#american college of healthcare sciences

[thedaveandkimmershow]

August was definitely an odd month.

It also felt like two months. There are definitely events during the early part of the month that seemed like they belonged in July. There are even things that happened after the fifteenth that seemed of another age.

The summer/fall thing had a lot to do with that oddness, I’m guessing. We are, after all, now living in the season of Fall.

Booooooooooo. 😡

August was a busy month for Linzy. She played gigs at The Cottage in Bothell and The Rustic Cork in Mill Creek where we enjoyed a lovely evening with dear friends.

The band she's in, The Little Lies (a Fleetwood Mac tribute band) played to a packed Taste Edmonds crowd on the 11th. The other band she's in, Midnight High, debuted their new album, Swimming Lessons, at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard to a packed house and a lot of love from that audience.

The month was a busy one for me in a number of ways, the most interesting of which was exploring the use of Generative Fill in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe's AI tool that enables serious manipulation of reality. For example, we were at a Public Storage place with friends when I took out a chair, placed it in the middle of the road between two buildings, and had our friend's son sit on that chair with a big smile plastered on his face. With not terribly much effort, I replaced the background trees and sky with a sun-soaked jungle. I also replaced the road with a brighter chunky cement surface and toy dinosaurs running all about.

Seriously.

Toy dinosaurs.

As if they were giant set pieces I'd brought down for the occasion.

Couple weeks later on a particularly bright and hot weekend, I took another photo at that Public Storage, this time with plenty of room for…

A giant public swimming pool.

No kidding. It actually looks like a public swimming pool complete with a net for water sports, barely a couple feet from our van.

I did a bunch of stuff like that across the month, figuring out this tool. Mostly illustration-y things. But those photos at Public Storage continue to capture my attention because of how strikingly real are my additions.

Kimmer, of course, continued her work from home with Ballard Psych. She's also fully gearing up for her Doctoral program at The American College of Healthcare Sciences in Portland. It's an exciting opportunity for her and, from the sidelines, I can see the experience is fixing to be pretty incredible with all the resources they're already making available to her.

For our family movie outing of the month, we all convened at The Crest Theater in Shoreline to watch "Barbie" and compare notes. It's fun to watch, definitely. It's filled with a lot of laugh out loud moments on top of a metric ton of nostalgia. It's creative as hell, great casting (did not see Rhea Perlman coming, for example), wonderful performances all around. Definitely a lot of social commentary that, in a nearly full theater, resonated with a lot of different people at different times according to their experiences... as well as lighting up universals that are obvious (of course) to everyone.

One of my favorite quiet moments of August was a comfy weekend afternoon when Kimmer 'n I drove into Ballard, grabbed some burgers at 'Lil Woody's next to The Majestic Bay Theaters, and drove further west to that spot overlooking Salmon Bay where the water empties out into Shilshole Bay. At that overlook is a patch of grass with a park bench on which we enjoyed a lovely lunch together.

Those sweet moments are not nothing, you know?

Insanely Small World Award of the month goes to Lerin Herzer who opened for Midnight High at their album release show. Lerin, it turns out, is the daughter of Linzy's Jr. High band director.

Dang.

The previous winner, by the way, is Harry Wirth III, Linzy's bandmate in The Little Lies who was also in a band called Molasses, a band in which Linzy's High School band director also played.

Speaking of Linzy's high School band director, he recently referred one of his 2023 graduates to me to talk shop. The student's about to embark on their university experience and wanted to ask questions about being a professional creative. We covered a lot of ground during our conversation and, once again, much to my chagrin, I found myself advocating what once I used to roll my eyes at whenever the Music & Video Business director at the Art Institute of Seattle would bring up his pet advice: networking.

He talked about it a lot.

And we all rolled our eyes.

Only, you know, he was right and even though I frame the advice in terms of community and chasing your career as part of a group with compatible skillsets, yeah.

I'm singing that same old song.

Networking.

So that's it for August (and summer, apparently).

Eight down.

Four to go in 2023.

Onward!

[feelingbluepolitics]

An Ethical AI-generated Prompt Sheet for Those Thanksgiving Conversations

*based on a neutral question

Question:

On issues relevant in our politics right now, which political platform is more beneficial to us, Democrat or Republicon, and why?

