Welcome to Friday, December 19, 2025, the fifth day of Hanukkah and National Hard Candy Day. Here’s a short video about complex hard candies are made:
It’s also National Oatmeal Muffin Day (ugh, but they’re better than rhubarb muffines), Holly Day, National Emo Day, and National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day. Why do people wear them (see here for a panoply of them)? Chat GPT gives a long answer which is summarized this way:
Ugly Christmas sweaters are about irony, humor, nostalgia, and togetherness—a way to make the holidays less polished and more playful.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Nooz will be truncated today as I was busy all day yesterday, when I prepare most of the dialogues.
*The suspect in the killing of two people at Brown University (and perhaps the killing of an MIT professor) was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire. I don’t know how they tracked him to that place, but it was surrounded by cops and as they closed in, the suspect apparently killed himself.
The body of a man suspected in the killing of two students at Brown University and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was found in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night, law enforcement officials said.
The authorities had swarmed the storage facility, in Salem, N.H., earlier in the evening in pursuit of a man wanted in connection with the two deadly attacks, which had stunned New England and set off days of frustrated searching.
Federal investigators obtained a warrant for a unit that they believed was linked to the person they were seeking, according to one official with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. Col. Oscar Perez, the police chief in Providence, R.I., where Brown’s campus is, said the suspect had died by suicide.
Colonel Perez identified the person as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He said the man was a 48-year-old former Brown student whose last known address was in Miami, and that the motive was not clear for the attack at Brown or the shooting Monday night of the M.I.T. professor in Brookline, Mass. But Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, said it was “safe to assume” that the suspect had, during a brief stint as a graduate student in the early 2000s, spent considerable time in the campus building where the Brown attack unfolded.
And the MIT connection (apparently a similar rental car was seen near MIT, as well as the suspect himself):
Federal prosecutors said Thursday that the suspect in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was his former classmate.
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had attended the same academic program in Portugal as Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the M.I.T. professor, from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Loureiro, 47, graduated with a degree in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, according to his M.I.T. profile.
. . .Security footage showed Mr. Neves Valente within a half mile of Dr. Loureiro’s residence, the authorities said.
Ms. Foley said Mr. Neves Valente drove to Salem, N.H., and entered a storage facility within hours of shooting Dr. Loureiro. He was seen in security footage entering a storage unit, wearing the same clothes he had worn in Brookline.
I’m amazed at how quickly the cops can apprehend these suspects. One of the factors appears to be the presence of security cameras everywhere. While you may consider that an infringement on privacy, if it can keep mass murderers at bay, it’s okay with me.
*I’m not quite sure what this means yet, but it’s going to cause a fracas: the NYT reports that “Trump moves to end access to gender-related care for minors.”
The federal government on Thursday acted to put an end to gender-related care for minors across the nation, threatening to pull federal funding from any hospital that offered such treatment.
The move reflects the laserlike focus on the issue by President Trump, who in his first days in office called gender treatments for minors “a stain on our Nation’s history.” The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.
If finalized, the proposed new rules, announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a news conference Thursday morning, would effectively shut down hospitals that failed to comply. Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly 45 percent of spending on hospital care, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.
It follows other efforts by the administration to pull back from or eliminate policies that recognize gender identities beyond being born male or female.
“We want our hospitals returning to healing, not harming, the patients entrusted in their care, or they’re going to pay a very steep price,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said at the news conference.
The new rules come one day after a divided House of Representatives voted to approve legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors and would subject providers to up to 10 years in federal prison. The House is expected to pass another bill Thursday that would bar Medicaid payments for gender-related treatments for minors. The two bills have little chance of passing in the Senate but showed how far the ultraconservative Republican majority was willing to go to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promise to end such medical treatment.
