The “work” week is over already: it’s Friday, October 10, 2025, and National Angel Food Cake Day. Though it’s one of my favorite cakes (my mom would make me one on my birthday each year, frosted with either coffee or strawberries-and-whipped-cream icing), you hardly ever see it in restaurants any more. That’s a damn shame. Here’s a shortish video on how to make one. How do I get one without having to bake it. ?
It’s also National Metric Day, World Mental Health Day, World Day Against the Death Penalty, World Porridge Day, World Egg Day, and Squid and Cuttlefish Day. Here’s a remarkable Attenborough video of a cuttlefish changing colors. This is one of the most remarkable phenomena in animals I know ot. How do they do it?
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Two Nobel Prizes to announce today. First, the Literature Prize went to a Hungarian writer:
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dark, apocalyptic themes and intricate sentences that can run on for pages, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai had received the award “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has long been revered by fellow writers. Susan Sontag once called him a “master of the apocalypse,” and the Hungarian movie director Bela Tarr has adapted several of his novels for the screen.
Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, as “Werckmeister Harmonies,” in 2000. Although Krasznahorkai published “The Melancholy of Resistance” in Hungarian in 1989, it did not appear in English translation until 1998. The novel, filled with vast sentences, concerns events in a small Hungarian town after a circus arrives with a huge stuffed whale in tow.
His latest work to appear in English is “Herscht 07769,” published last year in the United States. The novel, which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction, features only one period in its 400 pages.Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”
Jebus, I don’t know if I can read sentences that run on for pages. Fortunately, I’m loaded up with stuff to read. And then there’s the Chemistry Prize. which went to three people who developed molecular open frameworks that can contain smaller molecules:
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them.
The cavities on the inside are “almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for the creation of materials that can separate toxic chemicals from wastewater or harvest water molecules in a desert.
The laureates’ work started with experiments by Dr. Robson in the 1980s and gradually developed over a period of about 15 years.
“It takes time for science to be recognized, and it takes multiple workers in the field with different approaches,” said Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society.
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
Here’s the usefulness of their achievement, as given by the Nobel Prize organization:
The constructions they created – metal–organic frameworks – contain large cavities in which molecules can flow in and out. Researchers have used them to harvest water from desert air, extract pollutants from water, capture carbon dioxide and store hydrogen.
An attractive and very spacious studio apartment, specifically designed for your life as a water molecule – this is how an estate agent might describe one of all the metal–organic frameworks that laboratories around the world have developed in recent decades. Other constructions of this type are tailormade for capturing carbon dioxide, separating PFAS from water, delivering pharmaceuticals in the body or managing extremely toxic gases. Some can trap the ethylene gas from fruit – so they ripen more slowly – or encapsulate enzymes that break down traces of antibiotics in the environment.
And a figure from the page shjowing the cavities (read the caption):
I doubt that anybody would have guessed these two prizes, and I forgot to run my Nobel Prize contest this year.
*Peter Boghossian has changed his mind on gender-affirming care. He thinks it shouldn’t be allowed at all, even in adults, and by “gender-affirming care,” he means hormones and/or surgery.
I’ve changed my mind about certain aspects of “gender-affirming care.” I used to believe that at 18, one should have the ability to make decisions about whether they want to mutilate (and yes, let us be forthright about what it is) their genitals. Basically, one would go to a board-certified physician and undergo certain procedures to significantly alter their bodies for non-medical purposes.
I’ve always been uneasy with my position. While the drawbacks are obvious and ghastly, they still need to be explicitly stated: One becomes a lifelong medical patient; the taxpayer almost always bears the burden; the rate of regret, while hard to precisely ascertain, is significant; the procedures are ghoulish and activate the brain’s deepest disgust and repulsion modules; most of the procedures are irreversible; there is a wholesale lack of evidence for the necessity of these procedures and overwhelming evidence that they’re contraindicated; the medical and psychological establishment has been ideologically captured, thus informed decision-making is almost literally impossible; physicians compromise their professional integrity by doing harm; the ideology preys upon autistic and same-sex attracted people; and the list goes on and on and on.
On the opposing side, I held my principle. In a free society, adults must have bodily autonomy. They must have dominion over their own bodies. Lacking that, we do not live in a free society, by any reasonable definition.
After considerable reflection and frank conversations with Mia Hughes (here and here and here), Colin Wright (forthcoming), Helen Joyce (here), Dr. Eithan Haim (here), Billboard Chris (too many to list, but go here), the work of Travis Brown (here), and many others, I’ve changed my mind. Here’s what caused it to change: Doctors cannot and should not perform any medical procedure a patient desires. Patients should not be able to have their retinas removed because they think it’s a good idea. Nor should they be able to have additional rectums added to their body, or colon vaginas, or cow testicles sewn onto their foreheads, or have their limbs chopped off because it strikes their fancy, nor any other manner of extreme surgery.
. . . Yes, sovereignty and dominion over one’s body are important. And yes, some modicum of bodily autonomy must be maintained, and it also must have some limit. Perhaps breast augmentations, or tongue forking, or increasing the gauge in one’s ear would be the limit. But while some of these procedures could be categorized as extreme, they are categorically different from a young man inverting his penis, becoming sterile, being almost guaranteed to seek ongoing medical attention for the rest of his life, and forgoing any possibility of having an orgasm.
