FDA Slaps Warning on Puberty Blockers
Puberty blockers earned a warning label from the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month after six minors (ages 5-12) experienced severe symptoms. The puberty blockers in question are known scientifically as “gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) substances.”
The minors, who were all biologically female, suffered from symptoms of “pseudotumor cerebri” (tumor-like masses in the brain), including visual disturbances (seeing bright lights that aren’t there), headache or vomiting, papilledema (swelling of the optic nerve), increased blood pressure, and abducens neuropathy (eye paralysis).
“We’re just going to keep seeing more bad reports,” Jennifer Bauwens, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Family Studies and a licensed clinical psychologist, told The Washington Stand. “Our bodies were not made for these drugs.” So, the unscientific campaign to push these drugs on children “isn’t going to have a good outcome.”
Bauwens said she was “a little surprised” by the FDA’s announcement because the medical establishment has suppressed information regarding the harmful effects of puberty blockers.
Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics forbade the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine from exhibiting at its annual conference, rejecting its application without explanation, while L’Oreal, the National Peanut Board, and Infinity Massage Chairs were accepted.
At the 2021 conference, 80% of American Academy of Pediatrics members supported a resolution calling for “more debate and discussion of the risks, benefits, and uncertainties inherent in the practice of medically transitioning minors,” but such discussion has not been forthcoming.
This year, the American Academy of Pediatrics “is suppressing support” for a similar resolution that calls for “rigorous systematic review of evidence and policy update for management of pediatric gender dysphoria,” according to Genspect, a group that supports “an evidence-based approach to gender distress.”
“At the same time, there comes a point when they [the FDA] have to do something,” continued Bauwens. “We already have studies showing the negative effects of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” but “any time we see more evidence and more publicity on the damage that these drugs do to kids, it’s helpful.”
She added, “Good science is on our side. Truth is on our side. Those things always prevail when given the opportunity.”
While Bauwens believes the FDA’s warning for puberty blockers is good news, she doesn’t think this is the end of the debate.
In treating minors experiencing gender dysphoria, “the medical side will change faster than the psychological side,” she explained. “The medical side deals with physical realities where solid data is difficult to ignore. The psychological side is far more abstract and has been more completely captured by the mistaken notions of identity that gave rise to the transgender movement.”
What the FDA’s warning does show, explained Bauwens, is that it’s “very disingenuous for someone like Rachel Levine to stand up and say, ‘This is lifesaving medical care.’ It’s dangerous.”
As assistant secretary of health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Levine said last month, “Gender-affirming care is lifesaving, medically necessary, age-appropriate, and a critical tool for health care providers.”
According to Bauwens, and now the FDA, Levine’s rhetoric is simply not true.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/07/28/fda-slaps-warning-on-puberty-blockers/ ?
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The New Age of Orwellianism
Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”
Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”
“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.
Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.
But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like the cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.
In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.
This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”
This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal, Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms.
Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”
Democrats are now singing a different tune. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has stubbornly refused to concede that America is now in an economic recession.
Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”
The ruse is transparent and obvious to the point of comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth if a Republican is president. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”
Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.
The widely accepted economic definition of inflation is when there is too much money chasing too few goods. The way to tamp down inflation is thus to limit the money supply and/or increase the production of goods.
Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought after Build Back Better domestic initiative. But Democrats renamed the bill: It is now not called Build Back Better but the Inflation Reduction Act.
And the revised bill includes new government expenditures to the tune of nearly $400 billion in energy- and climate-related spending. Authorizing such a fiscal boondoggle is the precise opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a blowtorch.
Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.
In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”
Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?,” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”
Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.
That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
Alinsky would be proud of such an imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.
The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is curious that the left can talk and act this way when its most notable avatar, Biden, is as severely unpopular as he currently is.
Perhaps the left will be chastened by its impending November defeats at the ballot box. But don’t bet on it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/07/29/the-new-age-of-orwellianism/
********************************************************Is the Labor Market Really as Good as Biden Administration Says?
Between out-of-control inflation, ongoing supply chain struggles, the crisis at the southern border, foreign policy concerns, exploding energy prices, rising crime, and a high likelihood that the country is either already or soon will be experiencing stagflation (an inflationary recession), it’s no wonder that Democrats and the Biden administration are talking up the strong labor market.
A recent tweet on the Democrats’ official Twitter page stated, “Under Joe Biden, the private sector has recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic—and added jobs on top of that.”
