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Opposing the Transgender Craze: How to Become a Scientific Heretic
Opposing the Transgender Craze: How to Become a Scientific Heretic
Galileo Galilei was an advocate of Copernicanism when Copernicanism wasn’t cool. Galileo, the father of experimental physics, was an early advocate for the scientific idea that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
Church authorities, however, at first claimed the theory to be “philosophically [that is, scientifically] foolish and absurd, and is considered official heresy because it explicitly contradicts the meaning of Scripture in many places.”
Now there’s a lot more to the Galileo story, which became a mistold part of the “religion-opposes-science” trope ever since. But today I want to ask, who is opposing science these days?
Take the case of Paul McHugh, the Henry Phipps Professor and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001.
Gender’s Last Stand, or Reclaiming Our Humanity | Chalking Sidewalks
The viral image catches in my Facebook feed like a chicken bone in my throat. I can’t help but stop and clench. A forlorn human, nameless, androgynous, casts weary eyes at the camera, begging me to take seriously the words on the sign she holds: “MY GENITALS DO NOT DEFINE MY GENDER.”
I almost laugh when I see it. This sincere but misbegotten crime against language is its own best parody. Attempts to mock it with a rejoinder such as “my years of existence do not define my age” seem tame by comparison. Surely, my inner voice assures me, anyone who has ever watched a nature documentary, taken health class or spoken the English language knows that genitals are pretty much the centerpiece of what is meant by male and female.
Or at least, everyone knew this fact until last Tuesday at tea with Alice and the Mad Hatter, when the fickle zeitgeist of the 21st century suddenly and explosively shed objective gender. While the candles of our happy unbirthdays burned, our ruling class tore down the wall between the men’s room and women’s room and decreed that the privacy we had assumed was civilization’s sacred duty to the fairer sex was now an act of rebellion. What was once just the plain simple view of things has been discarded with a slur: binary-gendered. And those who were once just men and women have been given a pejorative—cisgendered—on par with the shame-inducing labels “white privilege” and “man’s world.”
This is why I almost laugh, but don’t.
You see, while American school children are divining which bathrooms to use, and while families are making headlines for encouraging their offspring to determine their own genders, I have a daughter who is just months away from tumbling out of her mother’s womb and landing in this topsy-turvy Wonderland.
I want to break her fall. My paternal instinct compels me to catch her delicate petals before they tear on the jagged shards of our collapsing western world. But there’s a problem.
10 demographic trends that are shaping the U.S. and the world | Pew Research Center
10 demographic trends that are shaping the U.S. and the world
At its core, demography is the act of counting people. But it’s also important to study the forces that are driving population change, and measure how these changes have an impact on people’s lives. For example, how does immigration affect U.S. population growth? Do Americans feel that children are better off with a parent at home, in an era when most women work? How is the rise of the young-adult Millennial generation contributing to the rise of Americans with no stated religion? For this year’s Population Association of America (PAA) annual meeting, here is a roundup of some of Pew Research Center’s recent demography-related findings that tell us how America and the world are changing.
1 Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades By 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority. Much of this change has been (and will be) driven by immigration. Nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in the past 50 years, mostly from Latin America and Asia. Today, a near-record 14% of the country’s population is foreign born compared with just 5% in 1965. Over the next five decades, the majority of U.S. population growth is projected to be linked to new Asian and Hispanic immigration. American attitudes about immigration and diversity are supportive of these changes for the most part. More Americans say immigrants strengthen the country than say they burden it, and most say the U.S.’s increasing ethnic diversity makes it a better place to live.
Bye-Bye, Distinct American Culture! The Left’s Massive Demographic Shift – The Rush Limbaugh Show
Bye-Bye, Distinct American Culture! The Left’s Massive Demographic Shift
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put out this massive research product recently: “10 Demographic Trends That Are Shaping the US and the World,” and, if you go into reading these with any kind of a pessimistic attitude, you would be totally within your logical bounds to conclude that the country’s done, as you’ve known it.
There’s always gonna be an America. But it increasingly looks like it will be less and less like the America that was founded. There will always be a United States, we think. It starts out this way. “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the US is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades. By 2055, the US will not have a single racial or ethnic majority. Much of this change has been (and will be) driven by immigration.”