. . . . Here’s what I would truly love to happen, but I’ve entirely given up on any hope of it happening: I really, really want to have a conversation with an informed trans advocate, someone who would provide me with reason and evidence so that I may understand their position and even position myself so as to change my mind. This is not possible. (And please do not tell me in the comments that it’s possible.) I’ve invited the WPATH people to a conversation, and many, many others on many, many occasions for many, many years. And not a single person has been willing to engage me in conversation. Not one. And those I know who’ve tried the same have been met with countless examples of deliberate lying, intentional obfuscation, and unabashed dishonesty.
It’s curious that gender extremists, who are not only absolutely sure of their position but aggressive as well, won’t participate in a simple conversation or debate about this issue with Peter, even though he’s a mild-mannered (but fiercely informed and passionate) debater. I wonder if Peter would extend this view to puberty blockers, which almost always lead to taking hormones to transition to the phenotype of your non-natal sex. For taking those hormones and blockers will nearly always make you sterile, but trans women (males who have cross-ex hormones) may also lose their ability to have orgasms. Should they be made illegal for persons of any age? I don’t know. A good doctor will not allow you to cut off your leg, but will they allow you to take cross-sex hormone therapy? Almost certainly. I guess I’m not ready to say that there should be a ban on any surgery for adults.
*Both Oregon and now Illinois have taken the government to court for sending in National Guard troops. Texas guards have already arrived in my state, though nothing has happened yet. These are ones with the potential to go up to the Supreme Court.
State lawyers representing Illinois and Oregon argued that the protests in their cities didn’t justify President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, as high-stakes legal hearings played out in two federal courtrooms at the same time on Thursday. The cases have far-ranging implications for the use of military power on U.S. soil.
“There is no rebellion in Illinois,” said Christopher Wells, a lawyer from the Illinois attorney general’s office. He accused the Trump administration of disregarding the conditions on the ground.
A federal judge in Chicago is considering whether to impose a temporary block on the deployment of National Guard troops from Texas, who arrived in Illinois earlier this week and were expected to begin guarding an immigration facility in suburban Illinois later today. In a case out of Oregon, a three-judge appeals court panel in San Francisco will decide whether to lift a similar ban that was imposed by a federal judge in Portland.
The federal case in Oregon turns, in part, on the amount of deference the courts must give to the president’s decisions about when and where to deploy the National Guard. The federal government is arguing that the courts cannot review those deployment decisions at all. Stacy Chaffin, who is representing Oregon before the appeals court, the Ninth Circuit, told the panel of judges on Thursday that the usual policy of deference did not apply if the president’s assessment of the situation in Portland was “untethered from reality.”
Troops from California and Oregon are in position outside Portland but have been blocked for now from entering the city, at the order of a Trump-appointed judge who ruled that the president’s actions appeared to be unconstitutional. Federally activated Illinois troops are preparing to join the Texas National Guard members in the Chicago area this weekend, if the judge there does not block their deployment.
Mr. Trump has said he needed to send troops into Democratic-controlled cities that he accused of being afraid to quell protests against immigration enforcement efforts, often mounted outside federal buildings. He said on Wednesday that the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois should be jailed, and described demonstrators in Portland as “insurrectionists.”
Democratic leaders in both Illinois and Oregon say the troops are not needed, and that their presence will only raise tensions. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has called Mr. Trump’s deployment to his state an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.”
We’ll see if it’s Constitutional, but even if it is, it’s throwing oil on the first. The one thing I’m missing is whether the presence of ICE members detaining and arresting undocumented immigrants is actually creating violent protests. Who is being violent: ICE, the protestors, or both? It’s hard for me to find out even in Cbicago without going to the protests, something I’m not keen on. But what does disturb me are those people on the Left who seem to think that immigrants here illegally should be completely left alone. Well, they have broken the law, you know. I think that in every case of arrest and possible deportation, there needs to be adjudication by immigration judges, and that arrests should not be made more violently than need be, nor should ICE agents be allowed to wear masks. I have no idea at all what the Supreme Court will say about this.
*Well, the Israeli hostages won’t be freed by this weekend after all, but soon. (Breaking news: Israel has declared a cease-fire and is moving its troops around in Gaza, probably to meet the “repositioning” requirement.) Ten to one Hamas is feeding them up so they won’t look so bad when they’re sent back to Israel. But they will be released within a week. From the Times of Israel:
A draft of the ceasefire and hostage-release agreement under review by Israel’s security cabinet includes the return of 20 living hostages and the bodies of 28 others, Channel 12 reports.
The inclusion of 28 deceased hostages implies the deaths of two hostages over whose fates Israel had previously expressed “grave concern,” but had not pronounced dead, the network notes.
In May, Israel publicly questioned whether three hostages were still alive, reportedly referring to Israeli hostage Tamir Nimrodi, Nepali hostage Bipin Joshi and Thai hostage Pinta Nattapong. Nattapong’s body was later recovered from Gaza.
