weirdcritter

Just to be clear, I do not agree with the mortgage plan that started this thread. It will not work, and it will just put a lot of poor families into deeper poverty and discouragement as well as make other homeowners angry at the Democratic party. Section 8, which helps with rentals, works fine.

Why is billionaire George Soros a bogeyman for the hard right? Published 7 September 2019 Share IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES He's a Jewish multi-billionaire philanthropist who has given away $32bn. Why does the hard right from America to Australia and from Hungary to Honduras believe George Soros is at the heart of a global conspiracy, asks the BBC's Mike Rudin. One quiet Monday afternoon last October in leafy upstate New York, a large manila envelope was placed in the mailbox of an exclusive country mansion belonging to multi-billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The package looked suspicious. The return address was misspelt as "FLORIDS" and the mail had already been delivered earlier that day. The police were called and soon the FBI was on the scene. Inside the bubble-wrapped envelope was a photograph of Soros, marked with a red "X". Alongside it, a six-inch plastic pipe, a small clock, a battery, wiring and a black powder. More than a dozen similar packages were sent to the homes of former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats. None of the devices exploded. The FBI traced the bombs to a white van covered in pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, parked in a supermarket car park in Florida. Immediately the right-wing media claimed it was a "false-flag" operation intended to derail President Donald Trump and the Republican campaign, just two weeks before the crucial US mid-term elections. Fox Business host Lou Dobbs tweeted: "Fake News - Fake Bombs. Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?" Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh added: "Republicans just don't do this kind of thing." IMAGE SOURCE,MORGAN FINKELSTEIN Soon the internet was awash with allegations that the bomb plot was a hoax organised by Soros himself. President Trump condemned the "despicable acts", but when a member of the audience at a White House reception shouted "Soros! Lock him up!" the president seemed amused. Then a 56-year-old Florida man called Cesar Sayoc was arrested. Conspiracy theories claimed he wasn't actually a Republican. But Luigi Marra, a former work colleague, told me how Sayoc used to deliver pizzas in his van plastered with pro-Trump stickers and argue with customers if they had Democratic posters at their homes. "Everything for him was a conspiracy theory, everything. George Soros was the one behind everything, he was the one buying the whole Democratic Party, he was the epicentre of what is going wrong in the United States of America." Sayoc's social media revealed more. On the day the pipe bomb was discovered at George Soros's house, Sayoc reposted a meme claiming, "The world is waking up to the horrors of George Soros." Sayoc later pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including intent to kill or injure with explosives, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. So how did George Soros come to be regarded by so many as the evil mastermind at the heart of a global conspiracy? Find out more Watch Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind on BBC Two at 21:00 on Sunday 8 September Viewers in the UK can catch up later online In the UK, Soros is known as "the man who broke the Bank of England" in 1992. Along with other currency speculators, he borrowed pounds, and then sold them, helping to drive down the price of sterling on currency markets and ultimately forcing the UK to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the process he made $1bn. The Hungarian emigre, who survived the Holocaust and fled the Communists, is thought to have made in total about $44bn through financial speculation. And he's used his fortune to fund thousands of education, health, human rights and democracy projects. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, Soros in Moscow in 1993 Established in 1979, his Open Society Foundations now operate in more than 120 countries around the world. But this bold philanthropy in support of liberal, democratic causes has increasingly made him the bogeyman of the right. The first conspiracy theories about George Soros appeared in the early 1990s, but they really gained traction after he condemned the 2003 Iraq War and started donating millions of dollars to the US Democratic Party. Ever since, American right-wing commentators and politicians have gone after him with increasing fury and vitriol, and often with scant concern for the facts. But it was Donald Trump's election victory that took the attacks on Soros to a new and dangerous level. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, White supremacists marching in Charlottesville Eight months into Trump's presidency, in August 2017, neo-Nazis held a torchlit procession in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clashes with counter-protesters ended in tragedy, when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Among US right-wingers it was soon claimed that the violence was orchestrated and financed by Soros, in order to tarnish the reputation of President Trump. And they said the key to the secret plot was a man called Brennan Gilmore, who filmed the car being driven into the counter-protesters. Right-wing radio host Alex Jones claimed Gilmore was paid $320,000 a year by Soros and was part of a deep-state coup to oust the president. But any connection was extremely tenuous. While it's true that Soros gave $500,000 to the political campaign of Tom Perriello - a Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia whom Gilmore had worked for - there's no evidence Soros or the Open Society directed or paid protesters at Charlottesville. Gilmore, who never received any money from Soros, is now suing Alex Jones and several others for defamation. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, Clashes in Charlottesville Since then, the attacks on Soros have kept coming, and only intensified. Last autumn thousands of migrants left Honduras bound for the USA, just a month before the mid-term elections that threatened to weaken Republican control of Congress. Immediately the so-called migrant caravan was blamed on Soros. Fox News repeatedly broadcast claims that Soros wanted open borders and unrestricted immigration. Jack Kingston, a former Republican Congressman, told me: "It is a very organised effort and somebody is behind this, somebody is paying for some of this and it would be typical of George Soros to get involved in that." For his part, President Trump retweeted a video that claimed to show cash being handed out to people in Honduras to "storm the US border", with a suggestion that the cash might have come from Soros. When asked outside the White House whether Soros was funding the migrant caravan, he replied: "I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people say yes." Cindy Jerezano, who travelled with the caravan from her home in Honduras to the US, told me that she was not offered any money and made her own decision to travel nearly 3,000 miles to San Diego. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, The migrant caravan crosses from Guatemala into Mexico Cindy was supported, once she arrived in the US, by the Catholic Charities for the Diocese of San Diego. Nadine Toppozada, the charity's director of refugee and immigrant services, explained that their lawyers interviewed asylum seekers in great detail but had never heard Soros's name mentioned. Nor had they seen any evidence of Soros involvement. What's more, the video President Trump retweeted quickly turned out to be flawed. Within hours, journalists discovered the footage was not filmed in Honduras as originally claimed, but in the neighbouring country of Guatemala, and a closer look at the clip showed at least one of the supposed aid workers was armed. The migrant caravan was filmed throughout its entire journey. Local charities were seen helping the migrants. But there is no evidence of Soros funding at any point. On 27 October 2018, 11 days after the first conspiracy theory surfaced about the migrant caravan, and five days after the pipe bomb was delivered to Soros's house, a white man armed with an assault rifle and three handguns walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh. There he murdered 11 Jews. It was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in US history - and it was carried out by a man obsessed with George Soros. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, A vigil in memory of the 11 people who died is held at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh The social media posts of the gunman, Robert Bowers, revealed he believed in a dark anti-Semitic conspiracy theory called "white genocide", with Soros as the mastermind. The theory claims white people are being replaced by immigrants and will ultimately be eliminated. It explains the neo-Nazis' chant, "Jews will not replace us!" as they marched through Charlottesville. Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, discovered one post where Bowers referred to Soros as "the Jew that funds white genocide and controls the press", and claimed that he pushed for gun control and open borders. Finkelstein, who has received Open Society funding to investigate what he believes is a growing threat, concludes that white supremacists like Bowers see Soros as a Jewish mastermind pulling the strings. "These violent actors are justifying their violence by pointing to Soros as a supreme form of evil," he says. 'I stabbed someone to get into a white supremacy gang' When a right-wing activist met a left-wing anti-fascist Is there a growing far-right threat online? The vilification of George Soros has spread far beyond the US, to Armenia, Australia, Honduras, the Philippines, Russia and many other countries. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Soros of being at the heart of a Jewish conspiracy to "divide" and "shatter" Turkey and other nations. In Italy, former deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini accused him of wanting to fill the country with migrants because "he likes slaves". The leader of the UK's Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, has claimed Soros is "actively encouraging people… to flood Europe" and "in many ways is the biggest danger to the entire Western World". But one country, and one government, has gone further than any other to attack Soros. It is his birthplace, Hungary, where he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding free school meals, human rights projects and even a new university. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his populist nationalist government claim that Soros has a secret plot to flood Hungary with migrants and destroy their nation. IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, A billboard tells Hungarians not to let Soros "have the last laugh" Leonard Benardo, vice-president of the Open Society Foundations, protests that this is an outright lie: "The allegation is false. Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations are proponents of open borders." That hasn't stopped the Hungarian government, which has spent 100m euros on a media campaign warning voters not to let Soros "have the last laugh" and introduced what it calls "Stop Soros" laws, criminalising help for illegal immigrants and taxing support for organisations "promoting migration". "There's a lot of money going into the Soros empire, billions of dollars for the past couple of decades and years," government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told me. "Now that's a lot of money, and nobody can be as naïve as to believe that that money goes without weight and goes without any intention." IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, Hungary erected a razorwire border fence in September 2015, halting the entry of migrants As Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of the Central European University that Soros founded, puts it: "The Orban government has decided to make Mr Soros public enemy number one". So how did this happen? The answer lies in upstate New York. In 2013, when the Hungarian leader needed advice on getting re-elected, he approached a legendary political consultant, called Arthur Finkelstein (no relation of Joel), who used to work in a small office above a hairdresser's in Irvington, just 20 miles down the road from Soros's country mansion. Arthur Finkelstein, who died in 2017, worked for Donald Trump, George Bush senior, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and is renowned for making "liberal" a dirty word in politics. IMAGE SOURCE,C-SPAN Image caption, Arthur Finkelstein Finkelstein created a new style of politics dubbed "Finkel Think", says Hannes Grassegger, a reporter for the Swiss publication, Das Magazin. "Arthur Finkelstein always said, 'You don't go against the Taliban, you go against Osama Bin Laden.' So it's about personalisation, picking the perfect enemy and then [you] go full on against that person, so that people are actually scared of your opponent. And never talk about your own candidate's policies, they don't matter at all." Finkelstein realised the best way to get Orban elected was to find a new enemy. He suggested Soros, and it was a perfect choice, Grassegger says. "The very right hated him because he was Jewish, people at the very left hated him because he was a capitalist." The irony is, Arthur Finkelstein was himself a Jew. "This Jewish gentleman creates this Jewish monster," Grassegger says. The Hungarian Government denies they needed anyone to "invent" Soros. In a statement it said: "George Soros invented himself as a political actor as long as two decades ago. George Soros's network of institutions exercises a great deal of power without a mandate coming from the people." But Orban seems to have implemented Finkelstein's advice to the letter and gone even further. Media caption, The Conspiracy Files: Why did Hungary’s PM turn on George Soros? In a speech weeks before the 2018 general election, Orban rounded on Soros and appeared to revive anti-Semitic stereotypes. "We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding. Not straightforward but crafty. Not honest but unprincipled. Not national but international. Does not believe in working but speculates with money. Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world," he said. Viktor Orban won by a landslide. After the election, the crackdown on Soros-funded organisations intensified. Last May the Open Society closed its office in Hungary. Michael Ignatieff has battled to keep the Central European University open in Budapest. He is determined to counter what he claims is dangerous propaganda in a country in which more than half a million Jewish Hungarians were exterminated by the Nazis in just two months in 1944. Ignatieff says the anti-Soros campaign "is a faithful reprise of every single trope of anti-Semitic hatred from the 1930s... The whole thing is a complete fantasy. This is the politics of the 21st Century, if you haven't got an enemy invent one as fast as you can, make him look as powerful as possible and bingo - you mobilise your base and win elections with it." Prof Deborah Lipstadt, who won a famous legal battle to expose a Holocaust denier in the British courts, is deeply uneasy too. "It terrifies me that this kind of rhetoric, which used to be heard in beer halls and dark corners, is being spoken by politicians, by leaders of countries, the deputy prime minister of Italy, the prime minister of Hungary. That this kind of language is being used is shocking."