But the proposed rules go much farther, by trying to force hospitals nationwide to stop providing the treatments altogether. A 60-day public comment period will follow, and the rules will most likely be subject to legal challenges before going into effect. If finalized, the rule would be “a death sentence — hospitals have such razor-thin margins as it is,” said Caroline Farrell, a former C.M.S. lawyer, and now an attorney with the firm Foley Hoag. The proposed rule “means just forcing them to stop the care,” she said.
Gender-related treatments for minors, which can include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries, have been a subject of fierce debate worldwide but are endorsed by most medical groups in the United States.
I haven’t read the bill itself, but it seems a bit harsh to prohibit every single bit of medical care related to gender. What about children who are deeply distressed to the point of suicide (not “suicidality”) and need at least psychiatric care. Andresumably children with “precocious puberty,” a medical condition in which you begin puberty way too early, can still be treated with blockers. I’ve often said that blockers, other hormones, or surgery should not be given to children with gender dysphoria until they are of age to make a decision (usually past the age of puberty), but surely there must be valid medical exceptions. And is psychiatry—part of medicine—off-limits as well? It should not be, because gender dysphoria should be treated with compassionate but objective therapeutic (not “affirmative care”), which can be considered a medical intervention.
*The WaPo has an editorial-board op-ed wholeheartedly endorsing Trump’s oil blockade on Venezuela.
There are three significant risks. First, a blockade risks provoking a confrontation on the high seas that could drag the U.S. into a land war in South America. Second, Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis will worsen if Trump stops the export of oil, which could trigger a fresh wave of mass migration toward America’s southern border. Third, if Maduro goes, there’s no guarantee whoever replaces him will be friendlier to U.S. interests.
Nevertheless, the oil blockade is a more coherent and legally defensible strategy to bring about regime change in Venezuela than continuing airstrikes on alleged drug smugglers, which have killed at least 95 people.
The administration frames its Venezuela policy as a drug war against “narco-terrorists,” and Trump this week issued an executive order declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” That added to the atmospherics, but according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual reports, Venezuela plays little role in the fentanyl trade. It’s far more enmeshed with cocaine. Considering how poorly Iraq went, another president playing the WMD card gives us déjà vu.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that Trump will keep striking boats until “Maduro cries uncle.” But whatever product these speedboats are moving is nothing compared to oil for Maduro’s bottom line. If the U.S. really wants to drive a wedge between Maduro and his generals, squeezing oil exports will make it harder for the regime to meet payroll.
Again I’m conflicted (wonky day today). Yes, we have sanctions to prevent Venezuelan oil from reaching other countries, mainly Cuba and China, but do we have the right to do this to foster regime change? Trump, of course, casts this as a way to keep drugs from reaching the U.S., but that’s not the only aim. I would like to see Trump at least say that we will NOT send ground troops into Venezuela, nor start a ground war, and I would like, as far as possible, proof that small boats incinerated by our military are carrying drugs.
*Luana called my attention to a piece in a usually satirical site, the Babbline Beaver, about the arrest of canceled professor Francis Widdowson, formerly of Mount Royal University in Canada. Widdowson’s cancellation, which seems unjustified, is based on her questioning whether a Canadian Residential school was “genocidal, and whether a number of bodies of children are buried in unmarked graves around those schools. (there’s no evidence for that, but she was demonized anyway and eventually fired.) Anyway, Widdowson was arrested for trespassing into a campus lawn after she was invited to give a talk about the “graves” and was disinvited by the university disinvited her. As Luana says, Widdowson “decided to go anyway and speak to students outside. They banished her from campus and prohibited her from entering. She showed up anyway and was mobbed then arrested.” From the BB:
Those of you tracking the decaying state of free speech and respect for facts and reason in our woke-mind-virus infected neighbors to the north are probably familiar with the Kamloops Indian Residential School graves hoax. You can read a detailed summary here.
This is a case study of moral panic triggered by fake science peddled by tribal grifters infused with anti-Catholic bigotry. Since launched, it has been adopted as a colonialist-atonement cause célèbre by the Canadian press, academia, and government.
