Friday, March 04, 2022



Young, Male and Infertile: The Men Struggling to Have Kids

Years ago, the doctors told me I was infertile but fortunately I wasn't. I have a very creditable 34 year old son to prove it. At that time they looked at sperm count but it turned out that sperm motility was the real issue. I was bad on one but good on the other -- JR

To many, infertility is still a women's issue. That couldn't be further from the truth.

In 2018, Kent resident Toby Trice took up go-kart racing in an effort to distract himself from recent bad news. The 31-year-old and his partner had experienced a second unsuccessful in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in their years-long attempt to start a family. The procedure was necessary due to his own infertility.

“I fell into a huge depression because I thought I was alone. I didn’t have anyone around to seek support through,” says Trice. “I was ashamed of the fact that I wasn’t able to have a child. Once a month go-karting at a local track was my escape from dealing with fertility.”

Trice, now a professional racing driver, was diagnosed with swollen veins in his testes that were inhibiting his sperm production, a condition known as a varicocele, one of the most common causes of infertility among cisgender men.

When people think of infertility, the common conception is that it is an issue affecting cis women. However, there has been a 50 percent decline in sperm production over the past 40 years, according to a 2017 study from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). Half of infertility cases include some form of male factor. In the UK, one in seven couples currently struggle to start a family.

“I spent 27 years in charge of a facility that did male fertility diagnoses. Over that time, every man that came through the door thought he was the first one,” says Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield. “There's a low level of education.”

While resources are readily available to cis women experiencing trouble conceiving children, a dearth of information available to their male counterparts contributes to stigma around infertility and a hesitancy to be vocal about the issue. This lack of conversation is detrimental to research that can improve or develop aid for patients.

“Male fertility is at the bottom of the heap for being funded, it's not seen as an important healthcare condition because nobody dies of male infertility,” Pacey says. “I am a dying breed of academics looking at male fertility – there's no one in my institution that's going to follow behind me, it's not seen as an attractive career path.”

The lack of interest in this research results in a scarcity of information on how infertility affects cis men of different ethnicities and sexual orientations. Trans men trying to conceive, as documented by VICE writer Freddy McConnell in his column Dad Bod, face a whole raft of challenges, too.

The only sizeable data around infertility comes from IVF patients – who are largely cis women – and as such, there is no real breakdown of demographics for cis men. According to Pacey, this lack of interest in male fertility among new medical professionals, who would rather focus on life-threatening conditions, will likely thin the ranks of specialists (urologists or andrologists) in the field. This leaves gynaecologists as the primary option available to most men looking to confirm or treat male fertility issues.

Trice, who initially discussed his semen analysis with a gynaecologist, believed that this was the only course of action at the time.

“In hindsight, I look back and think, ‘What a load of madness!’ Why [was] I not seeing someone that specialises in male fertility?” says Trice. “All the way through, even to the point where we went to an IVF round, it was all specialists [in female fertility]. It wasn't until I went to a private doctor that I then saw someone that was specifically trained in male fertility.”

According to Sheryl Homa, scientific director of Andrology Solutions in London, the NHS does not automatically offer tests for male fertility beyond semen analysis, while women might be offered blood tests for hormonal imbalance, for instance. This means men typically have to specifically request further tests from their GPs. Newer tests, like sperm DNA fragmentation or oxidative stress measurements (which test sperm quality), are only performed in private practice, requiring patients to pursue procedures that can result in financial burden.

Many men affected by infertility also suffer mental health side-effects.

“It was a tough pill to take,” says Kevin Button, a South Wales resident diagnosed with Sertoli cell-only syndrome, which results in no sperm being produced in the testicles, eight years ago.

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Bronx man, 37, who 'smeared human feces in a woman's face' in sickening NYC subway attack last week sticks his tongue out as he's led out of court

image from https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/03/02/13/54842211-10567993-Frank_Abrokwa_37_who_was_arrested_for_smearing_feces_on_a_woman_-m-5_1646229388186.jpg

Another one of America's charming "minorities"

A Bronx man accused of smearing feces on a woman's face in a vile subway attack last week stuck his tongue out as he was led out of his arraignment hearing Tuesday night.

Frank Abrokwa, 37, was arrested February 28 and charged with forcible touching, menacing, disorderly conduct and harassment, in connection with the stomach-churning attack.

Wearing a wearing brightly-colored 'Slam' magazine cover bomber jacket and NBA hat, Abrokwa cursed out Judge Wanda Licitra during his first court appearance at Bronx Criminal Court late Tuesday, the New York Daily News reported.

Abrokwa said he was tired of waiting and demanded the judge hurry things up so he could be handed over to Brooklyn detectives who were waiting to question him in a hate crime investigation.

The Bronx man, who had been freed without bail in three other cases, had to face the judge for the attack that took place just three days after New York City Mayor Eric Adams rolled out the Subway Safety Plan meant to crack down on violence in crime-ridden transport system.

