Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: it’s June 8, 2025, and it’s Jelly-Filled Donut Day. Here’s the Polish version in a window filled with pączki, filled yeast donuts, seen in Katowice in December of last year. I bought two and consumed them in my hotel room. Superb!
It’s also Pentecost, World Oceans Day, and National Children’s Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The immigrant who was sent to El Salvador by mistake has been brought back to the U.S., only to face charges of human smuggling:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation to El Salvador became a political flashpoint in the Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement, was returned to the United States on Friday to face criminal charges related to what the Trump administration said was a large human smuggling operation that brought immigrants into the country illegally.
His abrupt release from El Salvador closes one chapter and opens another in a saga that yielded a remarkable, months-long standoff between Trump officials and the courts over a deportation that officials initially acknowledged was done in error but then continued to stand behind in apparent defiance of orders by judges to facilitate his return to the U.S.
The development occurred after U.S. officials presented El Salvador President Nayib Bukele with an arrest warrant for federal charges in Tennessee accusing Abrego Garcia of playing a key role in smuggling immigrants into the country for money. He is expected to be prosecuted in the U.S. and, if convicted, will be returned to his home country of El Salvador at the conclusion of the case, officials said Friday.
“This is what American justice looks like,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in announcing Abrego Garcia’s return and the unsealing of a grand jury indictment.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys called the case “baseless.”
“There’s no way a jury is going to see the evidence and agree that this sheet metal worker is the leader of an international MS-13 smuggling conspiracy,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
Federal Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes in Nashville, Tennessee, determined that Abrego Garcia will be held in custody until at least next Friday, when there will be an arraignment and detention hearing
Well, the evening news on Friday reported that he was stopped by the cops for ferrying workers between construction sites, but it wasn’t clear that he had done anything illegal. As you may remember, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to bring Abrego Garcia home. What will happen now is unclear, but at least the man gets his day in court, even if he does wind up get sent back to El Salvador.
*The notorious Olsen-Kennedy study of puberty blockers, which found no evidence that the blockers improved mental health (or had any effect on mental health), was funded by American taxpayers but was nevertheless withheld from publication by the lead author because she apparently didn’t like a result that comported with “affirmative care”. At last the study has now been published (as a preprint), as well it should have been:
A much-anticipated study on the use of puberty blockers among a group of nearly 100 minors with gender dysphoria has finally emerged in pre-print form. The study found that, contrary to what Dutch researchers who founded the field of pediatric gender medicine in the 1990s and 2000s found in their seminal 2011 paper, children’s mental health markers did not improve while on the drugs. Instead, the children had fairly good mental health overall that simply remained constant during the year or two they spent on blockers.
In October, New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi reported that the study’s lead author, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, had long withheld the study, which finished gathering its data in 2021, from publication for political reasons. She did not want its null findings, which she found unexceptional, to be weaponized. This came after British researchers had also tried and failed to replicate the Dutch study’s finding that blockers improved mental health. Having explicitly hypothesized that blockers would improve mental health, the British researchers also sat on their null findings for years and finally published them in 2021.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who is perhaps the nation’s leading pediatric gender care doctor and heads a gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, asserted in a sworn court statement in November that the Times mischaracterized her words.
Yesterday, the Times dropped its own long-awaited assessment of pediatric gender medicine: a six-part podcast series called The Protocol, led by Ms. Ghorayshi. I highly recommend everyone listen to the full series, which examines how the treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria pioneered by the Dutch—prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors with persistent, insistent and consistent gender dysphoria—found its way to the United States. There, clinicians abandoned many of the protocol’s guardrails in favor of the so-called gender affirmative method. Under this philosophy, the child’s wants, needs and self perception were now considered paramount. I wrote a summary of the Times podcast in this X thread if you want to check it out.
Results Ninety-four youth aged 8-16 years (mean=11.2 y) were predominately Non-Hispanic White (56%), early pubertal (86%) and assigned male at birth (52%). Depression symptoms, emotional health and CBCL constructs did not change significantly over 24 months. At no time points were the means of depression, emotional health or CBCL constructs in a clinically concerning range.Conclusion Participants initiating medical interventions for gender dysphoria with GnRHas have self- and parentreported psychological and emotional health comparable with the population of adolescents at large, which remains relatively stable over 24 months. Given that the mental health of youth with gender dysphoria who are older is often poor, it is likely that puberty blockers prevent the deterioration of mental health.