Note the date of the article below. I read in another article, can't find it right now, that currently his one son is more active politically than he is. Several did mention one son hobnobs with Liberal politicians and celebrities. The guy is 92 years old after all. The Soros family aren't the only billionaires who supports the Democratic party and liberal policies. He may not even be the richest, though he is undoubtedly the most notorious. (check my next post to find out why. Last part is especially relevant.) Soros also does not control the world or this country. As The Temptations sang, this world is a Ball of Confusion. "Round and round and round it goes. Where the world's headed, nobody knows". Soros has influence because of his wealth but that is it. He has some control over his household and businesses but nothing more. By Riva D. Atlas Oct. 6, 2004 George Soros, the billionaire financier, is handing more control of his money management firm to two of his sons as he continues to scale back the focus of his investment firm. Late Monday, Mr. Soros disclosed that he was promoting one son, Jonathan, to be a deputy chairman of the firm, Soros Fund Management, sharing the title with another son, Robert, who was named chief investment officer last month. Mr. Soros remains chairman of the firm, which manages $12.8 billion. The two sons will oversee the investment business day to day. At the same time, Mr. Soros is spinning off divisions investing in real estate and debt, according to Monday's letter to investors. The firm is also planning to spin off a buyout business. Together, the three investment groups account for some $4 billion of Soros assets under management. Mark Schwartz, chief executive of Soros Fund Management, said in the letter that the moves were part of an effort "to return the firm to its core activity as a hedge fund manager," focusing more on active trading. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Mr. Soros, 74, made his name as one of the earliest and most successful managers of hedge funds, aggressive portfolios run on behalf of wealthy investors. In 1992, his funds made more than $1 billion from bets against the value of the British pound. "He is one of the great investment geniuses of all time," said Dixon Boardman, managing general partner of Optima Fund Management, which had been an investor in the flagship Quantum fund. Dig deeper into the moment. Special offer: Subscribe for $1 a week for the first year. More recently, Mr. Soros has been better known less for his financial bets than his campaign to defeat President Bush in next month's election. He has contributed about $18 million to Democratic advocacy groups, and yesterday began a nationwide speaking tour to urge voters to reject Mr. Bush. "George seems to be focused on other things these days," another investor in hedge funds said. Mr. Soros has been struggling to figure out how to run Soros Fund Management ever since it was stung by losses on technology stocks and other investments in 2000. That year, the Quantum fund lost 15.4 percent, and his longtime chief strategist, Stanley Druckenmiller, left the firm. After Mr. Druckenmiller's departure, Mr. Soros said he would adopt a more conservative approach, warning investors to expect lower returns. That led many to redeem their holdings. Today, Soros Fund Management oversees $12.8 billion, down from a peak of $22 billion in 1998. Much of the firm's assets belong to Mr. Soros and his family. Editors’ Picks Religious Pop Star Singing of ‘God and Faith’ Wins Over Secular Israel Strep Is on the Rise. Here’s How to Minimize Your Risk. Getting Married in a Nap Dress Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Over the last four years, a series of portfolio managers have come and gone, with the most recent chief investment officer, Jacob Goldfield, leaving last month to start an investment fund of his own. Now, Mr. Soros has decided to consolidate control of his investment firm in the hands of his sons. Robert Soros, 41, the oldest of his five children, will run the Quantum Endowment Fund, an $8.3 billion portfolio. Robert, who graduated from New York University in 1986, had a series of jobs on Wall Street, including a stint in the research department of a German bank, before joining the family firm a decade ago. He was chosen to run one of the firm's portfolios in 1996. Jonathan Soros, 34, is better known for sharing his father's passion for politics, working with MoveOn.org and other advocacy groups. He received a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in 1992 and a law degree and a master's in public policy from Harvard. He has worked in the firm's private equity group for the last two years, and will focus on its operations. A spokesman said neither George Soros nor his sons were available for comment. Returns for the Quantum fund have been relatively strong despite the turnover at the firm. The fund rebounded from its losses in 2000, returning 13.8 percent the next year, after fees. It lost 1.7 percent in 2002, but rose 15.3 percent last year, according to people briefed on its results. The fund's performance is flat through August. Mr. Soros himself earned $750 million last year, more than any other hedge fund manager, according to Institutional Investor magazine. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Even as the hedge fund industry has grown robustly in the last decade, no fund manager has emerged to match the scope and influence of Mr. Soros, who started the Quantum fund 35 years ago. Investors in hedge funds said the markets are a lot closer to being transparent than they were at the height of Mr. Soros's fame, making it difficult for any one investor to have an edge. And with pension funds placing increased amounts in these portfolios, managers of hedge funds are less eager to take big risks. "It's a different era," Mr. Boardman said. "In the old days, people invested with geniuses and didn't mind a bit of volatility. These days, he said, investors "don't want to see a one-man band; they want more of a process."