Yesterday, Joshi’s family released a video showing him shortly after his abduction on October 7, 2023, which remains the time of his last known sign of life.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum and the office of Gal Hirsch, the Israeli government’s pointman on hostages, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
. . . .US President Donald Trump, asked what guarantees the US has provided in negotiations to ensure that Hamas disarms and that Israel doesn’t resume the war, says that the first priority was securing the release of the hostages.
“That’s what people wanted more than anything else… After that, we’ll see,” Trump tells reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House, highlighting that a lot remains left to be negotiated.
“But they’ve agreed to things, and I think it’s going to move along pretty well,” he adds.
Trump declines to get into specifics regarding the second phase of the agreement, after the hostages are released, but says Hamas will disarm and the IDF will pull back its troops. He highlights his “22 different things that will take place,” apparently referring to his 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war.
“I think it will take place, and I think you can end up with peace in the Middle East,” Trump says.
He acknowledges that the roughly 28 bodies of dead hostages held in Gaza will be “a little bit hard to find.”
“But we have the hostages for the most part, and I don’t think it’s going to be an overly big situation with the bodies… We’re going to do the best we can,” Trump says.
I remember writing off the hostages at the beginning of the war, realizing that their chances of survival were slim. I’m delighted that at least 20 have survived, but also enraged that Hamas killed some outright, even strangling the Bibas children, and brutally murdering their mother. Do people not remember that? It is almost as if people have forgotten how the hostages were actually treated—far, far worse than are Palestinian prisoners in Israel, even if they were murderous terrorists. But the big problem still remains: the disarmament of Hamas and its removal from power. I have little doubt that the IDF will do what it agreed to do about pulling back—unless (a big if) Hamas won’t abide by its agreements.
*According to the Wall Street Journal, here is WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW about the first phase of the Israel/Hamas deal:
These are the main elements of the first phase:
All living hostages held by Hamas are to be released.
There are 48 hostages, about 20 of whom are believed to be alive. Trump said in an interview with Fox News Wednesday night that the hostages would probably be released on Monday.
The bodies of hostages who have died are to be handed over later.
Hamas has said it would need at least 10 days to locate the bodies of dead hostages, according to people close to the talks.
Israel will release Palestinian prisoners.
Once all the hostages are returned, Israel is expected to release 250 Palestinians who are in Israeli prisons and 1,700 Palestinians who have been detained in Gaza during the conflict. Precisely who is on that list is being finalized.
Hamas has pushed to get as many big-name prisoners released as possible, including Marwan Barghouti, whom Israel jailed over his role in a Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.
I think this is the worst concession Israel made, because those “big-name prisoners” are likely to foment terrorism when released, just as Yahya Sinwar did when he was one of a gazillion Palestinians released in a swap for a single Israeli soldier. Israelis, who value life, are willing to swap may more Palestinians, even potential terrorists, then the innocent people they get back.
Israel Defense Forces will withdraw from 70% of the enclave.
The deal includes a map of the withdrawal lines but without exact locations or coordinates. The final lines to which the Israeli military will withdraw might still be under discussion.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt will open.
The crossing will open after the cease-fire comes into effect to facilitate aid deliveries, and allow for entry and exit of Palestinians.’
That, of course, will allow smuggling in of weapons for Hamas. I presume there will be monitoring, but there were tunnels used for that running from Egypt into Gaza, and once again those will become operative. I have to say I’m dubious about not only phase 2 of the deal, but also phase 1.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej completes Hili’s thoughts:
Hili: Just imagine, just try to imagine.
Andrzej: You can’t imagine how many foolish things people have done because of an overactive imagination.
In Polish:
Hili: Wyobraź sobie, po prostu sobie wyobraź.
Ja: Nie wyobrażasz sobie do ilu głupstw ludzi zaprowadziła wybujała wyobraźnia.
*******************
From Joolz, relevant to yesterday’s discussion of how you refer to the sexes and genders. Double standards! Vulva owners????
From Animal Antics:
From CinEmma (this is me in warm weather):
Masih is quiet again but this item that her substitute Rowling posted bears on a reader’s question the other day:
We are disgusted by straight men calling themselves “lesbians”. We are even more disgusted by an “LGBTIQA+” group in a political party telling us – on “International Lesbian Day” – that we have to accept it.
Why not tell the Green Party what you think of this rank homophobia? https://t.co/qfaVJZZBpI— LGB Alliance (@AllianceLGB) October 9, 2025
From Luana. SJP is about the most antisemitic organization on any campus, and yet they get awards, presumably for hating Jews:
Sarah Lawrence College Students for Justice in Palestine yesterday.
The college gave this group a leadership award last year. pic.twitter.com/chZhgxdg26
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) October 9, 2025
From Malcolm. It’s things like this that revive my faith in humanity.
Tilly Lockey is double amputee due to meningococcal septicaemia.
She can literally snap on a robotic hand and control it just by thinking, even when it’s not attached to her body.
The bionic setup is fully wireless, fully real, and fully sci-fi.pic.twitter.com/hISyMRNiMN
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025
Titania has a new spoof piece, but I wonder if the photo is real:
Left-wing violence is a right-wing myth.