The narrative roiling Canada for over four years asserts that ground-penetrating radar revealed unmarked graves of 215 native children killed at an Indian residential school in British Columbia formerly operated by the Catholic Church.
Before we go further no human remains have been excavated and confirmed. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the hoax continue working overtime to deflect attempts to dig up the apple orchard that they claim is full of dead children.
Do a search on “Kamloops Graves” and you will be inundated with sensationalist stories from both mainstream media outlets and . In a campaign that would impress George Orwell, this bit of fabulism has been elevated into a species of “my truth” that will live forever in the bowels of leading Artificial Intelligence training sets.
Standing against this onslaught has been Dr. Frances Widdowson, the formerly tenured then fired professor from Mount Royal University. Her recently released book “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us” has mobs of “anti-denialist” indigenous rights protestors foaming at the mouth.
Widdowson was released without charges. She is an abrasive person, and when I met her I didn’t find her very congenial, but that’s of no matter: she’s been heavily demonized for simply asserting what is true: we don’t know if there are a gazillion dead Native American children buried in unmarked graves in a Canadian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. There is no evidence for the claim, but in Canada it’s simply unacceptable to even ask that question. And the Canadians won’t permit people to actually try to verify the assertion by looking for bodies. Read the link given above to see what we do and don’t know.
*Trump announced yesterday that he had settled “eight wars in ten months,” and that surely includes the war in Gaza. But the war in Gaza is far from being settled: there is a precarious cease fire and, as the WSJ reports, Hamas is not upholding its promise to disarm and disband.
President Trump’s phased peace plan for Gaza is struggling to move beyond its initial stage, hitting obstacles in Hamas’s refusal to disarm and Israel’s unwillingness to retreat from the enclave until that happens.
The 20-point peace plan that Trump touted as bringing peace to the Middle East helped end two years of brutal warfare and achieve the release of the remaining living Israeli hostages as well as the bodies of all but one of the dead. The initial phase left Gaza divided in two, with Israel controlling a little over half of the enclave and Hamas the rest.
The second phase of the plan requires Hamas to give up governance, disarm and transfer control of the territory to an international force of troops and a technocratic committee of Palestinians who would run it. A Board of Peace, chaired by Trump, would oversee the process. Israel would retreat from most of Gaza and the massive undertaking of rebuilding the shattered land would commence.
But Hamas still controls half of Gaza and refuses to disarm, creating a domino effect that stalls the plan and risks leaving it in limbo between war and peace.
Most countries won’t send troops into Hamas territory as long as the U.S.-designated terrorist group remains there. Some countries are considering sending troops into the territory controlled by Israel, but many, especially Arab countries, don’t want to appear to be supporting an Israeli occupation.
It is a problem that many observers predicted.
“I think the most important sticking point here is reality,” said Ofer Shelah, director of national security policy research at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “From the get-go, the whole idea of what’s beyond phase one was very vague, but this U.S. administration does not do details, does not do complicated, and does not do long term.”
Crikey, even I predicted that this would happen! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this would happen given that no other Arab state is interested in taking part in the pacification. The war will not be settled, nor Gaza reconstructed, until Hamas disbands and disarms, and they don’t see any reason why they should. Until they do, the war cannot be considered nearly over, and the vaunted “two-state solution” is a no-go. I wonder if all those countries like Canada and the UK which have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state are happy recognizing a sovereign state ruled by terrorists.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron seem to be in the closet:
Andrzej: What are you doing here?
Hili: Keeping my distance from the crowd.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Unikam tłumów.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Chicago Born and Raised:
From Masih: three women (two of them with an eye shot out) bring Iran to court, but in Argentina. The English translation from Farsi is given first:
Three women are set to bring the Islamic Republic to trial in a court in Argentina on charges of “crimes against humanity.” Kowsar Eftekhari and Mersedeh Shahinkar, two eye-injured victims of the Woman, Life, Freedom Revolution, and Mahsa Piraei, the justice-seeking daughter of Minoo Majidi, are the three names present in this case as plaintiffs.