Pesticides alter bumblebees’ flower selection, pollination skills – UPI.com
GUELPH, Ontario, March 14 (UPI) — Bumblebees exposed to even low levels of pesticides have trouble acquiring the pollination skills necessary to retrieve nectar from some wildflowers — especially those with complex shapes.
Researchers found bumblebees exposed to to neonicotinoid insecticide took longer to collect pollen and sought pollen from different flowers than control bees.
“Bees rely on learning to locate flowers, track their profitability and work-out how best to efficiently extract nectar and pollen,” senior study author Nigel Raine, the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation at the University of Guelph, said in a press release. “If exposure to low levels of pesticide affects their ability to learn, bees may struggle to collect food and impair the essential pollination services they provide to both crops and wild plants.”
It Goes Way Beyond Flint: America Has a Lead Crisis that Stretches from Coast to Coast – In These Times
“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.
The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable. As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”
Agrihood Communities Redefining ‘Homegrown’ Food – Earth911.com
That’s right. The hottest trend in housing development is to purposely build homes next to a large farm that benefits the entire neighborhood. Not only do agrihoods provide an even deeper sense of community for those fortunate enough to live in an eco-friendly planned community, but it also brings the farm-to-table movement one step closer to your kitchen counter every night. By placing an emphasis on growing food in the community, agrihoods reduce food waste associated with transportation (not to mention food is fresher and sources are more transparent).
In agrihoods, farms are the amenity that homeowners pay for, not tennis courts, gyms or community pools. That is not to say that carefully planned out agrihoods do not have community clubhouses, scheduled activities or other benefits that homeowners are used to in traditional housing developments. The focus, however, is in coming together as a community over the shared love of food and healthy living.
Texas Grand Jury Indicts Makers of Planned Parenthood Baby Parts Videos – Breitbart
Pro-life activist David Daleiden had hoped a Grand Jury in Texas would indict Planned Parenthood executives for dealing in aborted baby parts. Instead he and a colleague have been indicted by a Grand Jury in Houston for actions they took in exposing the Planned Parenthood baby-parts business.
Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson investigated Planned Parenthood and gave them a clean bill of health. They then indicted Daleiden, in a complete surprise to Daleiden supporters.
This turn of affairs happened today in Harris County Texas where Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress, and his colleague Sandra Merritt were indicted for felony tampering with a government record. The specifics of that charge and official record were not revealed. He was also indicted for a misdemeanor charge of buying fetal tissue.
A warrant was issued for Daleiden on Monday evening.
WORLD | ‘In God’s hands’ | Mary Jackson | Jan. 23, 2016
ROE V. WADE | Advocates for seniors and the disabled warn that newly legalized assisted suicide in California may snowball beyond the terminally ill
Ever since 59-year-old Laurie Hoirup was a year old, doctors have predicted she had only months to live. When she struggled to stand months after her first birthday, a doctor diagnosed her with Lou Gehrig’s disease. That day Hoirup’s mother placed her in her crib with a bottle, turned on the gas, and laid herself on the couch, waiting for both of them to die.
But within a few moments Hoirup’s mother realized the doctor could be wrong. She turned off the gas and resolved to face her daughter’s illness.
In the years following, doctors changed Hoirup’s diagnosis several times until at age 17 she learned she had spinal muscular atrophy, a condition that leaves her with little to no use of body parts except for her right hand. The Sacramento, Calif., woman relies on a ventilator and tempers pain with daily medication. She depends on family members and caregivers to feed, bathe, and groom her and to assist her with using the restroom.
Author of Pentagon Fitness Blog Criticized for Promoting Christianity | Military.com
A U.S. Army logistics officer who writes a fitness blog for the Defense Department’s health website has been criticized for plugging Jesus and the Bible as a way of getting healthy.
Col. Thomas Hundley, who authors the Motivational Monday Message on Health.mil, the official website of the Defense Health Agency, urged readers of the Jan. 4 column to “improve your spiritual fitness through increased prayer.”
Increased prayer was the first of five recommendations Hundley suggested for improvement in 2016 in a blog entry that also referenced a Bible story about Jesus feeding thousands of people with two fish and five loaves of bread.
“He just gave God a little something to work with,” Hundley wrote, tying the story into getting fit by challenging readers to “attain a ‘new you’ in 2016. All we have to do is give God and ourselves a little something to work with.”
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