My latest column for @TheCriticMag.https://t.co/687UJWUPeZ
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) October 9, 2025
One from my feed—a penguin rescue!
A Penguin jumped on this boat to escape a seal, so they took him to the iceberg where his friends were waiting for him… This is heartwarming! pic.twitter.com/cXGpWybX2H
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 9, 2025
. . and one I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
Isaäc Herzog was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was nine years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-10T12:10:01.763Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. Look how slowly this critter eats. No wonder they call it a slug! But where’s the red sauce? I can’t embed the tweet (click on the screenshot to see it on Bluehair), but have put the YouTube video below it:
Octopus! See-through! Watch the video, as it’s a beaut.
In celebration of World Octopus Day, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite cephalopod sightings, the glass octopus — Vitreledonella richardi filmed during a month-long #PhoenixIslandsCoral expedition in 2021.
— Schmidt Ocean Institute (@schmidtocean.bsky.social) 2025-10-08T22:21:58.488Z
I can’t get excited about the hostages getting released until it actually happens. Too many disappointments already.
Unfortunately, I am with you on this one DrB. Though I certainly hope it does not fail, it will be interesting to see Trump’s reaction/response if hamas messes with him on it.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. -Lin Yutang, writer and translator (10 Oct 1895-1976)
Nice one, empires falling!
Reminded me of this: “That in our days such pygmies throw such giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become,” was spoken by biochemist Erwin Chargaff, and it was a jab at Watson and Crick and their discovery of the DNA double helix, which he felt they did not fully acknowledge his contributions to.
UK News: “The Free Speech Union is delighted that Hamit Coskun’s appeal has been successful.” (Link)
“Hamit was convicted under the Public Order Act for burning a copy of the Koran during a lawful protest against the rise of political Islam and authorities in Turkey under President Erdoğan’s regime.
“The court conflated his political protest against Islam with hatred of Muslims, effectively reviving blasphemy law by the back door. It ruled his action as “disorderly” — not because of what Hamit did, but because it provoked violence against him, namely a man called Moussa Kadri slashed a knife at him and shouted “I’m going to kill you”. Kadri was spared jail time, and actions were used to prove Hamit’s guilt.
“From the Crown Court’s judgement in the Hamit Coskun case:
“There is no offence of blasphemy in our law. Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive. The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.
“We live in a liberal democracy. One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so. The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us.”
What a breath of fresh air that Crown Court quote is!
I have an idea that might spark a reformation. A group of prominent Imams should gather and burn 1447 copies of the Koran as a way of impressing upon the people that it is merely a book. There is nothing holy or divine about it but that we, mere people, make it so. Give up the shackles and be free.
Good luck with that🙂, though please remember that book-burning is very much a double-edged sword.
Good job UK! Wording reminds me a bit of the Tinker supreme court decision here in the U.S. some decades ago.
Wow. I am surprised. I mean, I don’t know anything about the zeigeist on this in the UK, but simply assumed they were captured too, at least to some degree. So it’s good to get evidence that I am clueless about the reality there; this news is welcome.
It seems that in the UK nowadays we have lots of “woke” judges but also some “traditional” judges, and quite a bit comes down to who presides over a case (which, of course, is not how things should be; I guess Americans have lots of experience with this state of affairs, whereas it’s a fairly new phenomenon here).
Typo alert:
“It is almost as if people have forgotten how the hostages were actually treated—far, far better than Palestinian prisoners in Israel, even if they were murderous terrorists.”
Indeed. I will fix it, thanks.
Thank you for showing the structure of the metal-organic cavities and the slug eating spaghetti without red sauce.
😆
This morning’s Nobel Peace Prize announcement video (14 minutes) should be at url
https://www.youtube.com/live/wrRBGaUwJiQ
It went to Maria Corina Machado.
The white House response was, shall I say, predictable (Steven Cheung was first)
I can’t wait ’til next year: He should get the peace prize, literature (for his many meaningful and bigly short works on “Truth SOcial”…. The prize is for literature, after all, which is principally fiction), Medicine (co-award with RFK, Jr), Physics (for his work in time travel– changing historical facts), and Economics (for his advancements is the science of accounting). This only leaves chemistry out. But I’m sure they will find something.
Let the nominations begin….
I read the one-sentence book Herscht 07769 by the Nobel prize winner Krasznahorkai recently and it’s good. There is punctuation, just no periods. And it’s hypnotic in a way. I wonder if I was primed for this though: I like books by Jose Saramago who also used very little punctuation.
I suppose ‘kids’ is the problem. Arming the adult population of the US should not be an issue. It is their right to keep and bear arms 🙂 And in some states it is legal to keep and bare arms.
The chemistry prize was actually expected, Omar Yaghi and MOFs have been mentioned in predictions for years.
I’m not progressive on trans issues, but dear god, Boghossian lost me right at the start:
You know what else activates our disgust modules? Babies’ diapers. The oozing sores of a leper. Being able to overcome our ‘disgust modules’ in order to care for our fellow humans and treat them with compassion is a large part of what makes us human.