This request to initiate criminal investigations has been filed in Argentina’s judiciary with the assistance of the “Iran Human Rights Documentation Center” and the support of the Strategic Accountability Project at the Atlantic Council.
This complaint requests that the Argentine court investigate the role of senior members of the intelligence apparatus, military forces and police, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and also civilian officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government in this widespread and organized attack against civilians. This indictment names 40 individuals who have committed crimes against humanity, including targeted blinding and murder, but their identities are currently being kept confidential.
The Islamic Republic had previously been tried and convicted in this country for the bombing of the Jewish center in Argentina.
Since the request is only for criminal investigations and not a civil lawsuit, the plaintiffs have no claim for financial damages.
Powerful women who now stand to reveal the hideous and criminal face of the Islamic Republic to the world more than ever.
But I wonder if anything can be accomplished by initiating a court case against Iran in Argentina.
سه زن قرار است جمهوری اسلامی را در دادگاهی در آرژانتین به اتهام «جنایت علیه بشریت» به محاکمه بکشانند. کوثر افتخاری و مرسده شاهینکار دو آسیبدیده چشمی انقلاب زن زندگی آزادی و مهسا پیرایی دختر دادخواه مینو مجیدی، سه نامی هستند که در این پرونده به عنوان شاکی حضور دارند..
این… pic.twitter.com/yqUqR2x2eX
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 18, 2025
From Luana. Vavilov died at 55 after being put in a gulag by the Soviets. His crime? Sticking up for genetics and opposing the ridiculous theories of the charlatan Lysenko. This man is a hero.
Drawing on the legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, the scientist who built the world’s then-largest seed bank before dying in a gulag, our new PNAS Perspective examines how modern biodiversity rules are undermining both conservation and food security. pic.twitter.com/lwH2QdkJe0
— David Bertioli (@BotanyBert) December 16, 2025
From Simon, who says, “I guess i found something i agree with him on.”
Dr. Oz: “We are in a weird place in America where we have mixed politics and medicine. And you know what you get when you mix politics and medicine? Politics. There is no medicine left.” pic.twitter.com/NMX93OB7ub
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) December 18, 2025
From Malcolm, a very fast dog:
Incredible speed of this dogpic.twitter.com/ThOSBBB07x
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
One from my feed; a flying (or rather, gliding) fish:
Flying fish also known as Exocoetidae pic.twitter.com/l8CYLzndnZ
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) December 17, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
https://x.com/Evolutionistrue/status/2001969370864783746
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one he describes as “Munching its way through condensed spirals of chloroplasts”. I seems quite full at the end!
“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known"- Bertrand Russell, 1976.Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠
— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-12-17T16:53:05.725Z
Clearly from Matthew’s new biography of Crick, which I’m well into now (it’s superb):
Was Rosalind Franklin a secret football fan? Cryptic note in her US address book.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-18T10:44:10.663Z
The line about mixing politics and medicine or politics and science yielding politics has regularly been heard from Vincent and Dr. Dan over the past year on TWiV. I think it was Paul Offitt who took it one step further when considering real world outcomes for children when he offered that mixing politics and science gives you death.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
You must protest / It is your diamond duty / Ah but in such an ugly time / The true protest is beauty. -Phil Ochs, folksinger (19 Dec 1940-1976)
I went looking for details on the gender-care bill, and found them on this substack. The act is called “Safety, Effectiveness, and Professional Standards of Care for Sex-Rejecting Procedures on Children and Adolescents.”
“Sex rejecting” seems a sensible way of wording it, given that the concepts of “gender” and “gender identity” are so ill-defined.
But that porevents people treating precocious puberty with blockers, which in my view is an ok procedure, though others may disagree.