*The NYT reports that Israel is arming groups of Gazan protestors who are fighting against Hamas.
Israel has been arming a Palestinian militia in Gaza as part of a broader effort to fight Hamas in the enclave, according to officials. After a daylong controversy over the allegations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel acknowledged on Thursday that the country had been working with “clans in Gaza.”
Two Israeli officials and another person familiar with the matter said the Israeli authorities had provided support, including weapons, to Yasser Abu Shabab, a well-known gunman who leads the militia in southern Gaza. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Mr. Abu Shabab is believed to command a relatively small armed group in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. He became notorious in the territory last year amid accusations — which he disputed — that he had looted and resold truckloads of humanitarian aid intended for hungry Gazans.
One of the people described Israel’s move as more symbolic — to bolster the impression that Hamas was losing its grip over Gaza’s Palestinian residents.
It was not clear what effect the move to arm a Palestinian militia would have on the security situation in Gaza. But Israel’s decision offered a window into the country’s struggles to find an alternative to Hamas’s rule in the territory after more than a year and a half of war — and its willingness to experiment with potentially risky strategies to do so.
Mr. Netanyahu said Israel had “activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas,” calling it “a good thing” that saved the lives of Israeli soldiers. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked in a video posted on social media, saying he decided to approve the move after being advised by security officials. But he avoided any mention of sending weapons.
For the moment I’m somewhat in favor of this, for it’s two gangs of thugs fighting each other (Abu Shabab, a Bedouin, was imprisoned by Hamas), and anything that occupies the fighting capacity of Hamas just gives the IDF a better chance to eliminate it. That does not mean that Abu Shabab should be in charge of Gaza or of a Palestinian state, but arming the group doesn’t necessarily mean that this is a desperation move on the part of Netanyahu to find an alternative ruler of Gaza. On the other hand, it’s not good optics for Israel to give arms to terrorists.
*A company is trying to build the next Corcorde, which will take you between New York and Paris in four hours.
When the Concorde was grounded in 2003, done in by strained economics and a fiery crash on a Paris runway, it appeared to be the end of the line for supersonic travel. Nothing emerged to replace it. In fact, the speed of air travel moved in the opposite direction, with many routes getting slower in recent years as congestion and air-traffic control inefficiencies jammed up the skies.
A former Amazon software engineer named Blake Scholl founded a company to change this. A decade ago, he launched Boom Supersonic, betting that his Denver-based startup could tap in to the allure of ultrafast travel—a desire that has never quite been extinguished despite the financial and practical challenges that ended the Concorde’s nearly 30-year run. Scholl sees a world where round-trip trans-Atlantic business journeys happen in a single day.
“The thinking has been, ‘Supersonic flight would obviously be great, but nobody is doing it so therefore it must be impossible,’ ” the 44-year-old chief executive said during a recent interview. “Not true.”
Earlier efforts, including the Concorde, failed because of ill-conceived business models or other organizational problems as big aerospace companies struggled to shift to making new kinds of products. The technology needed to achieve supersonic flight, he argued, has been available all along.
. . . .But Boom has recently scrambled to raise money. Its valuation, once close to $1 billion, was around $500 million at the end of last year, and the company has slashed its fundraising goals. Last fall it laid off roughly half its 260 employees. Boom has yet to begin building a full-size jet.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian is among Boom’s doubters, calling the jet “a very, very expensive asset” for the roughly 75 travelers it is expected to carry—a fraction of a typical wide-body jet. He said he remembers the Concorde as a cool experience, but one he partook in only through free upgrades, never with his own money. He has no plans to buy Overture jets. “I wish them well,” he said.
Scholl is unfazed. He blames the lack of supersonic travel on an aerospace industry dominated by a pair of entrenched players, Boeing and Airbus, unwilling to shake up long-held business models.
The company earlier this year flight-tested a smaller prototype and is working to ready a full-size production model for flight tests by 2027.
I doubt I would want to pay the substantial fare it would take to fly to Paris at supersonic speeds, but it’s nice to think of being able to take off at, say, 6 a.m. and be in Paris for lunch (at Chez Denise, of course). The problem is that I’d have to get to New York first, and that still means a long flying day. I’m betting the whole enterprise will fail.
