'Gender-bending' chemical found in food and plastic bottles now linked ADHD and autism

The logic here is obscure. Are they saying that BPA causes autism? If so they are going beyond the evidence. It could equally be that autism causes difficulty with BPA. And wherever the cause may lie, no evidence of harm from it is offered

A toxin found in food, drinks and other everyday items lingers longer in the bodies of kids with autism and ADHD, a study suggests.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical compound that has been dubbed a 'gender-bending' chemical because of its ties to hormonal and sexual problems.

Now, researchers from Rowan University and Rutgers University in New Jersey have found that kids with autism and ADHD cannot expel BPA from their bodies as quickly as neurotypical kids. BPA has been linked to both conditions previously, though this is the first to find that kids with ADHD and autism have a harder time eliminating the chemical.

The researchers also believe increased BPA exposure may increase the risk of developing these conditions but admit it is not clear how that works.

But the new link is bound to reignite calls to clamp down on the amount of BPA allowed in products in America, which has some of the most lax rules in the Western world.

Earlier this year, European officials drastically reduced the maximum amount of BPA by 20,000 times after finding that millions of people are likely consuming too much of the dangerous chemical. However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows much higher levels.

The US also has some of the highest autism and ADHD rates in the world, with rates of autism in particular increasing by 52 percent since 2017.

The study, published last month in the journal PLOS One, measured detoxification efficiency- how quickly the body eliminates chemicals like BPA- in 66 children with autism, 46 with ADHD, and 37 neurotypical children. The participants were three to 16 years old.

In order to determine how much BPA they purged, researchers collected urine samples from each child between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., which were then frozen. The team also measured the children's dietary and vitamin intake.

They found that children with autism are 10 percent less able to eliminate BPA from their bodies, while kids with ADHD are 17 percent less able to purge the chemical.

Dr T Peter Stein, professor at the Roman-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine and lead study author, said this compromised ability to clear BPA and other pollutants from the body is 'the first hard biochemical evidence of what the linkage is between BPA and the development of autism or ADHD.'

'We were surprised to find that ADHD shows the same defect in BPA detoxification.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12614847/Gender-bending-chemical-BPA-linked-ADHD-autism.html

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Why aren’t ‘anti-fascists’ condemning the tide of anti-Semitism?

Brendan O'Neill

I have a question about the events of the past few days: where is Antifa? Where are those self-styled anti-fascists who love to rage against anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of the 1930s?

Jews in Israel have been rounded up and murdered. Disgusting anti-Semites are on the streets of Sydney screaming, ‘Gas the Jews! Fuck the Jews!’ Mobs in London have taunted Israel, essentially laughing over its dead Jews. Britain’s Jewish schoolkids are taking off their blazers lest anyone recognise them as Jews and attack them. Across Europe security is being beefed up at Jewish establishments — schools, synagogues, museums — out of fear that Hamas-supporting mobs will invade and desecrate them.

And yet Antifa is nowhere to be seen. The thing these lefties fearmonger about all the time — the creeping return of the boiling hatreds of the 1930s — feels more real than ever and they’re saying nothing. It’s a strange anti-fascism that takes a break when something very much like fascism rears its repulsive head.

Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before

To the modern left, everything is fascism except actual fascism. Everything is ‘like the 1930s’ except the slaughter of Jewish youths, the kidnapping of Jewish grandmothers, the rise of mobs demanding a second Holocaust.

‘Fascist!’, they cry at everyone they disagree with, like real-life versions of Rick from The Young Ones. Yet when real Nazi scum show up, like that mob in Sydney crying ‘Gas the Jews!’, they turn coy.

Back Brexit and they’ll call you far right. Say a man can never become a woman and they’ll brand you a fellow traveller of fascism. Wonder out loud if we should try to do something about illegal immigration and they’ll say, ‘This is starting to feel a bit 1930s’.

But wipe out entire Jewish families? Gun down Jewish festivalgoers? Kidnap an elderly woman who survived the Holocaust? Mock Jews on the streets of our cities? Then they’ll erm and ahh. That’s ‘resistance’ apparently, not racism. It’s a rebellion, not fascism. It’s a ‘day of celebration’, as Novara Media’s commissioning editor said of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Saturday, not a return of the bigotries of the 1930s.

Surely nothing better captures the moral disorientation of the radical left than the fact that they are more likely to use the word ‘fascist’ about their own fellow citizens who voted Leave or who defend women-only spaces than they are about a radical Islamist in Gaza who spits on the dead body of a woman who was murdered on the presumption that she was Jewish.

The surrealism of the ‘fascism’ issue is best summed up by events in Australia. Something genuinely horrific happened outside the Sydney Opera House yesterday, as mobs of Hamas backers hollered for the mass murder of Jews.

The opera house was lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag but Australia’s Jews could not go there to mourn or to connect with one another because a baying mob was there calling for them to be shoved back in the ovens. This requires serious self-reflection on Australia’s part. Any nation in which such a sick thing can happen has a duty to reckon with itself.