The actual wording of the declaration (which would allow puberty blockers for precocious puberty, and which also allows psychiatric care) is given in a link in the above-linked Substack, and is:
“I hereby declare: Sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors, and therefore, fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care. For the purposes of this declaration, “sex-rejecting procedures” means pharmaceutical or surgical interventions, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as mastectomies, vaginoplasties, and other procedures, that attempt to align an individual’s physical appearance or body with an asserted identity that differs from the individual’s sex. This Declaration does not apply (1) To treatment of an individual with a medically verifiable disorder of sexual development; (2) For purposes other than attempting to align an individual’s physical appearance or body with an asserted identity that differs from the individual’s sex; or (3) To treat complications, including any infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused by or exacerbated by the performance of a sex-rejecting procedure”
Thank you for sharing this detail. It is what I expected the bill to do, but it’s reassuring to see it confirmed.
I don’t know if this bill is flawed in some way, or is basically sensible since it does produce practices that are similar to those now done overseas. But I’d expect most Americans would support psychiatric care for minors claiming gender dysphoria. And that may not be on the chopping block.
Thank you for these details. A rigid ban could harm some minors, so we’ll have to see how this plays out in practice. The policy may evolve.
Does Medicaid pay for elective procedures and treatments, such as cosmetic surgery? If gender-care is classified as elective, I would expect that the Medicaid could refuse to pay for it or for some aspects.
Hence the mantra insisting that gender-affirming “care” is “medically necessary”. Hence the insistence (not supported by evidence) that youths denied this “care” will commit suicide, thus making the intervention “necessary”.
I don’t think it’s correct to say that security cameras keep killers at bay, for in this case they did not inhibit the killer’s actions, they merely aided in his apprehension.
Yes, I meant to say, “make it easier to catch killers”. However, perhaps they do act as a deterrent, just as red-light cameras or speed-limit cameras make drivers obey the law more often.
We simply don’t know how many potential mass murderers have been “kept at bay” by ubiquitous security cameras. What limited empirical evidence we have suggests “many”. The prior knowledge that you are going to get caught deters lots of crimes. Mass murder should not be an exception.
Generally:
Mass murderers, especially ones with guns, are often the type who are on a suicide mission (sometimes not even knowing it). Nothing will deter them. Cameras? These people are fine with being killed, no doubt begging for it, and thus many kill themselves when the deed is done or the road ends. These types will never be kept at bay by cameras (until the cameras can turn into killer robots). The best you can hope for is these folk (usually young disenfranchised males) don’t have easy access to firearms. America will presently not stop such people, our laws won’t allow it.
By disenfranchised young men, Mark, you may mean the urban gang culture which accounts for the large majority of more-than-one murders in America. I don’t think those shooters are on suicide missions. It’s just part of the gang trade. And no, you aren’t going to disarm those people. No one cares about those shootings. Seriously they don’t. That’s why they don’t make the national news. Take out all those deaths before you start talking about the kind of shootings that people actually worry about. Like the drug trade that largely fuels it, their culture will have to fix it. We can’t.
OK, so now we are left with the mass shootings by mentally ill people who may well have decided that today is the day they die….or it dawns on them after they pull the trigger that first time that hey, there is no way out of this, is there. Spoiler alert: I don’t think this describes Sydney at all.
They aren’t very common, only about 3% of gun homicides are done in the settings that make the news because they are uncommon and the victims aren’t in the underclass. (The denominator is a large number so yes, 3% adds up to a distressing number of innocent dead people. Real tragedies.) In a country of 340 million people (and a lot of handy short-barreled semi-automatic rifles ideal for urban/suburban “combat”) you’re going to have a few of these shootings every year.
Now let’s shift to Australia, where the only lawful firearms are bolt-action hunting rifles licensed to members of hunting clubs. There is no access to scary guns for anyone. Unfortunately, full-powered .30 cal. cartridges fired from long-barreled rifles are frightfully dangerous. And that’s “all” that this father-and-son team of Pakistani Muslims managed to get. Were they the disenfranchised young men you speak of, left behind by their country? Were they alienated incel loners undergoing gender transition? Or are they the kind of ideologically poisoned jihadists Australians should never have let into their country in the first place? They were a team.
