60 years after the first breast enlargement, LIZ JONES despairs that women are still having surgery that damages their minds AND their bodies
This woman is missing the elephant in the room. She is not taking account of what most women know: Big breasts are attractive to men. And being attractive is a huge part of a woman's life. Without being attractive to men, her chances of children and a normal family life are very small. So women without big breasts do what is needed to attract men.
The thing that rather surprises me that quite clumsy implants that look quite un-natural (not dangly at all) still seem to be proudly displayed and are apparently still attractive to many men. See below:
So I think that women who have an augmentation probably do better for it but I suspect that it may often not be a tie that binds
Sixty years ago this spring, there was a huge — literally — shift in women's bodies. For such a fundamental change, it happened almost by accident.
Timmie Jean Lindsey, a 29-year-old mother of six, went into hospital in Houston, Texas, for a routine operation to remove a tattoo from her breast.
Her two surgeons, Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin, persuaded her to undergo a new procedure, which until then had only been tested on dogs: breast implants. She went from a B to a C cup.
It was curious timing, given the procedure took place within weeks of another memorable occasion in the history of womankind — May 19, 1962, when the world was given an eyeful of a woman deemed the pinnacle of female beauty, whose breasts were all her own.
Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday to President Kennedy in a near-transparent cobweb dress that exposed her bra-less embonpoint.
She was the envy of every woman in the world, desired by every man.
Her breasts were natural. They were bountiful. They hung, as they should, creating an almost triangular outline that, if it were the hands on a clock, would be telling the time at precisely 20 minutes to four.
But as an ideal they were soon, because of a scalpel wielded 1,500 miles away, to become extinct. An outline to be ashamed of, altered, excised, deemed not good enough.
Reflecting on the consequences of her procedure, Timmie said some ten years ago: 'I was not wise enough to realise the magnitude of it.'
The 1960s are remembered as the decade when women were released from so many shackles. Unwanted pregnancy, thanks to the Pill.
Backstreet abortions, thanks to legalisation. Giving up work after having children. The expectation of marrying young.
But breast augmentation was waiting in the wings to spread as rapidly as a stain on a shirt when someone has been stabbed in the chest. Which, in a way, we have.
It is the modern-day equivalent of foot binding — mutilation of the female body to fit an unrealistic beauty ideal.
Because for all those adverts that litter the internet and glossy magazines, which fool women into believing cosmetic surgery is easy, as simple and thoughtless an act as dyeing your hair, the reality is so very different.
It's an operation from which it takes weeks to recover and it carries risks galore — not to mention the fact that those implants will likely need replacing after a decade or two.
It's not only a physical mutilation, but a mental one, convincing you that your breasts, those implicit symbols of femininity, can somehow be deficient. That a surgeon's knife is the only thing that can 'fix' you.
That high, hard, perky breasts are somehow more desirable than your soft, natural female form.
Millions of women have had breast implants since Timmie went under the knife. The most popular form of cosmetic surgery in the world, in the UK alone some 7,000 women a year have their breasts altered.
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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signs bill making it a FELONY for doctors to give children medication to alter their gender
Alabama's Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill on Friday making it a felony for doctors to assist minors in gender transition.
'I believe very strongly if the good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl,' Ivey said in a statement on the bill.
'We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life. Instead, let us focus on helping them to properly develop into the adults God intended them to be.'
The Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act makes it a felony for doctors to perform medical procedures or prescribe medication to minors who want to alter their appearance, gender or delay puberty. The criminal penalty would be up to 10 years in prison.
The bill passed the Alabama House 66-28. The American Civil Liberties Union said the bill was the first of its kind to make trans healthcare a felony and promised to challenge it in court.
The legislation also purports to ban puberty blockers, which it says can cause infertility and other health risks.
Democrats who opposed the bill said it contradicted Republican principals of small government.
'This is not small government; this is not a conservative bill,' Democratic Rep. Neil Rafferty told the chamber.
But Republican Rep. Wes Allen likened the initiative to laws that prevent minors from getting tattoos or buying nicotine products.