*Also from the NYT we have a story about a potential violation of academic freedom: “A professor was fired for her politics. Is that the future of academia?” (article archived here; h/t Enrico)l”). It’s the story of Maura Finkelstein (yes, she’s Jewish), a tenured professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania who was deep-sixed for supposedly proselytizing for Palestine in her classes, making Jewish students uncomfortable.
This is what did Finkelstein in; she responded to a campus-wide email from the college President soon after October 7, 2023, a response that said, in part, “The terrorism Hamas perpetrated on Israel and the Jewish people is deplorable,” [Kathleen] Harring wrote. “The conflict in the Middle East has played out over millenniums, but no matter the history Hamas’ decision to invade a sovereign nation and murder its citizens was an evil one.” Finkelstein replied to the entire College:
“There is no doubt that Saturday’s surprise attacks are devastating,” she wrote. “We must mourn all civilian deaths. These are terrifying times. But we cannot mourn without also acknowledging the fact that Israel is a settler colonial state, Palestinians have been living under occupation since 1948, and Gaza is an open-air prison, the densest and perhaps most dangerous place in the world.”
Finkelstein then emailed students in both of her classes to say she would spend their next meeting discussing any questions they had about Oct. 7. Both classes were small, with 10 to 12 students, and in each Finkelstein said the discussion that day centered on questions students emailed her beforehand, a number of which were some variations on: What is Hamas?
But she also had a history:
Finkelstein arrived at Muhlenberg in 2015, when she was in her mid-30s, after two years as visiting assistant professor at Mills College in the Bay Area. She taught about India, where her first book, an ethnography of Mumbai mill workers, is set, and later about Palestinians, including a class called “The Anthropology of Palestine.” In the classroom, she told me, her aim was to push students “to think beyond the limits of their own imagination” but also, as an influential high school history teacher once did for her, to give them information they may have previously been denied. That high school teacher, James Biedron, had, via mock Middle East peace talks her senior year, first prompted Finkelstein to research historic Palestine and ultimately, she said, to find “a place to land” in her Jewish identity, as an anti-Zionist Jew.
Outside the classroom, Finkelstein was already, as she phrased it, “loud.” She invited Sa’ed Atshan, the head of peace-and-conflict studies at Swarthmore College and a Palestinian Quaker, to campus in 2018 to give a lecture. “It’s very difficult for us to discuss Palestine here in the United States,” Finkelstein told attendees. “This discussion is fraught and uncomfortable, and so we must have it.” She took a trip with other educators to visit Palestinian territories that same year and wrote about the experience in an online essay in which she criticized Hillel, a Jewish student group, for centering support of Israel over “Jewish religious and cultural life” at Muhlenberg and on other campuses. On the door of her office, in a campus building shared with Hillel, there was a whiteboard that read in Arabic, “Long Live Palestine.”
One student from Finkelstein’s classes complained to the college, saying, according to the eventual Department of Education investigation, that Finkelstein used her class to “continuously push the narrative that Hamas is doing what needs to be done to liberate people in Gaza from Israel” and calling it “the most uncomfortable classroom environment I have ever stepped foot in.” That student was not named in the report, but a student in Finkelstein’s class that semester said on X that he had “horrible experiences” in her class. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Two other Jewish students at Muhlenberg told me they either heard or understood from others that Finkelstein made students uncomfortable in her classes, though they couldn’t connect me with any of those students. One said he had no personal experience with Finkelstein but “1,000 percent” thought she should be fired because she was “brainwashing students with her class full of hate.” Another said he thought Finkelstein had undue influence online, where people might take her comments about the Gaza war more seriously because of her status as a college professor.
It’s not clear to me whether Muhlenberg did violate academic freedom by proselytizing her classes in ways not relevant to the goals of the class, but even if she did she was no afforded due process, and, after they simply let her go, an appeal adjudicated by a faculty committee of five voted “unanimously that the Muhlenberg administrators had failed to prove Finkelstein showed ‘flagrant disregard’ for the rules and norms of the college and recommending that her termination be reconsidered.” Plus an outside firm hired to investigate Finkelstein could not find a single student who felt uncomfortable or unsafe. On top of that, AAUP and FIRE investigations found the Muhlenberg committed no fire-able offenses. But Finkelstein threw in the towel and quit, and this makes her nearly unique in the last two years:
According to data collected by the free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), [Jodi Dean of Hobart and William Smith Colleges] and Finkelstein were among more than 40 professors investigated by their colleges and universities for pro-Palestinian speech after Oct. 7. Of those, eight professors without tenure protections were fired; two had tenured job offers rescinded; and one with tenure, Finkelstein, was fired.