That statement is only half true, at best.
According to the official jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector jobs are up by about 140,000 since the low in April 2020, but only 4 in 10 of those job gains occurred on the Biden administration’s watch, while 6 in 10 were recovered during the Trump administration.
While the labor market appears to be going well by some metrics, that’s not the whole story.
Metrics like a nearly half-century-low unemployment rate, high nominal wage gains, and 11.3 million job openings that equal two jobs available for every unemployed person didn’t arise naturally. They were artificially induced through bad government policies that have included a lot of unintended consequences.
Most significantly, 18 months’ worth of bonus unemployment benefits that paid most people more to stay on the sidelines than to work caused millions of people to leave the labor market. Meanwhile, Washington stimulated consumer and business demand for goods and services by flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in so-called COVID-19 relief, about half of which was money printed by the Federal Reserve.
Too few workers is also adding to the inflationary cycle.
When employers have to compete for workers, they have to increase their compensation. According to the National Federation of Independent Business survey, 48% of owners reported increasing compensation in June and 28% said they plan to increase compensation over the next three months.
But paying workers more to do the exact same thing requires hiking prices.
The future isn’t looking good. Small business owners’ expectations for better business conditions reached an all-time low in June, owing to “inflation and worker shortages,” along with “policy talks that [have] shifted to tax increases and more regulations.”
Government policies to spend more, tax more, regulate more, and produce less will only make labor shortages and inflation worse.
If lawmakers want to be able to tout metrics like increased labor force participation and real rising wages, they should start by removing the government-imposed barriers they’ve created for work and productivity.
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DeSantis Calls for Harsh Repercussions for Doctors Performing Life-Altering Surgeries on Children
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech on Wednesday where he condemned doctors who perform sex-changing surgeries on children. Ultimately, he suggested that such professionals should be sued.
During the conference, the Republican governor stood firm in his belief that the government should not give children the ability to castrate their bodies.
His proclamations about the subject prompted cheers of support from his audience. “They talk about these very young kids getting ‘gender-affirming care.’ They don’t tell you what that is,” DeSantis said in a video tweeted by Florida’s Voice.
“They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies. They want to castrate these young boys — that’s wrong,” DeSantis said.
“And so we’ve stood up and said, both from the health and children well-being perspective, you don’t disfigure 10-, 12-, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria. Eighty percent of it resolves anyways by the time they get older, so why would you be doing this?” DeSantis added. “I think these doctors need to get sued for what’s happening.”
It was after this suggestion that applause erupted from the governor’s audience.
DeSantis’ movement to restrict a minor’s access to sex-changing procedures has been grossly countered by Democrats. In the first half of 2022, the Biden administration announced its new healthcare proposals, which promoted “gender-affirming care” and suggested that minors have access to gender reassignment surgery, puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Fortunately for DeSantis, others in Florida’s leadership are in favor of restricting the “gender-affirming care” for which Biden and other Democrats are pushing.
In April, the state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo released new public health guidelines for Florida minors struggling with gender dysphoria — guidelines which counter those proposed by the Biden administration, WPEC News reported.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration also pursued restricting the Biden administration’s proposal. After Ladapo’s announcement, the state’s ACHA similarly suggested blocking payment for transgender medical treatment, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery, WPEC noted.
These measures alongside DeSantis’ proposal to sue the doctors who participate in the castration of young children is yet another one of the state’s trailblazing moves.
By restricting a minor’s access to gender-changing procedures, Florida’s leadership is leaning into the well-known fact that children lack a firm grasp on the world around them.
Just as a 12-year-old believes that having the coolest shoes will make them popular, so too are they susceptible to the promise that changing their gender will resolve the discomfort they feel in their own bodies.
Every adult has lived as a 12-year-old, and surely, each remembers a time where he toiled with an insecurity about his ears being just a little too big, his frame being a little too skinny or his stature being a little too short.
The difference — today’s adults struggled with their childhood body discomforts in a society that promoted the trope, “This too shall pass.”
Children are young and impressionable. Everything is new for them as they learn about the dynamics of the world and grow accustomed to their changing bodies.
To trust that a 12-year-old confidently knows that they don’t identify with their gender is far from logical.
To trust that a 12-year-old’s happiness will come from cutting off her breasts or castrating his genitalia is wishful thinking, and to believe that the child won’t regret it or change their mind later is ludicrous.