Response:

Analyzing the two major U.S. political platforms—Democrat and Republican—requires a clear, issue-by-issue comparison based on policies and their likely impacts on society. Below is an overview of how each party approaches the listed issues and which platform tends to benefit the majority of Americans, based on available evidence and historical actions.

1. Climate Change and Energy

• Democrats: Support renewable energy investment, international climate agreements (e.g., Paris Accord), and regulations on emissions.

• Benefit: Reduces long-term environmental risks and creates clean energy jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on deregulating fossil fuels, questioning climate science, and prioritizing short-term energy independence through oil and gas.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Climate science overwhelmingly shows the urgency of reducing emissions to prevent global warming and its catastrophic effects.

2. Wealth Inequality

• Democrats: Advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy, expanding social safety nets, and raising the minimum wage.

• Benefit: Promotes economic fairness and reduces poverty rates.

• Republicans: Favor tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, arguing it boosts economic growth (“trickle-down economics”).

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data shows tax cuts for the wealthy primarily widen inequality, while social programs reduce economic disparity.

3. Reproductive Rights

• Democrats: Support access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive healthcare.

• Benefit: Empowers individuals to make personal medical decisions, reducing maternal mortality rates.

• Republicans: Advocate for restricting or banning abortion, often without exceptions for rape or incest.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Restricting abortion leads to unsafe procedures and worsens healthcare outcomes for women.

4. Healthcare Access

• Democrats: Push for expanding Medicaid, lowering drug costs, and supporting universal healthcare.

• Benefit: Reduces the number of uninsured Americans and improves public health.

• Republicans: Seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reduce government involvement in healthcare.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Expanding access improves health outcomes, while Republican policies risk leaving millions uninsured.

5. Gun Violence

• Democrats: Advocate for universal background checks, assault weapon bans, and red flag laws.

• Benefit: Reduces gun deaths and mass shootings, according to studies from countries with similar laws.

• Republicans: Oppose gun control measures, emphasizing Second Amendment rights.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data consistently shows that stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of gun violence.

6. Education and Student Debt

• Democrats: Propose reducing student loan debt, increasing public education funding, and making college more affordable.

• Benefit: Expands access to education, which drives economic mobility.

• Republicans: Support school choice, privatization, and reducing federal involvement in education.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Underfunded public schools and high student debt hinder social mobility, which Democrats address more effectively.

7. Voting Rights

• Democrats: Work to expand voting access through early voting, mail-in ballots, and combating voter suppression.

• Benefit: Increases voter turnout and strengthens democracy.

• Republicans: Focus on voter ID laws, restricting voting methods, and questioning election integrity.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Voting restrictions disproportionately harm marginalized groups and undermine democratic participation.

8. Judicial Integrity

• Democrats: Push for judicial appointments that preserve civil rights, voting rights, and environmental protections.

• Benefit: Ensures balanced courts that reflect public values.

• Republicans: Focus on appointing conservative judges, often with corporate or religious biases.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Progressive judicial rulings better protect individual freedoms and minority rights.

9. Media and Information Integrity

• Democrats: Support policies to combat disinformation and promote media literacy.

• Benefit: Encourages informed citizenry and accountability for platforms spreading falsehoods.

• Republicans: Often align with narratives undermining trust in mainstream media and fact-checking.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Misinformation destabilizes democracy, making this issue critical.

10. Immigration

• Democrats: Advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, including pathways to citizenship and humane treatment of migrants.

• Benefit: Bolsters the economy, addresses labor shortages, and upholds human rights.

• Republicans: Emphasize border security, including walls and mass deportations, often framing immigration as a threat.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Immigrants contribute significantly to the economy, and humane policies align with democratic values.

11. Corporate Accountability

• Democrats: Push for stronger regulations on corporations, including anti-trust actions and environmental accountability.

• Benefit: Prevents corporate abuse and ensures fair competition.

• Republicans: Advocate for deregulation and reducing corporate taxes.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: History shows unchecked corporations exploit workers and the environment.

12. Digital Privacy and AI

• Democrats: Support regulating tech companies and protecting digital privacy.

• Benefit: Balances innovation with individual rights.

• Republicans: Often resist regulation, favoring corporate interests.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Without regulations, tech monopolies and privacy violations harm consumers.

13. Infrastructure and Transportation

• Democrats: Invest in public transit, green infrastructure, and broadband expansion.

• Benefit: Improves quality of life and creates jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on traditional infrastructure projects but resist spending on green initiatives.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Comprehensive infrastructure plans address future needs.