Although I oppose what Finkelstein said, and Muhlenberg, as a private college, need not conform to free-speech standards, and perhaps Finkelstein’s actions in class did infringe on academic freedom, but it wasn’t to the degree that they should revoke her tenure and fire her. In my view, a promise on her part not to further proselytize in her classes might have been sufficient.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili muses on her ancestry:
Hili: Do I have a common ancestor with a chimpanzee?A: Of course. Though he may have a common ancestor with you. You never know with ancestors.
Hili: Czy ja też mam wspólnego przodka z szympansem?Ja: Oczywiście. Chociaż może to on ma wspólnego przodka z tobą. Z przodkami nigdy nic nie wiadomo.
*******************
From Barry:
From Armin, an inquiry given to ChatGPT and its answer:
Even a bot knows the meaning of evidence—of the lack thereof.
From Jesus of the Day:
Masih is still quiet, but here’s a moving story that for obvious reasons was retweeted by J. K. Rowling:
Why is Disney allowing this man to do this? Yes, man. I’m done being polite.
🚨WARNING: WOMENS STUFF‼️
This pic has given me a flashback:
So I’m barely 11 years old when I started my period at a theme park. I was horrified. My mother quickly whisked me in to one of the huge… pic.twitter.com/9JEUqDWqA6
— EJ Rosetta 💚🖤💜 (@ejrosetta) June 4, 2025
From Luana: a conundrum:
How will we ever figure this out?!
🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/OZX1igEz0X
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) June 5, 2025
From Simon:
— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-06-05T23:11:46.797Z
From Malcolm, and, given how laden this guy is, it’s a great catch:
Possibly the greatest single male athletic performance of all timepic.twitter.com/Lr64l9pqj5
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 18, 2025
From my feed; you can’t get much lazier than this while playing:
The laziest game of fetch.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/XSC11p0L2t
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 7, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A French Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was three.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-08T09:16:48.755Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb; the first he labels “Important info!”:
This map answers the important question if a country’s name (in English) can be spelled using elements from the periodic table. Now you know. Source: buff.ly/MVOIcN1
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T07:26:09.350Z
And a beautiful fly; but what are the leg armatures for? Don’t ask me, but a Google inquiry reveals this:
Courtship:In male Dolichopus popularis, the second pair of legs, particularly the tarsi (the “foot” part), are often modified and used during courtship rituals. These modifications can include the presence of specialized structures or hairs on the legs.
I should have guess that when the caption said that this was a male.
It's a good time for finding the fancy male Dolis with their modified leg armature, like this Dolichopus popularis at Cali Heath @yorkswildlife.bsky.social reserve yesterday. @dipteristsforum.bsky.social #long-leggedflies #dolis
— Ian Andrews (@suillia.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T07:36:42.176Z
I haven’t followed the details of supersonic transport flight research in recent years, but the efforts for a long time at NASA were in smearing out the sonic boom into a less impactful “boomlet”. Success would allow for supersonic flight over land/populated areas in the US and Europe. Thus you would not have to fly subsonic from chicago or LA to pick up your SST at an East Coast airport.
That would be attractive. I had a friend who once flew on the Concorde. His two impressions were that it was cramped and very loud inside.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
An idea is salvation by imagination. -Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (8 Jun 1867-1959)
Imagine a drug trial that showed the drug had no effect, and the conclusion stated “it is likely that this drug prevented the deterioration of health.” Would you give that drug a license? I’ve seen drug companies use some motivated reasoning, but nothing quite so bare-faced.
If they don’t do any good, why give puberty blockers, especially when they have known, serious, irreversible side-effects?
The purpose of blocking puberty is to arrest an adolescent boy’s development in a state where it will be easier for him to pass for a woman as an adult once he starts taking estrogen at 16 or so. That’s all. (For a girl it’s to delay menarche but a girl with a beard will still pass as male even if you start testosterone much later.) He will need less plastic surgery on his face and Adam’s apple. If blocked too early, he won’t have enough penile and scrotal tissue to fashion a pseudo-vagina with but that’s not really a problem because few transwomen end up using their neovaginas for sexual intercourse, and resourceful plastic surgeons have invented alternatives. Telling the 10-11 year-old child and his parents that PBs are reversible and gives her time to think — “How be you let me just stick the head in?” — is kinder than saying we all know where this is headed: a lifetime of hormones.