I wasn't referring to the first post you made, but rather the message that the restaurant's owner, Donald Hoffman, left on the message area of his restaurant. I have no reason not to believe that Donald Hoffman wrote those words himself. Donald Hoffman said the following at the end of this message. Without further proof, Donald Hoffman is the "I" used in these words: <I take full responsibility for the shortcomings and I apologize to the current and former employees who have experienced harm while working at Mela Kitchen. I will be ordering additional sensitivity training for myself and promise to develop a culture of understanding, empathy and tolerance to ensure that our staff feel safe and empowered.> In other words, Donald Hoffman, the person you are lionizing as a hero, is apologizing to his former employees who left the restaurant, acknowledging that he believed he caused them harm. Donald Hoffman then states he will be receiving sensitivity training so he will not make similar blunders in the future to make sure "our staff" (his staff) will feel safe and empowered. I usually think these apologies are insincere and done to save face and protect businesses and investments, which is very understandable. For all I know he could be sincere in these wishes. But what do you, Fedup, think? Did he do what is necessary to protect his business or did he turn into a sniveling cupcake who deserves scorn? Hey, while I'm thinking about it, if you worked for somebody who learned you had said something someone found offensive, would you quit before you got fired or would you get that sensitivity training to keep your job?

Oh a lot would have happened. A Black restauranteur who wanted to call a cocktail "The Negro" would be ostracized by other Blacks and he would be lucky if that was all that happened to him. I myself didn't know that the term "Negro" had become so offensive to Blacks until a few years ago. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2010/october.htm uestion Senator Harry Reid got in trouble for referring to President Obama as a "light skinned" African American with "no Negro dialect." What's the big dea with using the work Negro? Last time I checked there was a United Negro College Fund run by blacks. --John Babcock - Williams, Arizona Answer Senator Harry Reid apologized for his comment, made before the 2008 election, that Barack Obama could win in part because he was a "light skinned" African-American with "no Negro dialect." Reid, who is resisting calls for his resignation, described the gaffe as a "poor choice of words." When did the word Negro become socially unacceptable? It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro. Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned. In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other. It can be challenging for institutions and older people, who have seen racial terms come and go during their lifetimes, to adapt. The NAACP, founded in 1909, declined to change its name during the DuBois revolution but did stop using colored in all other contexts. Negro History Week, begun in 1926, changed to Black History Month in 1976. The United Negro College Fund is now trying to emphasize its initials rather than its full name. The last time the Supreme Court used the word Negro outside quotation marks or citations to other scholarship was in 1985. The writer was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who came of age during the time of DuBois. Despite public outcry, the U.S. Census still includes the word Negro, because many older people still use it.

She makes the claim that the bodies of children are being mutilated. Scare tactic. She and others like her want to control the decisions that people make about their own bodies.

The government controls children by allowing children to do something with the guidance of parents and teachers? ??????

OK. Thanks for some information that someone could look into. I would hope there are other puberty blockers that don't have that effect.

You have made my day! Candace Owen doesn't agree with me? Yes! Happy happy happy joy joy joy

After a certain age, I must point out, kids are going to be more influenced by their peers and the media, including social media, than they will be by parents and other adults.

And the vast majority of liberals would agree that the parents should have been notified.

18 years and older are not little kids. At 18 you are responsible for yourself, you can join the armed forces, you would have been able to drive for several years, you can take out a mortgage, you can get married and have children, you are an adult. Why wouldn't you then have the right to decide for yourself what sex you will be? And it isn't the government controlling children. It's doctors and parents making these decisions with inputs from the child. In what you post after this, I agree that parents and guardians should have been involved in these decisions for their minor children. The emphasis on minor. Needless to say, the government should have no input into these decisions. I'm also not interested in trying to convince anyone I am right. Most young people seem to see transwomen as women and transmen as men.

Those kiddies probably found better jobs with bosses who aren't that stupid and/or nuts.

Did you know that Jesus advocated for his followers to become eunuchs? Matthew 19:12 KJV For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. What Jesus meant is up the individual person reading this. I myself think that Jesus and his apostles and his early followers had this done as a means of sexual purification. But we will never know for certain. The church father Origen is probably the most famous Christian to have this done to him, though there were also the Skoptsys of Russia back in the 18th-19th century. You are over looking the fact that with a transwoman the penile tissue is refashioned into a vulva and a vagina. Many transgendered people do not even get these operations. They are satisfied to simply pass as the sex they identify with. The only people who need to know are their urologist, proctologist and sex partner.

This country and all countries in Western Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand and a few others have a mixed economy, which means they have some aspects of Socialism which co-exists with Capitalism. Sanders is a Democratic Socialist in the Scandinavian sense, and those countries have a very strong social care network and robust capitalism. I myself am fine with the mixture we have in this country. A laisse faire capitalist economy would be nearly as oppressive as a communist one. In that paragraph Sanders says nothing about puberty blockers though I do think that all medical decisions for minors should be made by parents and doctors, and when it comes to transitioning, the kid, not the parent or doctor, should take the lead in deciding how far to go, as long as puberty blockers-which does affect bone density but not reproductive potential-doesn't damage the bones too much. If it does then regardless of how much the kid wants to continue taking the puberty blockers, the kid would have to stop taking them. If the kid wants to transition but the parents oppose it, well the parents may wind up with a child who will hate them and want nothing to do with them after they do transition as an adult. But that wouldn't be the first time that happened, wouldn't be the last. As Oscar Wilde once said, All parents are in time judged by their children. If the parents are lucky they will be forgiven. https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/Gender-Clinic-Puberty-Blockers-Handout.pdf If you want to argue that this site has an agenda, so does The American Thinker.