Surveillance video from the station that was released by the New York City Police Department on Monday shows the victim, described as a 43-year-old woman, sitting on a bench waiting for a train.

A man walks along the platform carrying a plastic bag. Suddenly, he lunges at the woman and appears to shove the bag into her face.

Mayor Adams called the incident a 'horrific experience for anyone to go through' at an unrelated press conference on Monday.

'Human waste or someone spitting in your face, those are real signs of mental health issues … and we really must dig into how we're dealing with these mental health issues,' the mayor added.

The attack took place at 5:15pm on February 21 on the southbound platform at the East 241st Street station.

Assistant District Attorney Grace Phillips revealed Tuesday that just before the attack, Abrokwa hit on the victim, asking her, 'Hey, mami, hey, mami, why don't you talk to me?'

When she ignored him, he walked into a subway car and defecated into a bag.

Video then shows the Abrokwa walking back out of the idling subway car and lunging at the woman, smearing the excrement on her.

When the woman leans forward, he walks behind her and presses the waste against the back of her head and her back.

The video released by the police offers a clear image of the suspect, who is seen wearing black pants, an oversized blue sweater, and a ballcap over a durag, and carrying a large duffle bag slung over his shoulder.

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Working Folks and the Poodle of Congress

By Jon N. Hall

In the old days, America’s working folks, the once great and sprawling middle class, had a strategy for “getting ahead” and achieving the American Dream. At the center of that strategy was saving their hard-won wages in commercial banks. Sounds crazy, right? But depositing one’s money in a bank wasn’t just some way to preserve one’s wealth for the future because, back in the old days, commercial banks actually paid decent interest, and sometimes handsomely. For instance, in the 1980s banks were paying double-digit interest rates to their depositors. And as late as 2000, one could get close to 7.0 percent on a certificate of deposit. So, one’s money made money. Over the last couple of decades, that’s all been shot to hell.

Nowadays, the banks pay hardly any interest. Some are paying interest at the princely rate of 0.01 percent for savings accounts. Abysmal rates have been the norm since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. And just when rates started to inch up a bit, the 2008 financial crisis or the 2020 pandemic hit and interest rates for savers again took a nosedive.

But the situation for working folks is worse than the fact that their money isn’t making any money to speak of by way of interest. That’s because their deposits have been losing value, buying power, due to inflation.

Inflation has been called a “tax,” and an especially cruel one for working folks. But when inflation is engineered, and the direct result of deliberate government policy, inflation might just as well be regarded as theft. And at the center of this policy (of theft) is America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.

One of the Federal Reserve’s mandates is to guarantee price stability and thereby preserve the value of the U.S. dollar. But the Fed tries to engineer an ongoing inflation rate of 2 percent. Why is the Fed’s 2 percent inflation rate policy acceptable? After all, doesn’t money lose value at any inflation rate?

The Fed’s targeted 2 percent inflation rate rests on the belief that economists can control the economy. We may soon get to see if that’s true because the inflation rate is now 7.5 percent. That means the money in your bank account is losing 7.5 percent of its value this year. The Fed’s main duty right now should be to get inflation down and to do it quickly. Unfortunately, that is complicated by the Fed having another mandate.

The Fed’s so-called “dual mandate” needs to be changed. In these pages, this writer has urged that the Fed’s other mandate of maximizing employment be stripped from the Fed. That mandate is at odds with the mandate to maintain price stability, (not to mention also being at odds with Congress paying people not to work during the pandemic).

The Fed actually has a third mandate. The third mandate may not have any statutory foundation nor get much press, but it is no less real. The Fed’s third mandate is to create whatever money Congress wants. Sometimes the Fed’s money creation is justified, such as during the 2008 financial crisis when the Fed provided urgently needed liquidity with TARP.

But the Fed didn’t stop with TARP. For long after the Great Recession ended in 2009, the Fed kept on creating additional trillions of dollars through QE, its quantitative easing programs. And during the pandemic, the Fed has been purchasing about half of the Treasury’s new securities. When the Fed does these things, it creates new money, and expands the money supply, creating actual textbook inflation.

To head off price inflation, the Fed has signaled a reversal of policy entailing “tapering” of its money creation and in March the hiking of its key interest rate. It was even rumored that the Fed’s first rate hike might be 50 basis points. But then Russia started a war with Ukraine. At Barron’s on Feb. 24, one reads:

The capital markets typically react more vigorously to a surprise than an anticipated development. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was telegraphed, and yet the market has reacted like it was a bolt from the blue. Russia’s initial preparations spurred little market reaction outside of Ukraine and Russian bonds. It wasn’t until two weeks ago, when the U.S. warned a Russian invasion could “begin at any time,” did it become much of a market force.

Until then, the dominant theme had been the anticipation of the Federal Reserve’s rate hike next month, and tighter monetary policy more broadly. As recently as Feb. 10, the fed-funds futures had discounted an 80% chance that the Fed would hike 50 basis points to kick off its monetary adjustment cycle. The odds now are less than 20%.