'We make decisions in this body all the time that are to protect children from making decisions that could permanently harm them,' Allen said.
Last year Ivey signed a bill banning transgender youth from playing in sports that align with their gender identity.
The governor also on Friday signed a bill that would ban K-12 students from using the bathrooms and school facilities that do not correspond with their biological sex.
'Here in Alabama, the men use the men's room, and the ladies use the ladies' room - it's really a no brainer.
This bill will also ensure our elementary school classrooms remain free from any kind of sex talk. Let me be clear to the media and to opponents who like to incorrectly dub this the 'Don't Say Gay' amendment: That is misleading, false and just plain wrong. We don't need to be teaching young children about sex.'
The bill compels school personnel to alert parents if 'minor's perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor's sex.'
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday went off about Republicans who she said are 'engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids.'
'Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country's mental health crisis,' she said, 'Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.'
Psaki continued: 'Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.'
Last week, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill banning irreversible gender reassignment surgery for minors.
In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct child abuse investigations into parents who get their children healthcare to alter their gender.
A Texas judge temporarily stayed such investigations, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton insisted they were legal and would continue.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen states now ban transgender athletes from participating in girls' sports. The fresh wave of anti-trans legislation came as University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who transitioned from a man to a woman before senior year, won a Division I title.
But last month Republican governors in Utah and Illinois vetoed legislation banning transgender youth from sports, arguing the issue did not pose a problem in their states. Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear did the same.
An average of 1.8 percent of high school students identify as transgender, according to a CDC study from 2019.
Most Americans say trans athletes should have to play on the teams that match their birth gender. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 62 percent of Americans said that trans athletes should play on teams corresponding with their biological gender, while 34 percent said they should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity.
Amid the uptick in laws regarding health care for trans youth, the Department of Justice issued a memo last month to state attorneys general reminding them of their 'federal constitutional and statutory obligations' to protect them.
'State laws and policies that prevent parents or guardians from following the advice of a healthcare professional regarding what may be medically necessary or otherwise appropriate care for transgender minors may infringe on rights protected by both the Equal Protection and the Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,' the letter warned.
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Biden Directs ICE To Drop 'Low-Priority' Immigration Cases
The Biden administration is seeking to clear potentially hundreds of thousands of deportation and asylum cases pending before immigration courts, an unprecedented move that could significantly reduce the current backlog of 1.7 million cases.
In a memo dated Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement directed its lawyers to review cases and try to clear those considered low priority under enforcement guidelines that the administration established last year. The American Immigration Lawyers Association estimates that there are at least 700,000 such cases — about 40 percent of the court backlog.
The agency would not provide an estimate of how many cases would be cleared under the directive or how long it would take. Previous administrations have moved cases off the court docket but not on such a broad scale. During the eight years of the Obama administration, more than 166,000 immigration cases were administratively closed, according to court data.
The court backlog has ballooned to the largest ever, causing yearslong delays for immigrants seeking asylum and other forms of relief. One reason is that the coronavirus pandemic has delayed proceedings. A significant number of cases were added during the Trump administration, especially after a surge in undocumented migrants crossing the border in 2019. That administration also reopened tens of thousands of cases that had been removed from the court docket.
The effort to reduce the backlog comes as the Biden administration prepares for what could be the largest increase yet of undocumented migrants crossing the border. The surge is expected to coincide with the end of a pandemic-era public health order that has given border officials the authority to quickly expel undocumented migrants.
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America's new vulnerability in resources
Beginning in the Clinton years, policymakers and economists of both parties celebrated the shift of the United States to a “post-industrial economy.”
In a speech titled “The Challenges of Success” to tech executives and investors in San Francisco on April 28, 1998, the neoliberal economist Larry Summers, then deputy secretary of the treasury, celebrated the allegedly immaterial information economy: “The twin forces of information technology and modern competitive finance are moving us toward a post-industrial age,” he said. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not manufacturing or agriculture or oil and gas, symbolized the “new economy.”