How about Rumbarger?

Which is true of all political commentators. Left or right. Peoples opinion, nothing more.

Any one under the age of 18 is a child, a kid. I repeat, I oppose these procedures for anyone under the age of 18. If Chloe Cole prevails in court I hope she gets a huge settlement from Kaiser and others. And if my grandfather had lost his dick I would hope my poor mother would have married a man who would have treated her like a queen.

You seem very obsessed with this transgender thing. You do know this post is from the official Facebook page of that establishment. This is the owner Hoffman speaking about himself getting sensitivity training. Probably to regain a work staff and regain customers who don't want to be asked if they want a Negro cocktail.

Why the GOP, Fox-So-Called "News" & Rightwing Hate Radio Use Fear as Their Primary Tool This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán achieved and exercised power using fear Thom Hartmann 31 min ago 7 Image by intographics from Pixabay Share Marjorie Taylor Greene is warning America that God is vengeful, evil will be punished, and the [international Jewish] “Globalists” are out to destroy America. Like most of today’s Republicans — particularly the Trump-humpers in the Congressional Sedition Caucus — she portrays an America under attack from within and in a state of decay and collapse. Most Democratic political messaging and ads are upbeat and talk about what politicians and the party have done and hope to do for working class and poor Americans. Most Republican ads, on the other hand, are dark, ominous, and point to danger, death, and destruction. Every wonder why this has been the case for at least 40 years? Our most primal emotion is fear. For millions of years it helped us and our primate ancestors survive: fear kept us wary of predators and other dangers. Walk up to a wild squirrel or bird and you’ll see fear kick in as they run or fly away from you: every animal on Earth maintains its life on a substrate of fear. This is why fear is so powerful: it’s at the core of our survival instincts, right alongside thirst, hunger, breathing, and the need to excrete waste. It’s wired into our brains and begins to function at the moment of our birth: the younger and more helpless we are — all the way back to our first moments outside mom — the more easily we slip into fear. Because fear was primary at our birth, when we experience it as adults it tends to throw us back to our infancy. It’s why torture victims usually sob uncontrollably; why George Floyd and Tyree Nichols both called out for their mothers as police officers brutally murdered them: Floyd’s mother had been dead two years when he called her name as he died. Fear, in other words, infantilizes us. It takes us back to a time before knowledge, before logic, before we felt power and agency as an adult. Fear sweeps aside a lifetime of learning and maturing and reduces us, emotionally, to infancy. Which is precisely why Republicans and GOP-aligned media like Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio use fear as their primary tool to capture and motivate voters. Turn on rightwing media at any random time and you’ll get a fiery blast of rhetoric and imagery specifically designed to induce fear, thus producing infantilization. Because infants don’t question things. They don’t make comparisons. They don’t put things in context or look for alternative explanations. They don’t think critically. They just cry out for mom or dad, and when Republicans can throw them into that state of fear, part two of the classic authoritarian playbook kicks in: offer a powerful-seeming parental figure (almost always male) who can reassure frightened Republicans that he’ll take care of them, he’ll hold the threats at bay, he’ll keep them safe if they just surrender their agency and power to him. Donald Trump has been playing this game ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 ranting about dark-skinned “rapists and murderers pouring across our border” from Mexico. His first inaugural address, his infamous “American Carnage” speech, referred to our “inner cities,” “crime and the gangs” and “radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” But fear as a GOP political weapon goes back much farther than Trump. Nixon did it when he declared his racist “war on drugs.” Reagan did it when he referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “cannibals” who are “uncomfortable wearing shoes.” George HW Bush did it with his Willie Horton ads. George W. Bush did it to justify two illegal wars while torturing and extrajudicially murdering Afghan and Iraqi civilians. If you can scare people badly enough, you can get them to go along with almost anything sold to them as providing safety and security. It’s why every fascist movement in history starts out by dehumanizing its victims, then characterizing them as an existential threat. Whether it was Hitler’s characterization of Jews, or DeSantis’ portrayal of trans people and drag queens as “groomers and predators,” the script is always the same. Scare people, point to an “other” as the threat, and then promise to “deal with” that threat in the most brutal and thus instantly effective way possible. Double bonus points for convincing people that their beloved children are the ones primarily under threat. As the brilliant Amanda Marcotte noted for Salon: She goes so far as to speculate that Republicans refuse to do anything about gun violence because mass- and school-shootings increase the fear of Americans, and Republicans live on fear the way vampires live on blood (my metaphor, not hers). Ignoring the very real “sexualizing” effect of pornography instantly available on the internet — it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that could be cordoned off with an “.xxx” domain that requires age verification to access — the GOP has blocked all efforts to keep explicit porn away from our children. Republicans instead want you to believe that drag queens, public school teachers, and trans people are “groomers” and “molesters.” You won’t hear a peep out of them about the steady stream of fundamentalist and Catholic pastors and priests (and Republican politicians) arrested for grooming and molesting: this is about creating fear and then redirecting that fear against people who are the least likely to be able to fight back. While Republican politicians will blithely tell you there’s “nothing that can be done” about high-velocity bullets from assault weapons tearing our schoolchildren’s bodies into mangled and sometimes unidentifiable masses of bloody meat, they’ll go to the mat for fetuses. Why? Because defending innocence and purity is the other face of attacking sinfulness and danger. As Pastor Dave Barnhart wrote on his Facebook page back in 2018: The GOP’s relentless focus on criminalizing abortion is part and parcel of their larger efforts to infantilize Republican voters. To protect them from scary Black men, uppity women, terrified asylum seekers, poor people, union “bosses,” and “Marxist” progressives who want to give them free healthcare and college. Once white voters are reduced to that child-like state, with every fear assuaged by performative anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-Black history, anti-drag, and anti-abortion laws, it’s an easy step to telling them, as Trump did repeatedly: This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán achieved and exercised power using fear. And now the GOP has adopted fear as their first and foremost electoral strategy, knowing it’s so powerful that both optimism and fact-checking almost always fail against it. Ironically, in their overreach, Republican policies are now inspiring so much reactive fear in Democratic voters — particularly among women, students, the queer community, and people of color — that it may end up propelling millions of new progressive voters to the polls. Turnabout, apparently, is fair play. Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @RepMTG Vengeance is mine declares the Lord. God will not let evil go unpunished. The @HouseGOP must do what is right for the American people and no longer serve the Uniparty and the Globalist agenda. America First! 🇺🇸 3:56 PM ∙ Jan 16, 2023