And in any event, ‘disgust’ is in large part a learned response, rather than innate. For example, remember what ‘disgusted’ Germans in the 30s? Jews. That’s right. If German disgust for Jews proved anything about Jews, and not Germans, then Jews would indeed have deserved to be exterminated like any other vermin.
So, to give any kind of epistemological status to disgust is, in itself, kind of disgusting. Also, if we want to use that kind of ‘evidence’ for policy-making, let’s ban gay sex, too. And gay marriage while we’re at it.
Bottom line is that to seriously propose that surgery should be banned for even fully informed dysphoric adults is immoral. Brianna Wu is a case in point. She is sane and mature (and it admittedly helps that she has all the right opinions, imo), and I don’t think for a minute that she is exaggerating when she says that her dysphoria was so severe and crippling that she couldn’t have kept living if she had been unable to transition. More generally, there are no good reasons to deny the testimony of the many other trans people like her, and none of Boghossian’s other arguments come close to convincing me that denying all trans people hormones and surgery would be anything but immoral and outrageous.
He has a point in saying doctors ought not to do just what they are asked to do. I suspect that this is fast becoming a dinosaur attitude, but I believe that when you hire a professional, you are hiring him for his opinion, not to do a task. This is what differentiates a profession from a trade. I can hire a carpenter to build me something to my specs, no matter if my idea is nuts. If carpentry were a profession, he would be obliged to tell me why I am wrong, suggest a better approach, but in all events he would not build me something that would be unstable. In medicine this applies to small things as well: you don’t simply prescribe whatever drug is requested, you only do it if it is the right course of action. Nor do you perform irreversible surgery unless you agree it is necessary and justified. In many ways the move towards intense oversight has backfired—it was intended to ensure doctors do not engage in unproven or dangerous treatments (a good thing), but has also meant that we get into trouble for not doing those things we disagree with. I tend to agree with you that a fully informed adult should be able to decide for themselves, if they can find a doctor to go along with their wishes. I just don’t think all doctors should have to go along, whether they agree or not.
As a profession we gave away that fiduciary high ground long ago, Christopher, when our self-regulators gave in to public pressure to see ourselves as tradesmen in the matters of abortion and euthanasia. Strictly you don’t have to do either procedure but you must make an “effective referral”, and be quick about it, if you won’t or can’t do it yourself. In the case of euthanasia, our regulator in Ontario anticipates that the euthanasia flying squad will burn out and stop accepting referrals: it publishes the recipe on its public website. If you can’t find anyone to kill your patient for you, you can’t use the excuse that you never learned how to kill people according to a professional standard.
For surgical procedures, it’s clear from case law that a surgeon can’t be punished for not having learned to perform any particular operation for which there is public demand. The surgeon can tell the referring GP to find another surgeon who offers that operation. But any GP can prescribe hormones. The patient theirself will tell you what dose they wants. “What’s your problem, Doctor?” As the doc, you’re just on the hook for any side effects, complications, and, maybe, later regret. Just don’t spend too long talking about the risks of treatment or possibility of irreversible regret, though, or you might be accused of trying to talk the patient out of it, which would send you to jail for attempting conversion therapy.
A legislative ban on physicians affirming something that doesn’t exist would help us immensely (and save iatrogenic illness down the road.) In theory, a willing customer should be able to contract with a willing seller to provide any service if they can agree on terms, and not provide it if they can’t. But the medical regulators see it rather as a human rights question where any desired health care is a “right.” As you imply, fiduciary concerns are paternalism especially in respect of a class of patients who are all, in one sense or another, “women.”
As I read it I thought he was just referring to the “disgust and repulsion” of having one’s genitals mutilated, rather than it being about trans people themselves.
I agree that there are very rare cases where surgical interventions can alleviate severe mental distress from gender dysphoria, there have been some successful cases in the past. But, in the past, the sufferers had full and intensive psychological assessment before proceeding. Most sufferers will benefit from proper therapy without the need for surgery, but trans ideologists fight against proper assessment. They insist everyone should be allowed to mutilate themselves, and I believe that is wrong as it brings untold suffering as people age.
I see these surgeries as the same as people who need neurosurgery for mental disorders (NMD), or brain splits for epilepsy, or brain treatment to reduce Parkinson tremors. Surgeries are very rare and should only used as a last resort when all else has failed. That is clearly not the way gender surgeries are being used at the moment.
I tend to agree with Boghossian for the most part, but you have a very valid point, i.e. that a subjective feeling of disgust is rather shaky grounds for decisions on these matters.
I think that another difficult issue that we are faced with here is the question of where the lines are to be drawn and who draws them? I personally would also outlaw breast, butt and penis (probably also lip) “enhancement” surgeries as (at least in the vast majority of cases) entirely contraindicated procedures, and even more so when it is a matter of, e.g., outlandishly large breast implants. Any “doctor” who stuffs 20 kg. of silicon in a woman’s (or a man’s, nowadays) chest should lose his licence in my view. And what about those who have knobs/horns “installed” on their foreheads? Apparently entirely legal currently. And of course there is also no medical reason for any kind of male or female circumcision (again, in the vast majority of cases).