Perhaps the perception that the Fed won’t be quite as aggressive in hiking its federal funds rate as had been thought may be why the U.S. equity market rallied so smartly on Friday the 25th. The concern for inflation hawks is that sagging prices in stocks or real estate, or the advent of a recession, or a wider war, or something, could derail the Fed’s plans to start dealing with inflation.

Fighting inflation should be the Fed’s only war. The Fed should leave other problems, like full employment, to Congress. But the Fed is the poodle of Congress, and Congress wants the Fed to use its monetary policy of money creation and zero percent interest rates because raising taxes to pay for all their new spending programs will put them in bad odor with the taxpayers.

Congress and its poodle have destroyed the time-honored traditional means working folks have used to prosper and grab a bit of the American Dream, which is saving money in banks. Through their acceptance of absurdly low-interest rates, savers have paid for the recovery and pandemic response, while the Fed’s pumping up of the money supply has inflated the stock and real estate markets, which are now grossly overvalued. The Fed has been picking winners and losers. But now the Fed’s policies have finally resulted in inflation at a 40-year high.

Inflation is the destroyer of currencies, and it can be the destroyer of nations. The Fed needs to focus only on reducing inflation, and that may mean resisting Congress. The Fed is supposed to be independent, not some compliant obedient lapdog that gives Congress everything it wants.

Interest rates for depositors in the nation’s banks need to rise. If the Fed’s 2 percent inflation is really as healthy as the Fed seems to think it is, then commercial banks should be required to offer accounts that mirror that inflation rate. Any commercial bank that cannot pay the inflation rate on a one-year certificate of deposit probably shouldn’t exist.

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Closing the border for two years in response to the pandemic cut off immigration to Australia -- and made all Australians richer

Amazing per capita growth rate

The December quarter GDP numbers delivered two big ‘truths’ – one maybe a little fatuous, the other seriously and challengingly profound and bitingly relevant for decisions that are being made, right now in 2022, both for 2022 and indeed for all of the 2020s.

The first is the old truth of how great it feels when you ‘stop banging your head against a brick wall’.

For most of the last September quarter NSW and Victoria were in – let’s hope they were the last, ever – lockdowns.

That’s nearly 60 per cent of the national economy. As a result GDP fell 1.9 per cent in that September quarter.

Bad enough as that was, it was way better than the 6.8 per cent plunge in the June quarter 2020 when all of Australia – in sync with pretty much all of the world – was in the initial Covid-hysteria lockdown.

So, when Victoria and NSW came out of lockdown in the December quarter, GDP growth rocketed up 3.4 per cent – or, 13.6 per cent on an annualised basis, as the Americans report their GDP numbers – and making it 4.2 per cent for the year.

For comparison, US December quarter GDP growth was 1.7 per cent, making 5.5 per cent through 2021.

This meant that we were up 3.4 per cent on the last pre-Covid, December 2019 quarter. The US was up slightly less, 3.1 per cent over the two years.

So the bounce-back is great when you stop ‘banging your head’, so to speak; and the worse the head-banging, the bigger the bounce-back.

True, after both of those big lockdown-caused GDP plunges, GDP leapt the same 3.4 per cent in the immediate recovery quarter.

However, the national GDP increase would have been more than 5 per cent in the September 2020 quarter, but for of course, Chairman Dan keeping Victoria and one quarter of the national economy in its own specially curated lockdown, as he set after the world’s lockdown record.

He of course finally ‘achieved’ the world record after lockdown #26 - or something, I’m still too locked-in and locked-out punch-drunk to remember exactly.

The second, bigger, more telling, truth is more than a little awkward for our ‘Big Australia’ elites to contemplate.

Simply, that bigger is not just not better, it is categorically worse.

Through 2021 overall GDP growth was 4.2 per cent. GDP growth per capita (per Australian) was only slightly lower at 4.0 per cent.

Contrast that with the last pre-Covid year, 2019. Overall GDP growth was 2.2 per cent and per capita growth just 0.7 per cent; with the previous year almost exactly the same at 2.3 per cent/0.7 per cent.

Indeed, over the two years of Covid, per capita GDP growth has been almost double that of the previous two years, when immigration was running at 250k a year.

The only growth that really matters; the only growth that really delivers rising prosperity – and that doesn’t just mean bigger flat-screen TVs, but more and better hospitals and social services etc etc – is per capita growth.

There’s no point – there is no increase in either average or indeed aggregate prosperity - in doubling the size of the economy if you also double the population. Everyone stands still; and indeed would really go backward.

But that is exactly what we have been doing pretty much all of the 21st century, until March 2020 when Covid brought that game to an abrupt – and, I would hope, permanent - stop,

Indeed, much of that earlier ‘growth’ was simply building more and more infrastructure, just to keep up with the population, not more and better infrastructure for people generally.

Do we have to get to 20-lane toll roads for a 12m population Melbourne before that penny drops? And Sydney?

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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)

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