Summers listed examples of this new economy—“AIG in insurance, McDonald’s in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news.” Let backward, old-fashioned East Asians and Germans make cars and TV sets and telephones and computers; America will sell insurance and infotainment to the world.
In the post-industrial economy, large firms regulated and supported by government and negotiating with organized labor would give way to spunky startups founded by overnight tycoons, according to Summers in 1998: “Look right here in California, where millions are invested before revenues, let alone profits come, and anyone with a good idea can make their first million before buying their first tie.”
A quarter-century later, when it turned out during the COVID pandemic that the United States had ceased making many essential drugs and medical supplies and was dependent on autocratic, anti-American China for many of them, the same Larry Summers was apparently shocked to learn that many things are no longer made in America. On March 21, 2020, Summers tweeted: “Thoughts at the end of a long week: Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”
Cold War II may finally discredit the fallacies of the free market globalist economists who shaped the consensus among both Democrats and Republicans for three decades.
Following COVID-19, Cold War II may finally discredit the fallacies of the free market globalist economists like Summers, Paul Krugman, and Glenn Hubbard who shaped the consensus among both Democrats and Republicans for three decades. Appropriately enough, for a financial and online business services superpower, the United States responded to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine with more or less the arsenal described by Summers in 1998—“AIG in insurance, McDonald’s in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news.” The United States waged financial warfare against Putin’s Russia, American credit card giants cut off Russian consumers, and, in a devastating blow, McDonald’s pulled out of the Russian Federation.
It may be that financial and economic sanctions are enough to force Russia to retreat or negotiate. But Germany, the major NATO economy after the United States, is dependent on Russian oil and gas, which Germans continue to buy, partly subsidizing Putin’s military. At the same time, the world’s largest nation and its biggest economy (in purchasing power parity terms), China, which has surpassed the United States in many areas of manufacturing if not yet software, is in a position to help Russia endure Western sanctions as part of a common crusade to drive the United States out of their regional spheres of influence.
Even the beneficiaries of U.S. dependence on China—Silicon Valley, universities, Wall Street, “green” technologies that need Chinese imports—are being forced to acknowledge that we still live in a material world in which countries can be great powers even if they do not dominate global banking and insurance markets, on the basis of mining energy and minerals, growing crops, and making physical things. Russia and Ukraine together are responsible for more than a quarter of global wheat exports. Russia and Belarus together produce nearly half of the global exports of potash, a critical nutrient used in fertilizers, while Russia produces more than a fifth of the ammonia exports used in global agriculture.
For its part, China dominates global production of many essential minerals, both directly—producing 63% of rare earths and 45% of molybdenum—and indirectly, by investing in lithium mines in Australia, platinum mines in South Africa, and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A few decades ago, the United States mined and refined many of the minerals it now imports. But thanks to cheap labor abroad, excessive environmental regulations at home, and the fantasy of the post-material “information economy,” the U.S. government allowed corporations to shut down many American mines even as other firms shuttered American factories. The energy analyst Mark P. Mills describes the result:
As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. …
More relevant, as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) notes, are strategic dependencies on specific critical minerals. In 1954, the U.S. was 100% dependent on imports for eight minerals. Today, the U.S. is 100% reliant on imports for 17 minerals and depends on imports for over 50% of 29 widely used minerals. China is a significant source for half of those 29 minerals.
Along with free market globalism, the environmental movement has crippled and endangered the economies of the United States and its allies. Rejecting the asceticism of the old Malthusian left that called for voluntary poverty, edgrowth, and population decline through anti-natalism, establishment environmentalist leaders like Al Gore and his European counterparts have optimistically claimed that existing technology permits a rapid “green transition” from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to solar, wind, and hydro power, with no need to lower Western living standards or cripple what remains of Western industry.
But according to experts on global mineral production who belong to SoS Minerals, in a letter delivered to the British Committee on Climate Change:
The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric [in the UK] by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper.
This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry. …
Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.