But should I be the one drawing that line? If a person wants 20 kg. of silicon stuffed in his/her chest, or butt, or horns attached to his/her forehead, should s/he be allowed to have it done? Well, perhaps. Should doctors who mutilate (as it seems to me) their patients in such outrageous ways maintain their licences? Not in my view. But who decides?
(This comment is for Jared’s information, to answer his direct question. Now that we’re over 30 comments I guess my third should be OK.)
Ultimately the state with its power to legislate decides absolutely what treatments doctors may, must, and must not provide. That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court was correct in upholding Skrmetti, which prohibits sex-trait manipulation in minors in Tennessee. Medicine is not a law unto itself, no matter what doctors and patients/parents wanting a treatment might think. It is a learned profession to which the state grants the privilege of self-regulation conditional on it upholding the public interest. (“The State has no place in the doctor-patient relationship!” No. It does.)
Because professional work is so complex and often arcane, lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. are generally left alone to regulate themselves, with the tort system as a check on mistakes and misadventure. But the state can for reasons entirely of its own step in at any time if self-regulation is not, in its sole opinion, upholding the public interest. It can ban through the political legislative process any medical treatment that it thinks doctors are misusing, or put legally binding restrictions on it. It will conduct hearings where the public, expert and lay, can have its say, but the Legislature can make any law it wants to, subject to the Constitutions in countries that write theirs down.
As doctors opposed to medical mutilation of mentally ill people, we would prefer that the self-regulating apparatus express its disapproval and stop or limit the practice using its various norm-enforcing and disciplinary tools to influence our behaviour. That would show that self-regulation is working in the public interest. None has. Because of capture by activists, none likely ever will. Most mandate it, rather. So it falls to the legislators. They have the full power and authority to decide, especially since Skrmetti has been found not to violate the U.S. Constitutional rights of minor patients denied the treatment. (We don’t know yet if Alberta will be successful with minors in Canada.) The only barrier to banning it in adults is political, where autonomy to demand mutilation may be a tougher nut to crack with the fiduciary hammer.
Perhaps Jared is talking strictly about circumcision of babies for religious reasons.
The standard treatment for Phimosis is circumcision. As far as I can tell it does not cause distress in aging males who need the procedure. It prevents a rather unpleasant emergency situation from happening during sex.
Regarding the issue of surgical transitioning, I think when the blunt tool of the law is brought to bear on the choices regarding medical procedures, problems are bound to occur. Every situation is different, in a way no parliamentary body can handle. In polarized politics, opinions on what to do about the issue become dominated by which camp one is primarily influenced by. The resulting laws are based on scary simplifications.
What I think is missing from this discussion is a recognition that a solution good for some will make others miserable and vv.
Great thread of comments. I agree with Brooke that simple disgust shouldn’t be the basis for deciding what’s acceptable. But I think the analogies break down. Handling a diseased organ or a full diaper is disgusting but normal, and dealing with the disgusting object directly addresses the problem. By contrast, puberty blockers and hormones and surgeries don’t address the problem (the disordered mind of the “trans” person), and they treat the wrong organ. They are medical non sequiturs. MDs shouldn’t be required to offer them. But MDs should be required to offer appropriate treatment of the mind or brain of a “trans” person who asks for help. They are in my experience very sympathetic cases, often in desperate need.
“For taking those hormones and blockers will nearly always make you sterile, but trans women (males who have cross-ex hormones) may also lose their ability to have orgasms.”
Saying ‘nearly’ when it comes to children and puberty blockers is incorrect. NO child, male or female, put on blockers at Tanner Stage II will be fertile, as fertility only commences with puberty.
NO child, male or female, put on blockers at Tanner Stage II will ever be capable of orgasm as that capability develops from brain changes that occur during puberty. This statement is on public record by Dr Marci Bowers. He is the trans identified surgeon who removed the genitals of Jazz Jennings. He is one of the heads of WPATH. He should be in prison as no child can give informed consent to making their future selves inorgasmic when they don’t even know what that means.
Jazz Jennings missed puberty which means his brain didn’t develop correctly. He has no sexual feelings, but you can see him trying to imitate his peers and pretending that he does. He has stated on film that he doesn’t know whether he is het or gay, that is because he missed the emotional brain changes that come with puberty and he didn’t develop the ability to be sexually attracted to anyone.
This is child abuse.
Exactly Joolz. There is a pricey toll at the trans turnpike. Not only the anorgasmia, but as ttExulansic has documented (accurately to the best of my amateur, med school dropout analysis)… LOTS of side effects such as infertility, no breast feeding, etc.
Also all manner of lesser % risks in the cancer dpt. Before we start on lifetime medicalization and those horrors and expenses.
To me though, a major down side is if you are a trans anything… your potential dating pool is reduced to almost zero: except men who are “actively seeking tranny.”
This is not a good place to be in in life.
Funny… most plastic surgery is intended to WIDEN one’s appeal – and often the circumference of one’s boobs!, and thus dating pool, but trans ….. not so. It destroys it.
keep well, Joolz.
D.A.
NYC
There are some successful trans relationships, but the most successful ones I’ve seen were gay couples. Two lesbians in a relationship who both decided to identify as men, and another which was two gay men, one of whom called himself a woman. Closet gay men would probably find it convenient to have a partner that they could pretend was a woman.