14. Military Spending vs. Human Needs

• Democrats: Aim to reduce excessive military budgets and redirect funds toward healthcare, education, and climate action.

• Benefit: Balances security with societal well-being.

• Republicans: Advocate for high military spending, often at the expense of domestic programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Excessive military budgets often neglect urgent domestic priorities.

15. Food Security and Safety

• Democrats: Support sustainable farming, SNAP benefits, and food safety regulations.

• Benefit: Addresses hunger while ensuring food safety.

• Republicans: Focus on reducing regulations and cutting food assistance programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Robust food programs and safety regulations are vital for public health.

This analysis generally favors the Democratic platform across these issues, as it aligns more closely with data-supported policies that prioritize equity, sustainability, and public welfare.

[rjzimmerman]

From what I can read online without a paywall block, US medical schools are moving in the direction of requiring or offering courses on climate change. I'm copying this directly from my Duck Duck Go search results:

The number of medical schools in the United States that include climate change in their curriculum has been increasing, with 65% of MD-granting schools requiring or offering courses on the topic in 2022.  A survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that the percentage of medical schools with climate change in their curriculum increased from 27% in 2019–2020 to 55% in 2021–2022, and then to 65% in 2022. 

Excerpt from this EcoWatch story:

A network of universities across Europe has launched an initiative to train medical students on climate change-related illnesses as well as provide education on more sustainable healthcare.

The initiative includes 25 universities that have formed the European Network on Climate & Health Education (ENCHE), which will incorporate climate change education into the existing curriculum. The goal is to better prepare students to treat humans facing health disparities linked to climate change as well as to improve the sustainability of the healthcare system.

“From the spread of infectious diseases to increasingly deadly heatwaves, the health impacts of climate change are becoming ever more dangerous,” Iain McInnes, co-chair of ENCHE and vice principal and Head of College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement. “As educators, it is our responsibility to ensure that the next generation of doctors, health professionals and medical leaders have the skills they need to face these challenges and can provide patients with the best care possible.”

The network will be led by the University of Glasgow and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), and universities from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and the UK will be involved in ENCHE.

Other health organizations, part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative Health Systems Task Force, will provide additional support to ENCHE. The network will serve as a regional hub for the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, with GCCHE providing collaboration and expert support for the initiative.

ENCHE has a goal to train 10,000 or more medical students on treating climate change health impacts in the first three years of the program. According to the University of Glasgow, there is not a consistent curriculum in medical schools that teaches on the links between climate change and health impacts.

This training could help save many more lives, as human health becomes increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. According to the WHO, about 99% of humans globally are exposed to air quality below WHO standards, while more than 7 million people die from air pollution-related health impacts. Rising heat is another concern, with heat-related deaths expected to triple by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

My name is Dr Jill Simons. I'm a board-certified pediatrician and the executive director for the American College of Pediatricians. Today I'm here alongside my colleagues representing the Coalition of co-signers of the Doctors Protecting Children Declaration. Our coalition consists of physicians together with nurses, behavioral health clinicians, other health professionals, scientists, researchers and public health and policy professionals. And we have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex.

This declaration was authored by the American College of Pediatricians, but really it was developed from the expertise of hundreds of doctors researchers and other healthcare workers and leaders wh, for years have been sounding the alarm on the harmful protocols that continue to be promoted by the medical organizations in the United States. Despite recent revelations from the leaked WPATH Files and the recent release of the final report from the Cass Review, these medical organizations have not changed course.

So, we are calling on these medical organizations of the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to follow the science and their European colleagues and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.

In our declaration, we affirm that sex is a dimorphic, innate trait defined in relation to an organism's biological role in reproduction: male and female this genetic signature is present in every nucleated somatic cell in the body and is not altered by drugs or surgical interventions. Consideration of these innate differences is critical to the practice of good medicine and to the development of sound policy for children and adults alike. Medical decision-making should be based upon an individual's biological sex. It should respect biological reality and the dignity of the person by compassionately addressing the whole person.

We are here defying the claims made by these medical organizations in the US that those of us who are concerned are a minority and that their protocols are consensus. They are not consensus, and we are speaking in a loud unified voice: enough.

[ Full press conference: https://youtu.be/C2tU90XPFlg ]

--

Doctors Protecting Children Declaration

As physicians, together with nurses, psychotherapists and behavioral health clinicians, other health professionals, scientists, researchers, and public health and policy professionals, we have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex.