Normally I’m at least equipoisedly sympathetic to the idea that keeping guns out of the hands out of most people might be a good thing, since so many people are silently crazy enough to do harm someday. And in my country the background level of violence that a good guy with a gun might attenuate is low. (In our remote rural prairie and mountain districts, though, the police can be an hour away in good weather. We are very thin with lawful force. Hence my equipoise.) However in this Australian pogrom, I think it really was true that people, not guns, kill people.
The most sensible response is to round up the Muslims and deport them (or at least anyone of them who has come to the attention of the police.) Doubling down on “common-sense gun control” and confiscating the hunting rifles from everyone else would most oafishly miss the point here, as well as rubbing the noses of the Jewish community in what the government is communicating by so missing the point.
Ordinary crazy people deprived of guns might not resort to knives and machetes on their “Today is my day to die” day (although the denizens of our Crown Indian Reserves certainly do.) But jihadis will resort to whatever weapon is handy when Allah tells them to go kill a bunch of Jews, and happily die doing it. We know they will because they do. This is not the standard gun-control story. It’s Muslims killing Jews in Australia.
Well, you sure fleshed out that comment. 🙂
Though my comment was mostly about cameras not being a deterrent for mass-murderers; I think you agree.
Per WaPo, apparently the Brown case was greatly aided by someone who followed the shooter around before the shooting, after seeing him acting suspiciously in a bathroom there. The guy got the plate number.
Also, imagine being able to cross those fish with pigs.
That Vampyrella needs to find somewhere to sleep off a very heavy lunch! Impressive stuffing
The flying fish are amazing!
I have little to say about the other news of the day, so will refrain. Until I can’t.
I’ll just toss this out there. If I must choose between the following two options:
1) RFK Jr. withdrawing COVID vaccination recommendations for children; delaying the dose of HepB for children with HepB-negative mothers; bringing both of the above in line with standard practice across most of Europe; deferring the decision for each to parents in consultation with doctors; and effectively banning “gender-affirming” care, or
2) Another progressive Administration reinstituting the former recommendations for the above two vaccines; schools and universities then mandating COVID vaccination for youth; and full-throated support of the federal government for “gender-affirming” care with all its atrocities—
Then, I clearly know which option I would choose despite having heard repeatedly that one set of options is anti-science and the other enlightened. If only things were as simple as good versus bad.
TERF twitter – where I spend time, is very happy about the Trump admin’s move re; “Affirmative care”. It was a big promise he made and (it is said, at least) it mattered in the election, particularly in swing voters – presumably parents.
Just a note: precocious puberty, prostate cancer and the chemical castration of sex offenders are the ONLY on-label uses of puberty blockers. I imagine there will be a carve out for these. Though I haven’t read the bill either yet.
All trans stuff is off label in the US.
Actual body dysmorphia occurs at a rate of one in 50,000 kids and can be handled in other ways. Bc there is simply no way to know “genuine” cases. TRA activists school confused kids online on how to obtain blockers from doctors: tutorials threatening suicide.
PALESTINE:
You (all), me, my dog and (if we had ’em) our grandchildren will be long gone before a Palestinian State is even considered. Meantime… Gaza will continue on its merry, jihadist way.
I’m a big fan of Frances Widdowson and am very jelly PCC(E) got to meet her – possibly at Stamford? It doesn’t surprise me she’s a bit of an abrasive broad but in countering the Kamloops moral panic she’s a hero of mine.
Frances spoke with Peter Boghossian on you tube this week about the incident.
D.A.
NYC
There is also some use of LHRH agonists and antagonists in some forms of breast and ovarian cancer – which doesn’t change your general point. These drugs have been used in cancer therapy for decades. As you say it’s hard to imagine that anyone would ban uncontroversial applications of established drugs. But then again in this administration anything might happen.