You are right about the side effects, and more and more are being discovered every week. We’ve known for a while that effectively throwing teenage girls into early menopause, is causing serious osteoporosis. Giving girls testosterone thickens their cartilage and, as heart valves are cartilage, it can make it harder for their hearts to pump – giving them breathing difficulties. Jazz Jennings has the opposite, his cartilage is getting thinner, which is giving him joint issues. The problems don’t always show up right away. I’ll save you the gory details of things I have read about, but Exulansic has covered many.
Even in old age there are problems. A man in a care home with dementia was in constant distress because every morning he woke to find he had breasts, and he thought someone had put them on him as a bad joke. He didn’t remember transitioning at all. Sadly he wasn’t compos mentis enough to have a mastectomy, so he had to suffer every day.
Basically these children will be walking medical experiments for the next 70 years. Proper research and testing should have been done BEFORE we started destroying children’s lives.
The “Arm Trans Kids” photo appeared here in a 2023 story with date and place of the event cited:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/29/activists-hold-disturbing-arm-trans-kids-banner-in-uk/
I take the trouble to point this out because the activists shown in the accompanying video mixing it up with the cops are all men, as expected because violence comes more easily to men. I want to draw a distinction with the kerfuffle earlier this week over the poster soliciting “menstruators” as research subjects at an American college campus. The UK episode is about men trying to invade women’s spaces and harm children for their gratification, as men are wont to do. The campus poster episode is about women policing the speech of other women in order not to give offence, for fear of cancellation, to women who identify as something other than women. It is these women, not men obviously, who resent being misgendered as women and who demand terms such as “pregnant people”, chest-feeding”, “front hole” and, yes, “menstruator”, to describe themselves. So now you know where to direct your counter-revolution’s energies. Set your own house in order, I repeat. Taking your spaces back from men and protecting children from cult predators is important, too, of course, but the power over women-erasing language is all on you. No man is going to tell a powerful woman in the language Provost Corps that she can’t cross out “vagina” in an official document and replace it with “front hole”, especially when the female staff and patients in the gender clinic all call it the front hole.
Don’t forget that the explosion in numbers of people seeking care at gender clinics identifying as trans has occurred chiefly among young women, the very sort who populate college campuses today. The male count may be underestimated because their pathology is less medicalized — women see doctors about their angst and get transitioned (and counted), while men just adopt a feminine persona and stay out of the helping industry’s statistics, unless they want to grow breasts. (Very few have surgery.) There do seem to be a lot more trans-identified men in the news than there used to, but they have violence, and the support of prominent male homosexual politicians, to keep them in the limelight. The trans-identified women — feminists with beards — meanwhile are quietly burrowing away like termites into the timbers of our institutions. I’ll have to leave it up to women to decide if these are Good Feminists or not.
P.S. Great news from the UK Crown Court!
A couple of weeks ago, trans protesters carried a banner in Bristol that read “Fuck Cops – Arm Transwomen”. https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/hundreds-march-bristol-solidarity-with-trans-community/
Yes, Leslie. While the numbers of “trans” have flipped genders in the last 10 years as it has become The Main Thing and a “symptom pool” (Mia Hughes) for a lot of dysfunction, the male/AGP side of the equation, while professing their female-ness, seem to have an awful lot of almost comically male characteristics. Think of AGPs and activists.
I mean – they’re VERY into porn and have politically aggressive and even violent positions. Just as one would assume from a dude in a dress with a lot of co-morbidities in their psychological make up.
I’m sad I missed GENSPECT’s New Mexico thing but “next year in Mexico City!” (hehehe)… I’ll be there.
All the best my northern friend,
D.A.
NYC
@DavidandersonJd
You are right. AGPs and their misogynist young male allies are responsible for almost all of the violence against women who are just trying to defend their rights. It is precisely because of their porn fetish etc that we have to keep them out of women’s spaces and away from children. It’s not all male trans people, of course, but the ones who demand access to women’s private spaces are the dangerous ones.
There are certainly women who are screwing up their own rights (we call them ‘dick panderers’ or ‘handmaidens’) but these self hating women are not a physical threat to us. Those women baffle me as I can’t imagine any woman who has a daughter who would want to let her into a changing room with a man.
It’s ironic that so many trans identifying men are violent. I even made a meme about it..
“Men seem tohave immense difficulty transitioning their male privilege and male pattern violence. It’s almost like men can’t actually become women.”
Re “other women” — I was taken aback by this line in the NY Post article: “A huge line of London cops kept the militant protesters … from the other women.” So the Post blithely concedes that the militant female-identified male TRAs are women?
“Kindness”, you know….
There is also the argument that were the Post to refer to them as men, it would be accused of right-wing bias that would undermine the objectivity of its reporting. (I’m not being sarcastic here. I know the Post is a tabloid of the “Mom Axes Kids and Self” variety — that might really have been a New York Post headline — but I wasn’t damning with faint praise.) I’ve resigned myself to never seeing anyone dare misgender even the anonymous in print — how many times have we read, “The as-yet-unidentified assailant lifted her dress and exposed her erect penis to two nine-year-old girls”? Too many is how many.