Of course a real American is also someone from a foreign country who becomes a naturalized citizen of this country.

From: https://www.facebook.com/melajackshardcider/ When we started Atomic Dog our goal was to create a healthy and inclusive work environment. We are proud of how we have provided jobs for over 100 employees since our founding in January 2019 I have come to realize how we have fallen short on addressing the sensitive issues towards others. Both inside the company and in how we present ourselves to the community. I take full responsibility for the shortcomings and I apologize to the current and former employees who have experienced harm while working at Mela Kitchen. I will be ordering additional sensitivity training for myself and promise to develop a culture of understanding, empathy and tolerance to ensure that our staff feel safe and empowered. Perfect

As I said before, I oppose this procedure for anyone under 18, but adults should have that right. Why, you ask? Well, OUR BODIES ARE OUR ULTIMATE PROPERTY. WE ADULTS SHOULD MAKE THE DECISION OF WHAT WE DO WITH OUR OWN BODIES AND THE GOVERNMENT, THE CHURCH, FEDUP, ANYONE, HAD JUST BETTER F--- OFF. I have no desire to transition to a woman, but I fully support anyone who does. Because it is THEIR LIFE and THEIR BODY to do with as they please. I myself believe that tattoos are stupid and so is piercing anything but the ear, but I have no problem with someone getting those adornments. Care to guess why? FORCING somone to go through any of these procedures is barbaric and totalitarian. Sorry you think the government should have the right to tell other people what they can do with their bodies because it makes you nervous when you learn about it.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? William Casey was an archconservative cold war hawk. He hated liberals and had nothing to do with them. John D. Rockefeller was a conservative businessman who fought the government bitterly when it broke up his oil monopoly. Sure his foundation is liberal, but so is the Carnegie Foundation and the Annenberg Foundation, despite both being formed by staunch conservative businessmen. If Peter Thiel and Elon Musk formed foundations to live on after their deaths, their foundations would likely soon become liberal as well. There may be a few exceptions to this, but for the most part this is the pattern that is followed.