Cheap shot. The Declaration by Secretary Kennedy explicitly doesn’t propose anything of the sort.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/declaration-pediatric-sex-rejecting-procedures.pdf
Thank you, Simon. I didn’t know about the ovarian cancer application.
best,
D.A.
NYC
From what I’ve read, the new gender bill is preventing treatment that makes physical changes to a child’s body. No more breast removal at 13. No more sterilising. No more drugs that will make them intellectually, sexually and emotionally stunted for life.
Blockers have side effects, but short term use does less harm than allowing a precocious puberty to go ahead. I haven’t seen anything that says they will be banned for the already legally approved use, just for off label use. There may need to be checks that they are stopped before the normal puberty window, to allow puberty to go ahead. Unscrupulous medics may overprescribe.
I think the only change to psychiatric care will be that psychiatrists will now be free to investigate the root causes of a child’s distress, and not be compelled accept the child’s self diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Basically they will be free to do their job properly. In girls, rejection of the female body is often a result of child sexual abuse. The psychiatrist should be allowed to focus on healing that trauma and challenging feelings around the body without being accused of transphobia.
Dr Az Hakeem, a highly respected psychiatrist, was reported to the GMC for “conversion therapy”. If a patient truly believes they are trans they should have no fear of being questioned about it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220522161144/https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/trans-conversion-therapy-patient-speaks-out-psychiatrist-reported-1641330
“Basically they will be free to do their job properly.”
….or… forced to do their job properly. Sadly many are on the trans train.
Dr. Hakeem is excellent, impressive doctor. He was on Genspect / Stella’s show and the NM conference perhaps?
cheers Joolz,
D.A.
NYC
Dr Hakeem specialises in the subject of gender dysphoria. He is highly regarded by sane people. He worked at one of the gender clinics for a while and saw what was going on.
I get frustrated when people who are supposed to be intelligent, like qualified therapists, suddenly start quoting absolute nonsense. I get so cross about it that I’ve even discussed it with my own therapist 😂
That phrase “people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth” is ambiguous, possibly deliberately so.
Clearly there are people who believe themselves to be a sex other than the one they were born as. They feel “misaligned.” That might fall under the description. It sounds like it could. And of course the reasons for this aren’t specified, they could include mental health conditions and social contagion. The trans-identified.
But “people whose gender identity does not align with their birth” when used by Genderists means people who, at birth, have an inherent immutable “gender identity” which is misaligned with their sex (or “sex assigned at birth.”) The cause is included in the description. They identify as trans because they are trans, which is narrowly defined.
It’s of course perfectly possible to disagree with this and still believe in the existence of people who do agree with it, but are mistaken. The NYT however tries to make it sound absolutely shocking that OMG even the existence of people is being denied. We don’t see them when we look at them! We turn our heads! They can’t vote, hold a job, or even go outside!
Oh please. I wish this whole “denying the existence of” trope would go away.
The “extinct us” trope is huge, central to the whole ideology.
You can find a heaping helping at it on the PBS newshour twice this week. It is framed as trans kids being hunted by a totalitarian mob like it is Rwanda or something.
It is so extreme as to be bizarre. Makes the NYT seem moderate.
best Sastra,
D.A.
NYC
FWIW I confirm your observation.
Let’s be clear that we are talking about the Declaration by Secretary Kennedy of his intent to introduce new executive regulations on the provision of sex-denying care. The House bills are something else. The Dept. proposes to exclude hospitals from Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement entirely if they allow their doctors to perform sex-denying treatments to minors. It also proposes to prohibit Medicaid and CHIP from reimbursing providers for this treatment. The rules wouldn’t directly prohibit hospitals or doctors from doing this treatment. They would “just” exclude hospitals from the entire federal reimbursement system if they do.
The legislative bills passed in the House of Representations would outlaw something different. But since they are described as unlikely to pass in the Senate I haven’t looked them up to see how different. The bills would seem to directly prohibit providers from doing the treatment at all, even if they offered to do it for free.