Think about it. If The Post had referred to the unruly demonstrators as men, sure as shooting someone would have said, yeah, that proves The Post faked the photo. Only MAGA outlets call transwomen men.
I presume that if they gave a toss the Post’s editorial skills would be sufficient to come up with an obvious un-gendered rephrasing. Hrrrrumph.
Non-jarring gender-neutral language has been a thing since at least the 70’s. Been there.
“Jebus, I don’t know if I can read sentences that run on for pages.”
There’s a sentence in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch that runs on for over thirty pages, during which the narrative voice switches between several different characters. It works, because he was a genius.
There is a music equivalent of this, it goes on for 5 mins where there is not a beat, rhythm, hook, in sight, it sort of swirls all over the place AND it is the start of a 2.5 hr opening act without a break… of a 15hr opera! not in one sitting mind you. It’s ALMOST irritating to listen to for some, (if you’re a drummer LOL) and not an opera fan per se, although I like some of his work. To others and I get it, it is mesmerizing…
Google AI:
“The piece is the prelude to Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, which begins with a sustained, shimmering chord that doesn’t have a distinct rhythm or beat until about five minutes in.”
What a delightful angel food cake video! I don’t even bake, but I was hooked just watching to see how well the guy could keep the instructions going.
I have no ulterior motives in sharing the video with my wife–who does bake.
The angel food cake video is excellent. All of the essential steps are outlined. An aluminum pan is mandatory and DO NOT GREASE the pan!
It is important to cool the cake upside down.
Like a souffle, it really is not difficult to make. I have never had a failed angel food cake or souffle.
Here’s the video of the Qur’an burning. Note that it was Hamit Coskun who was arrested and not the man who attacked him with a knife! https://x.com/Con_Tomlinson/status/1929586711316647937/mediaViewer
I have made many angel food cakes from scratch through the years. If you don’t want to go through separating all the eggs, Duncan Hines angel food cake mix it’s not a bad alternative.
In Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald has a sentence that runs for eight pages. I really like his work and the eight page sentence in Austerlitz, which accounts events his mother went through at a concentration camp, didn’t seem like a long sentence. It wasn’t tedious and at no time did I think; “when he going to get to the point”? It was so well written it seemed more like a story within the novel itself, than an unnecessarily long sentence.
Good writers can write sentences of any length. The problem is so do bad writers.
Yesterday I met a random fellow Jew in the street (my Israeli t-shirt), joyous about the hostages. I told him we’d get some back for sure but I’m not getting any hopes up.
I don’t think Hamas controls many of them (See Islamic Jihad and privateers).
But hey – it is movement in the right direction.
As is Peter B’s position on genderwang. I really admire that guy and was disappointed he did his street show and interview in my very neighborhood – as I really wanted to meet the guy. He’s terribly bright and a stand up guy: no wonder the uni system pissed him off so much. 🙂
A problem with “sex changes” is it doesn’t just effect the (let’s say only adults), it becomes a cultural “thing” that victimizes and vivisects kids and the very, very vulnerable. So it is a kind of a sui generis problem.
D.A.
NYC
@DavidandersonJd
When I was an undergraduate, the geology department had a weekly Friday afternoon seminar by a visiting professor, which was followed by a “tea.” (The “tea” was beer. The drinking age in New York State was 18 at the time, so most students could join in.) One Friday, the speaker was an expert on zeolites. These are naturally occurring minerals that have large cavities in their crystal structures, much akin to the cavities that were created artificially by this year’s Nobel laureates in Chemistry. I thought the talk was absolutely fascinating. There are so many ways to use zeolites in industry!
After the talk, at “tea,” to my astonishment, several of the professors panned it. Their responses were completely at variance with my impression of what I had heard. Why didn’t they like the talk, I asked? They didn’t like it, they said, because it was not science, it was engineering. After 47 years, I still remember the discordance between what I thought and what they thought. In the end I was right. Three-dimensional solids that have large cavities in their structures are super interesting after all, as the Nobel Committee determined.
Regarding whether people have the right to decide whether or not to modify their bodies once they’ve reached the age of majority. I think they should be allowed to do so, but that doesn’t mean that society should require doctors to provide the means for them to do so. Modifying one’s genitals is permissible and there are doctors who are willing to provide that service. But having one’s retinas removed? My guess is that you would have to do that yourself.
People are focusing on the first phase of the agreement with Hamas because the first phase brings the hostages home and eliminates Hamas’s leverage. After that, once Hamas breaks the agreement to disarm, Israel will be free to go back in and finish the job. Those criminals that Israel is being forced to release as part of the deal are a huge concession. Sinwar himself was released in 2011 as part of a similar exchange. With over a thousand terrorists soon to be at large, when the war ends, it won’t be over.
Apart from the obvious, a huge problem with autoretinectomies is that you can only do one of the eyes.
Perhaps Peter Boghossian should contact former pornographic film actor and producer Buck Angel who is a trans man. Buck strictly rejects gender-affirmative treatment of children and adolescents and is a fierce critic of trans activism. He is a pleasant person who is always willing to discuss transsexuality and transgenderism with other people on his Youtube channel.
I owned a Volvo once. It was orange.