No current adult looks back and thinks that their 12-year-old self was reasonably capable of make good life-changing decisions.
DeSantis is right to suggest that doctors who perform gender-altering surgeries on minors should be sued.
No matter what the general arguments are for gender-altering surgeries for adults, it should be accepted that those surgeries are not appropriate for children who are not physically or mentally mature enough to make life-altering decisions.
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A new Harvard study throws cold water on characterizing the breaching of the Capitol by rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, as an “insurrection.”
According to the study conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, more than 40 percent of rioters were motivated by former President Donald Trump’s claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, as well as a desire to see him re-elected.
According to The Harvard Crimson, researchers found that 20.6 percent of rioters were motivated by wanting to support Trump, while another 20.6 percent of rioters cited Trump’s election claims as the reason they stormed the U.S. Capitol more than 18 months ago in a bid to thwart certification of now-President Joe Biden’s election.
Less than 8 percent were motivated by a “desire to start a civil war or an armed revolution,” the Crimson reported.
The study has been released as a working paper because it has not yet been peer-reviewed, according to the Crimson. It is titled, “‘President Trump Is Calling Us to Fight’: What the Court Documents Reveal About the Motivations behind January 6 and Networked Incitement.”
It found a smattering of other causes as well, including “pursuit of historical significance” (7.43 percent), “protect the country or ‘take back'” the country” (5.76 percent), and even “Marxism, socialism, communism” (5.76 percent).
Study authors Joan Donovan, Kaylee Fagan and Frances E. Lee wrote that their analysis found the largest portion of defendants were “motivated, in part, to invade the U.S. Capitol Building by Donald Trump,” according to the Crimson.
Donovan is research director at the Shorenstein Center. Fagan is a Shorenstein research fellow. Lee is a professor of politics and acting chairwoman of the department of politics at Princeton University.
The report explained how the former president was able to persuade a number of his supporters that the country faced a catastrophe.
“The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger,” the study said.
“This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to D.C. from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.”
In other words, it was the exact opposite of “insurrection.”
While the Harvard study is not complimentary toward Trump, of course, in that it paints a picture of a cult of personality as the main reason for the violence, it does damage the narrative put forth by Democrats and the mainstream media that an “insurrection” took place that day.
An insurrection has traditionally been defined as an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence.
As legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote, the study showed that while there was violence involved in the Capitol incursion, the attack was not a serious, organized attempt to take over the U.S. government.
In his online column “Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks,” Turley, a professor at George Washington University wrote:
“Once again, none of this exonerates or excuses those who rioted on January 6th or those who fueled the riot. However, the use of ‘insurrection’ by the politicians, pundits, and the press is not an accurate characterization of the motivation of most of the people who went to the Capitol on that day. It was clear that this was a protest that became a riot.”
Turley went on to say that most of the people who showed up in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, only wanted to peacefully protest.
“There is no question that there were people who came prepared for such a riot, including some who are extremists who likely would have welcomed a civil war,” Turley wrote. “Yet, the vast majority of people on that day were clearly present to protest the certification and wanted Republicans to join those planning to challenge the election.”
Labeling the awful events of that day as an “insurrection” is all about politics, according to Turley.
“It is possible to express revulsion about what happened on Jan. 6th without claiming that this was an insurrection and attempt to overthrow the nation,” he concluded. “This was a collective tragedy for the entire nation, a desecration of our constitutional process. The effort to mandate ‘insurrection’ as the only acceptable description prevents the country from speaking with a unified voice. It clearly serves political purposes but only makes a national resolution more difficult as we approach a new presidential election.”
It’s unclear what, if any, impact the Harvard study will have on the House select committee investigating what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, but it certainly provides ammunition to those who think the committee is in a clearly wrong direction.
As the only Republican on the committee who is seeking re-election this year, possibly no House member should be getting that message more than Liz Cheney.
Earlier this month, Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the panel’s vice chairwoman, told ABC News that a decision on criminal referrals is in the works. “We’ll make a decision as a committee about it,” she said when asked about the prospect of referring Trump for prosecution, as Breitbart reported.
“The Justice Department doesn’t have to wait for the committee to make a criminal referral, and there could be more than one criminal referral,” Cheney said.
Cheney has essentially staked her political career on smearing Trump and his supporters over the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and painting their actions as an “insurrection.” This study isn’t going to help that at all.
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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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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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