Secretary Kennedy pointed out the CMS does not have the authority to recommend any treatment. It can only ban treatments as not meeting the standard expected of hospitals permitted to bill CMS. He noted in passing that various forms of psychotherapy (“talk therapy”) were endorsed by the HHS review and are therefore not covered in the reimbursement ban on sex-denying therapy.
The host raises the question as to whether there are ever any valid medical exceptions where sex-denying treatment should be permitted, i.e., a condition where going through normal puberty could ever be considered harmful, but developing the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex would be beneficial. (Puberty blockers are almost always followed by pseudo-puberty.) HHS is not banning any treatment. It’s only proposing to starve the hospitals that do it. So no, there are no exceptions under which a hospital could do any sex-denying care even for “heroic”, “compassionate” reasons and not lose its privilege to bill Medicare/Medicaid. Suicidal adolescents must of course be treated. Just not with sex-denying treatment if the hospital wants to keep billing Medicare/Medicaid for everything else it does.
However, the rules from the HHS Declaration would not prevent a doctor from providing this treatment outside a hospital as long as he didn’t try to bill Medicaid. A free-standing clinic that doesn’t see Medicaid or Medicare patients could operate as now, treating whomever it liked, at least so long as private insurance continues to reimburse it. Caution, though. Private insurance companies often follow Medicare’s lead in what they regard as medically necessary care. These clinics might soon have to live on what they can get out of pocket from self-pay patients. Are there enough trans people with that kind of money to keep all those gender docs in the style they have become accustomed to?
Yes, esp with the insurance companies. They quietly rule our lives in ways we don’t often consider.
“HHS is not banning any treatment. It’s only proposing to starve the hospitals that do it. ”
– that’s as I see it. Directionally correct of the admin but probably all they can do at this point. A win.
best Leslie,
D.A.
NYC
My guess is that Widdowson is never charged. The last thing the Kamloops folks want is for the actual evidence to be disclosed. I trivially found the following.
CNN “‘Unthinkable’ discovery in Canada as remains of 215 children found buried near residential school”
The AI summary was a bit more accurate.
“While anomalies detected in 2021 near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School suggested potential unmarked graves, no human remains have been excavated or confirmed as of late 2024”
The police charged her with trespassing and gave her a ticket. She can either plead guilty and pay the fine or plead not guilty and have her day in Provincial Court. In neither case is the apple orchard going to be dug up for evidence. She’s guilty (or not) of trespassing on the UVic campus regardless of what the truth in the ground in Kamloops is.
The Indians in Kamloops know full well there are no bodies there. If the RCMP believed for one second that orchard was a crime scene — according to the narrative some of the “murderers” might still be alive and some families are still anguishedly searching the province for their lost children — they would have been there that afternoon, at the Band’s insistence, with police tape, Hazmat suits, and shovels collecting evidence.
Yes, Leslie. From her discussion w/ Peter Boghossian it seems the charge is absolute BS.
In fact… it is a huge win for her, publicity wise. 🙂
This is an amazing moral panic example, easy to grasp, that should be more widely known as a learning example of how mass opinion can go bonkers in our era.
D.A.
NYC
I find the residential school massacre scandal kind of amazing. I understand that some folks are making a ton of money on it, but the psychology of the rest of the true believers confounds me.
It is like the flat earth or 9/11 truther arguments, with their strange, circular logic.
Here is an interesting look at previous work at the site-
https://gravesintheorchard.wordpress.com/
Re: the Washington Post endorsement of U.S. Venezuela actions: I’d like to know the editorial board’s (and Venezuelan Nobel Prize winner Machado’s) preference: Allende or Pinochet. Would that the saintly, omniscient, benevolent Heinz Kissinger were available to counsel the Narcissist in Chief.
Re: “Bertrand Russell, 1976” quote: perhaps a typo. Russell died in 1970.