There is not enough cobalt, neodymium, or lithium being mined and refined in the entire world today for Britain to meet its green transition goals in the next generation. And Britain has only 67 million people. The United States has 330 million. The world has nearly 8 billion. Do the math.
“Clean” energy is not clean. No less than natural gas and oil extraction, extracting the minerals required for solar, wind, and hydro power equipment requires massive mines and destruction of local landscapes and ecosystems. For pointing out this obvious fact, the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore’s documentary Planet of the Humans was denounced by the organized green lobby, and Moore himself has been canceled by the left.
While some democracies like Australia, Canada, and the United States have significant mineral resources, many of the countries with large mineral resources and reserves are autocracies or fragile postcolonial regimes: China (gold, tin, and bauxite, used to make aluminum), Indonesia (nickel, tin, gold), and Russia (oil, gas, nickel). Half of global cobalt reserves are found in one country—the Democratic Republic of Congo. Substitutes for some of these minerals may be discovered or synthesized. But in other cases, natural deposits of elements that are essential to an advanced industrial society may give particular countries enormous economic windfalls.
During and after the first Cold War, many Westerners assumed that capitalism was associated with democracy and liberalism, and communism with autocracy. But economies based on resource capitalism or a single commodity crop (“banana republics”) have so often been ruled by dictatorships or oligarchies that the phenomenon is known as the “resource curse.”
To excel in global manufacturing, a country has to have a well-educated workforce, while innovation requires a high degree of intellectual (if not political) freedom. But if a government or economic elite derives its income simply by selling other countries the products of its mines or farms or ranches, what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call an “extractive” regime, it has no incentive to educate most of the population or respect their rights and every incentive to enserf or enslave the miners or agricultural workers. And if the route to personal political power and wealth in a nation lies through control of the nation’s oil fields, mines, or agricultural estates, ambitious individuals will be tempted to dispense with cumbersome elections and to seize power and resources directly through assassination and coup d’etat.
We Americans should recognize this pattern in our own history. The “original sin” of the United States was not slavery or racism; it was plantation agriculture. The Southern planters—oligarchs who raised first tobacco and then cotton for export—did not care what race their unfree workers were, settling on African and African American slaves only after experiments with exploiting Native American labor and European indentured servants had failed. And as Barbara Fields and other scholars have observed, Southern racism was formulated and enforced to rationalize labor exploitation in the plantation system, both before and after the abolition of slavery.
Far from being “backward” or “premodern,” the 19th-century Southern planter oligarchy, like the theocratic monarchy in 21st-century Saudi Arabia, was a product of modernity. As Britain and the Northern United States industrialized, the demands of their factories for Southern cotton grew and enriched the lords of cotton, just as global industrial development has enriched the monarchs and military dictators of various contemporary petrostates. Southern planters and Saudi princes, like Russian oligarchs, recycled the wealth they gained from the industrial regions by importing manufactured goods and vacationing and buying luxury real estate abroad.
This kind of elite “co-dependency” is built into industrial capitalism. The more advanced the technology becomes, the richer become those who, through fair means or force and fraud, control the appropriate industrial inputs and energy supplies. The genius of the creative entrepreneur in the diversified industrial economy who improves the quality of life of working class people with innovative goods may indirectly create corresponding fortunes in poor countries with deposits of essential minerals ruled by hereditary cliques or military dictators.
A green transition, then, will not necessarily lead to a liberal democratic world. Rather, it may simply ensure that petrostate oligarchs will have to share Swiss banks and swank London and New York neighborhoods and New England prep schools with counts of cobalt and lords of lithium, whose yachts and mansions may be as impressive as those of Jeff Bezos or Putin’s fellow kleptocrats. Generations of politicians from liberal democracies who are yet unborn may find themselves forced to flatter the president-for-life who controls a large bauxite deposit or the junta whose country sits atop a lot of samarium.
Last but not least, great powers like the United States that have decided to forgo entire areas of manufacturing as well as resource mining and refining may find that cornering the global market in insurance, investment banking, and adolescent action movies may not help them in the global resource competition to come.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-coming-resource-wars
****************************************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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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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