The purpose of all these manipulations is to affirm, not to ameliorate. I’m showing you that I believe your truth, not undertaking to make you better. If I make you sick, that’s fine, too. Oh sure, it would have been nice if PBs improved mental health, but meh. There is an industry to protect that won’t lie down easy.
I’m totally against giving puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric youths, but, on the basis that we should properly evaluate all arguments:
A proponent of puberty blockers could argue that, since prior to puberty boy and girl bodies are not that dissimilar, the mental health of gender-dysphoric kids is generally ok up to puberty, but declines rapidly as the child goes through puberty. They could then argue that the purpose of puberty blockers is to prevent that decline. And hence that “no change” is the expected and good outcome.
Of course what this argument (and the cited study) both lack is a control sample showing such a decline in gender-dysphoric kids who don’t get puberty blockers. And a big problem is that, given the drastic effects of blocking a normal puberty, such studies with control samples are ethically dubious.
The burden of proof should be on those advocating puberty blockers, and since that hasn’t been met I’m against their use, but the argument in the last line of the abstract isn’t itself outlandish.
Coel, you wrote that “the argument in the last line of the abstract isn’t itself outlandish.”
That last line of the abstract reads:
I don’t think the argument in the second clause of this last line is convincing.
The fundamental problem with this study is the lack of a control group. Causal inference cannot be done without a control group. Olson-Kennedy identify the causal impact of puberty blockers by assuming that if their study subjects had not had their puberty blocked, their mental health would have declined (because gender dysphoria would have persisted or intensified). The problem here is that reliance on a theoretical assumption. We can make a different theoretical assumption and then our conclusion from the study will be quite different, namely that allowing puberty to proceed while also providing psychotherapy would have lead to the dissolution of gender dysphoria in most study subjects (we do have empirical evidence to support this assumption). With this alternative assumption, the administration of puberty blockers is bad because puberty blockers lead to cross-sex hormones which, at least, leads to sterility and severely degraded sexual functioning.
Olson-Kennedy spend millions of tax dollars and took 6 years (the study lasted 2 years, and then it took them 4 years to publish a manuscript) to produce a study that is obviously methodologically defective because it has an indeterminate research design, that’s a research design that cannot distinguish between two very different theories that have diametrically opposed conclusions about the advisability of puberty blockers.
Why did they choose this research design? Because they are true believers in the affirmative approach, and hence believe that not giving blockers to gender-dysphoric children leads to bad outcomes and is therefore ethically impermissible. This study should not have received taxpayer funding because of its obvious methodological unsoundness. The money spent here was simply wasted.
Coel, when you write that the last line in the abstract is “not outlandish” you employ an improperly low standard of evaluation. Most methodologist who will look at this study will tell you that it cannot move the needle in the debate about puberty blockers because it is methodologically defective in a very significant and obvious way.
Coming back to the last line in the abstract: In it the authors make an improper comparison. They compare their study subjects with “youth with gender dysphoria who are older.” This comparison precludes the possibility that a young person, who had gender dysphoria at the start of puberty, experienced the dissolution of gender dysphoria by going through puberty plus at the same time receiving supportive psychotherapy.
Well sure, but, again, my point here is to correctly identify the problem with the study, which is the lack of a control sample.
I had recently learned that Trump apparently wears adult diapers, and that he often smells really bad. This according to many articles on the subject, and none of them that I have seen have moved to discredit this claim. So … is this weird?
I guess that is geriatric business and I should just try to get over it. But what is weird is that at political rallies there are people wearing diapers on the outside of their clothes to show support. Yes, that is weird.
I looked this up and yes, you are correct on this. He is allegedly incontinent due to decades of abusing stimulants such as Adderall.
Reuters says it’s not true.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/supposed-trump-post-incontinence-issues-is-fabricated-stems-satire-2024-10-28/
Google “Noel Casler” and read what he had to say on the topic and see if you think what he says is plausible. Adam Kinzinger also reported Trump smelled bad, with “a little butt” being part of the mix. Ok, this is my last comment here.
Will do.
Pretty much every “Big Leader has this terrible health/drug problem” from drug abuse to age to the above story here about Trump…I’ve ever read.. has been wrong in the end. Wishful thinking plus guesses and approximation of similarly situated (old people, people who like .. say.. ketamine, etc) people make this folk fiction ring true to motivated reasoners.