And yet I remember there being far more online fury, especially from Antifa, when Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, was in Australia earlier this year. Her Let Women Speak events Down Under, at which women agitate against the idea that blokes can become women, were furiously counterprotested by the masked anti-fascists of the modern left.

Where were these people yesterday? Why were they not counterprotesting the radical Islamists who were calling for another genocide of the Jews?

It is a curious anti-fascism that gets more riled up by a diminutive British lady whose only crime is to understand biology than it does by a baying mob that wants to eliminate the Jewish people.

Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before. I don’t think they realise how hard it will be for them to come back from this. Jews murdered by a virulently anti-Semitic movement, Jews taunted on our streets, Jews living in fear across our continent, and they said: ‘Well…you know…what did Israel expect?’

They’ve been fighting fantasy fascism for years, yet when real fascism came, they hid, they looked the other way, they made excuses. If they think this isn’t being clocked by people around the country, by the decent majority who abhor radical Islamist bigotry against Jews, women and others, then they’re even dimmer than I thought.

Here’s the thing: today’s Jew haters are even targeting the same people that yesterday’s Jew haters did. It is reported that the wheelchair-bound grandmother snatched by Hamas and spirited into Gaza is a survivor of the Holocaust. If you want to know how you would have reacted the first time this lady’s life was turned upside down by a movement of violent anti-Semites, just look at how you’ve responded the second time it happened.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/why-arent-anti-fascists-condemning-the-tide-of-anti-semitism/

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What really motivates the ‘new progressives’

Dramatizing their own virtue is all they really care about

Kemi Badenoch is right to say that Britain is not a racist country. The data simply does not support the claim that black and ethnic minority (BME) people in the UK are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons – that ‘systemic racism’ is the cause of the problem. It also suggests that some ethnic minorities tend to perform better than others because of internal cultural factors – not least, strong families and high educational aspirations. By the same token, the cause of relative disadvantage often lies in culture, not racism.

In Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities, Rakib Ehsan writes: ‘Family dynamics and internal cultural attitudes can have a very real impact on the life trajectory of people living in Britain’s competitive society.’

So why, in defiance of the empirical data, has the Labour party given itself over to the brainless importation of radical identity politics from the US? This holds, as a matter of political dogma, that we may speak of BME people as if they are a single homogenous body, united in their common disadvantage, which is simply attributable to a systemic racism rooted in every white person’s ‘privilege’. Why cling to this narrative, when the evidence says you shouldn’t?

People who really cared to correct unjust economic and social disadvantages would be eager to understand the causes correctly, since accurate diagnosis is requisite for effective remedy. So, when presented with data that their wonted diagnosis – say, systemic racism – simply doesn’t stand up empirically, they would react with keen curiosity, even if with scepticism. That’s because what matters above all else to them is solving the real problem.

Yet that is not how the new progressives react. Over the past six years, I have presented evidence that Britain’s alleged systemic racism cannot be made to derive from a colonial history epitomised by slavery and the dehumanising racism that justified it – not least, since the British Empire devoted the second half of its life to anti-slavery on the basis of fundamental human equality. I have been met not with sceptical curiosity or thoughtful criticism, but with spitting abuse and the fist of repression. My antagonists never get as far as disagreeing, since they are determined not to listen in the first place. But if they really were concerned about the world’s victims, they would open their ears, perchance to learn, improve, and become more effective.

What do they really care about? One answer, according to Ehsan, is money: ‘The financial health of bad-faith actors ultimately rests on the peddling of fundamentally warped interpretations of British society and its institutions.’ And then of course there are jobs and influence at stake, all manner of ‘anti-racist’ political careers having been built upon carefully fashioned personas which attract social status and power.

But there’s more to it than that. It is notable that members of this ideological group are determined to think the very worst of their country. It is important to them that Britain is, and remains, as Ehsan puts it, a ‘hellish island of rampant institutional racism’. They don’t need to believe this. Indeed, the hard evidence says they shouldn’t. But they plough ahead regardless. Why? What’s going on here psychologically, even spiritually?

One plausible candidate is the operation of a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint is distinguished as the one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner he really is. There is considerable virtue in this, of course, since it tempers self-righteousness with compassion for fellow sinners, forbidding the righteous to cast the unrighteous beyond the human pale.

Yet, like all virtue, it is vulnerable to vice. For it can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou. The Jesuit-educated French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, captured this when writing of contemporary, post-imperial Europe in the Tyranny of Guilt:

This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key… Barbarity is Europe’s great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility).

There is a self-obsessive quality about this. While the rhetoric claims the mantle of the oppressed, the action ignores them:

[By] erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others … In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras.

And so it was in the December 2015 Rhodes Must Fall agitation in Oxford. The protests involved several hundred students, many of these overseas postgraduates privileged with scholarships to study at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, who were clamouring for the downfall of an obscure statue of a British imperialist who had been lying in his grave for well over a century. Some were even Rhodes scholars, cheerfully biting the hand that was feeding them.