Except that millions of Americans are liberals, and none of them are going away soon. And a real American is anyone who is born in this country and it has nothing to do with ideology. Many Americans are rising up against right-wing indoctrination that some are trying to impose on our children. And these Americans are just as American as you are. The only way you can eliminate liberals is through the means that I mentioned. Plus there is evidence that people may be born with a predisposition to be liberal or conservative. If true that means that any baby that is born would have to have its brain evaluated sometime to determine whether that child is liberal and then what to do with it. What to do. What to do. I have no doubt that as time goes on the bulk of this country will become more and more liberal, with rural areas being more conservative than their city cousins. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/\\ SKIP TO MAIN CONTENT SubscribeLatest Issues Scientific American Cart 0 Sign In |Newsletters SHARE LATEST Spring Flash Sale Shop Now BEHAVIOR Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences Scanners try to watch the red-blue divide play out underneath the skull By Lydia Denworth on October 26, 2020 أعرض هذا باللغة العربية Credit: Getty Images In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation. The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions. On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives. ADVERTISEMENT While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, not certainties—meaning there is plenty of individual variability. The political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive Priuses and everything in between. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a Republican’s brain lights up over X while a Democrat’s responds to Y. So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions—gauging who has the biggest amygdala—to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity. Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. “Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses,” says political neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. “Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a ‘window’ into their brains.” That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to “read minds,” but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes. Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. Yet “neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomes—just not in a deterministic way,” Nam says. To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. ADVERTISEMENT Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. They also considered participants’ own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task. Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which “are involved in helping people form and think about their attitudes,” Haas says. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. But she acknowledges that they may instead exercise a particular form of bias called “motivated reasoning” to downplay the incongruity. Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system justification.” Sign up for Scientific American’s free newsletters. Sign Up Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says. After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests,” Nam says. “That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the system.’” ADVERTISEMENT Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity. Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a 2013 study, liberals were more likely to misremember George W. Bush remaining on vacation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and conservatives were more likely to falsely recall seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran. Partisan identity also shapes our perceptions. When they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police depending on their interpretation of the protest’s goal. If the objective was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest (opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy. If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. The tension between accuracy and identity probably involves a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex, which computes the value of goals and beliefs and is strongly connected to memory, executive function and attention. If identity helps determine the value of different beliefs, it can also distort them, Van Bavel says. Appreciating that political affiliation fulfills an evolutionary need to belong suggests we should create alternative means of belonging—depoliticizing the novel coronavirus by calling on us to come together as Americans, for instance. And incentivizing the need to be accurate could increase the importance accorded that goal: paying money for accurate responses or holding people accountable for incorrect ones have been shown to be effective. It will be nearly impossible to lessen the partisan influences before the November 3 election because the volume of political information will only increase, reminding us of our political identities daily. But here is some good news: a large 2020 study at Harvard University found that participants consistently overestimated the level of out-group negativity toward their in-group. In other words, the other side may not dislike us quite so much as we think. Inaccurate information heightened the negative bias, and (more good news) correcting inaccurate information significantly reduced it. “The biology and neuroscience of politics might be useful in terms of what is effective at getting through to people,” Van Bavel says. “Maybe the way to interact with someone who disagrees with me politically is not to try to persuade them on the deep issue, because I might never get there. It’s more to try to understand where they’re coming from and shatter their stereotypes.” ADVERTISEMENT Rights & Permissions ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and contributing editor for Scientific American. She is author of Friendship:The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond (W. W. Norton, 2020) and several other books of popular science. Credit: Nick Higgins Recent Articles by Lydia Denworth U.S. Kids Are Falling behind Global Competition, but Brain Science Shows How to Catch Up People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties A Single, Quick 'Mindset' Exercise Protects against Adolescent Stress READ THIS NEXT BEHAVIOR Trolling for Truth on Social Media Joan Donovan BEHAVIOR A Political Scientist's Guide to Following the Election Michael Latner | Opinion BEHAVIOR Why Trump-Favoring Voters Ignored a Deadly Hurricane Warning Rachel Nuwer BEHAVIOR What AIDS Taught Us about Dealing with COVID-19 William A. Haseltine | Opinion ADVERTISEMENT NEWSLETTER Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up Support Science Journalism Discover world-changing science. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. Subscribe Now! 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