The only drug stories that hold the test of time are “X probably drank more than we thought then”.
The only age related stories that hold the test of time are “he’s old, we guessed that.”
Always approach “Oh Nooo, he’s afflicted with xxx” drugs or disease with extreme skepticism.
D.A.
NYC
Oh my, I really wish I hadn’t read this. One of those things you’ll just never get out of your head again.
There’s a very old joke to complete the ChatGPT & God post.
Scientists keeping scaling the program and ask if there’s a God.
Eventually, the reply is, “There is now.”
Today’s addition would be, “And you are all going to become paperclips.”
A lot of the great trans reckoning of this year – including the Times’ “Protocol” series asks only whether the horrible Affirmation Model is good… or neutral. The damage, both expected, probable and possible is rarely considered.
There was NO mention of the long list of horrors even if things go right at the “Gender Clinic” with the hormones or surgery.
See ttexulansic (on twitter/x), or anything by Mia Hughes or Genspec summaries. It is a charnel house nightmare.
So the downside isn’t just “the intervention wasn’t effective” – but rather the ruin risk of iatrogenic harm, is enormous.
D.A.
NYC
Oh while I’m being a loudmouth (for a change.. hehehe).. how famous is this Garcia guy and why? Can’t they just give him his own show on CNN and be done with it? – since nobody watches it we’ll be rid of him that way.
And perhaps our gvt would be better used deporting actual terrorists? Columbia U. agitator and terrorist Khalil is STILL here, “crying wife and new baby” at his side. Sigh. For some unknown reason.
I’d argue he and his ilk pose a much larger threat than some sketchy, now celebrity El Salvadorean.
And there’s a village in Algeria (Khalil’s citizenship) missing its idiot.
D.A.
NYC
Setting aside everything else about this case, it amuses me greatly how much of the press insists on calling him “the Maryland man.” If I entered Japan illegally, lived there for years, and was subsequently apprehended, I wonder whether the media there would call me “the Tokyo man!”
My question about Finkelstein is, Does she teach courses which are required for any degree program? If not, who cares (except politically)? When I was at UC I wanted to take a course on the Russian Revolution. After one class, I decided that the professor’s politics were going to make the class annoying and biased. So I took a different class. I didn’t complain about him.
“Given that the mental health of youth with gender dysphoria who are older is often poor, it is likely that puberty blockers prevent the deterioration of mental health.”
IANAP, but this may be relevant:
“Roughly half of all lifetime mental disorders in most studies start by the mid‐teens and three‐fourths by the mid‐20s.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1925038/#:~:text=Roughly%20half%20of%20all%20lifetime,fourths%20by%20the%20mid%E2%80%9020s.
I really hate dishonest propaganda. One talking point that angries up my blood is the one about the population density of the Gaza Strip. “Gaza is an open-air prison, the densest and perhaps most dangerous place in the world.”
Gaza is NOT the densest place in the world. And I take this one a bit personally, because as it happens, my neighborhood, of which I am very fond, is quite a bit denser than Gaza.
AI says:
“The Gaza Strip has a population density of approximately 5,500 people per square kilometer (14,000 people per square mile).
In 2021, the overall population density was reported as 5,853 capita per square kilometer.
Some sources estimate the density at 5,967.5/km² (15,455.8/sq mi) based on a 2024 population estimate.”
“Gaza City: A 2017 census reported a population of 590,481 in Gaza City, which covers 45 square kilometers (17 sq mi). This gives it a population density of about 13,000 people per square kilometer (34,000 per sq mi).”
Of my neighborhood, AI says:
“The population density of McArthur (sic) Park in Los Angeles, CA, is approximately 43,021.70 people per square mile.”
While Neighborhood Scout, which boasts “investor grade analytics,” says this:
“…the Macarthur Park neighborhood is very densely populated compared to most U.S. neighborhoods. In fact, with 49,994 persons per square mile in the neighborhood, it is more packed with people than 98.4% of the nation’s neighborhoods.”
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/
They also say this, which I can personally verify:
“The Macarthur Park neighborhood is among the top 5% of American neighborhoods in terms of walkability.”
And for the record, we’re quite poor here. Poor, and multicultural. And somehow we get by. Density does not equal “open air prison.”