Meanwhile, back in the home of RMF’s student leader, Ntokozo Qwabe, Jacob Zuma and the ANC were busy looting the state, driving South Africa to the verge of collapse and exposing its people to destitution. About that real-time political scandal and looming human crisis, what did Oxford’s student Social Justice Warriors have to say? Nothing at all.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/bad-faith-2/

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Housing policy built on dodgy foundations: Government hasn’t got a clue about the economics of renting

It is an unfortunate reality that modern Australian government has become an enterprise in search of instant political self-gratification; in delivering reams of announcements and volumes of spending while producing very little in the way of sustainable positive outcomes.

The bleak state of housing, where too many Australians are experiencing a genuine rental and accommodation crisis, is borne not of a lack of government action, but rather consistently wrong action and of decades of bad policy across all tiers of government. This is a situation that cannot be quickly remedied, especially through yet another cash-splash.

Following the recent agreement between the Albanese government and the Australian Greens to pass the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) legislation, Greens leader Adam Bandt said that ‘the Greens are the party of renters’. Bandt is more correct than he realises because this policy and the concessions extracted, will lead to ever more Australians being locked out of home ownership and trapped into perpetual renting.

Eminent US economist Thomas Sowell frequently counselled that there are no solutions and only trade-offs. This is advice Australian governments consistently refuse to heed, regularly announcing new policies with accompanying billions in spending, all while failing to properly account for the associated costs and consequences. This latest housing announcement, coupled with Prime Minister Albanese’s earlier New Homes Bonus (NHB) announcement just demonstrates that our political leaders are prepared do anything to address Australia’s housing and rental crisis – anything except undertaking the necessary reforms to address underlying causes.

A significant driver of Australia’s housing problems is a policy-driven supply squeeze caused by a toxic cocktail of bad planning, tax, energy and industrial relations policies. It should not surprise that a political and bureaucratic ecosystem driven by ‘announceables’ and not results has increased the cost of housing for Australians. The effects of this toxic policy cocktail is further exacerbated by the Commonwealth’s large immigration intake.

Australians experiencing housing price stress should genuinely question whether they will be better off following all the recent announcements.

As a case in point, the most recent $3billion committed by the government to mollify the Greens to pass the HAFF legislation and the earlier $3bn for the NHB to provide ‘performance-based funding for states and territories’ will need to be funded from somewhere. And that somewhere will be from taxes imposed, directly and indirectly, on those these policies claim to benefit. All these claimed supply enhancement announcements are however more reflective of an episode of Yes, Minister with the government proposing to increase housing supply by destroying housing supply. Invariably, the principal beneficiaries of these new schemes will be the public servants hired to administer them.

The most recent Commonwealth budget papers that showed that over the past thirty years, inflation-adjusted per capita Commonwealth spending has nearly doubled, and taxing has more than doubled. Our governments have taken ever more from Australians, including by borrowing from the future, and given it back less a ‘handling’ fee, all while asking to be thanked.

Not satisfied with the economic damage caused by the current policy mix, the Greens have indicated that they will continue to fight for ‘a freeze and cap on rent increases’. This is the bedrock of the Greens housing policy and they even produced analysis suggesting that, were a rental freeze implemented last year, two million renting households could have saved $3.1bn in 2022-23 and $4.9bn in 2023-24.

Such a rent freeze would just result in a temporary transfer of economic pain from one group to another. According to Treasury’s most recent Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, almost half the 2.6m taxpayers who claimed rental deductions in 2022 experienced rental tax losses. These losses summed to $10.2bn and provided $3.6bn of negative gearing offsets. These losses were before interest rates started rising and before inflation driven increases on council rates, insurance and property maintenance set in. A rental freeze would just further increase the pain on landlords and the Commonwealth budget, a pain that will ultimately be transferred back to renters including via higher taxes for longer.

Landlords would also likely respond by either selling, withdrawing rental stock, or reducing maintenance, and the Commonwealth would just need to collect more taxes from other sectors of the economy. The net effect would be further harm to renters and the broader economy.

The Greens even equated their rental cap proposal to the gas price cap agreed to by National cabinet. However, gas industry expert Saul Kavonic noted that the price cap is already being unwound and that, ‘It will go down as one of the most anti-market, poorly planned and economically damaging policies Australia has seen in recent memory, with no discernible benefit to show for it.’ Kavonic added that, ‘The goal of the (gas price cap) policy, to lower prices for end users, has not been achieved. Unfortunately, even with the policy now being walked back, the economic harm may prove lasting.’

To address Australia’s housing and rental issues requires not a cash splash but rather a comprehensive productivity and supply side reform program including through reduced government spending, taxing, and regulation.

Some 150 years ago, Leo Tolstoy wrote describing the Russian government of his day. This description could aptly describe contemporary Australian government: ‘I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.’

If Australian policymakers want to ease the economic pain of Australians, whether in housing or general cost of living, they should first get off our backs.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/housing-policy-built-on-dodgy-foundations/

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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