a person reinterprets a memory of feeling a certain way early on, in order to reaffirm their identity and choices in the present.
“So, why wouldn’t Turban use question No. 2?” Sapir asks. “Well, we dug down into the data. We did some analysis, and it turns out if he had used question No. 2, the median time from realization to disclosure would have been one year, and a one-year time from realization to disclosure supports the ROGD hypothesis.”
Yet the biggest problem with Turban’s analysis is timing, the Manhattan Institute fellow says.
The ROGD hypothesis is “that this phenomena really started to emerge in the late 2000s and picked up speed in the 2010s,” Sapir notes. “The sample, a survey of adults from 2015, cannot possibly pick up on ROGD phenomena if that’s what Turban and his colleagues are trying to investigate.”
Furthermore, the survey only includes adults who currently identified as transgender, not anyone who stopped identifying as transgender, he explains, and Turban and his co-authors have no control group to compare with the survey.
Sapir admits that it is unlikely researchers are “going to get a study that will definitively resolve the ROGD debate.” Yet, he predicts that “we are going to have piecemeal evidence that comes out as a trickle confirming aspects of the ROGD hypothesis.”
He emphasizes that the burden of proof rests with those who advocate for experimental transgender medical interventions, not with critics who study ROGD.
“Because what’s riding on this debate is the legitimacy of a medical intervention that can cause severe, irreversible lifelong harm and suffering, the burden of proof here is on those arguing that anybody who says, ‘I’m trans,’ is eligible for medical intervention. They face the burden of proof, not us,” Sapir adds.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/07/transgender-series-part-1-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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