We affirm:

1. Sex is a dimorphic, innate trait defined in relation to an organism’s biological role in reproduction. In humans, primary sex determination occurs at fertilization and is directed by a complement of sex determining genes on the X and Y chromosomes.  This genetic signature is present in every nucleated somatic cell in the body and is not altered by drugs or surgical interventions

2. Consideration of these innate differences is critical to the practice of good medicine and to the development of sound public policy for children and adults alike.

3. Gender ideology, the view that sex (male and female) is inadequate and that humans need to be further categorized based on an individual’s thoughts and feelings described as “gender identity” or “gender expression”, does not accommodate the reality of these innate sex differences. This leads to the inaccurate view that children can be born in the wrong body. Gender ideology seeks to affirm thoughts, feelings and beliefs, with puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries that harm healthy bodies, rather than affirm biological reality.

4. Medical decision making should not be based upon an individual’s thoughts and feelings, as in “gender identity” or “gender expression”, but rather should be based upon an individual’s biological sex. Medical decision making should respect biological reality and the dignity of the person by compassionately addressing the whole person.

We recognize:

1. Most children and adolescents whose thoughts and feelings do not align with their biological sex will resolve those mental incongruencies after experiencing the normal developmental process of puberty.

Desistance is the norm without affirmation as documented by Zucker in his article “The Myth of Peristence”. (1) Zucker, KJ. The myth of persistence: Response to “A critical commentary on follow-up studies and ‘desistance’ theories about transgender and gender nonconforming children” by Temple Newhook et al. International Journal of Transgenderism. 2018: 19(2), 231–245. Published online May 29, 2018.http://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1468293 [1]

In the “largest sample to date of boys clinic-referred for gender dysphoria,” there was a desistance rate of 87.8%. (2) Singh D, Bradley SJ and Zucker KJ. A Follow-Up Study of Boys With Gender Identity Disorder. Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:632784. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784

The pro-affirmation Endocrine Society Guidelines (2017) admit: “…the GD/gender incongruence of a minority of prepubertal children appears to persist in adolescence.” (3) Hembree, W., Cohen-Kettenis PT, Gooren L, et al. Endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric/gender-incongruent persons: An Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2017; 102:1–35.

A longitudinal study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands followed 2772 adolescents (recruited from a psychiatric clinic) from age 11 years through 22 – 26 years. “In early adolescence 11% of participants reported gender non- contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26).” Even in this psychiatric patient study group for which interventions were not addressed, but “gender affirmation” is most likely, gender non-contentedness (essentially gender noncongruence) decreased substantially from early adolescence to young adulthood.(4) Rawee P, Rosmalen JGM, Kalverdiijk L and Burke SM. Development of gender non-contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2024; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5

2. Responsible informed consent is not possible in light of extremely limited long-term follow-up studies of interventions, and the immature, often impulsive, nature of the adolescent brain. The adolescent brain’s prefrontal cortex is immature and is limited in its ability to strategize, problem solve and make emotionally laden decisions that have life-long consequences.[2]

3. Sex-trait modification or “Gender affirming” clinics in the United States base their treatments upon the “Standards of Care” developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). However, the foundation of WPATH guidelines is demonstrably flawed and pediatric patients can be harmed when subjected to those protocols.

The two Dutch studies that form the foundation for treatment guidelines as documented in the WPATH “Standards of Care” guidelines version 7 (SOC 7) had serious flaws.[3]

These studies did show that the appearance of secondary sex characteristics in adolescents and young adults could be changed by hormonal and surgical interventions, but they failed to demonstrate meaningful long-term improvement in psychological well-being.

Scientific concerns with these studies also include a lack of a control group, small sample sizes, significant numbers of patients lost to follow up, and the elimination of patients who experienced significant mental illness from entering the studies.

It is concerning that the Dutch studies did not address complications and adverse outcome in the adolescent cohort that underwent transition. These complications included new onset diabetes, obesity and one death.[4]

4. There is now sufficient research to further demonstrate the failure of the WPATH, American Academy of Pediatrics and Endocrine Society protocols.

The Cass Review was released on April 10, 2024, as an “independent review of gender identity services for children and young people”. The following points are from Cass’s final report:[5]

Commissioned by the National Health Service (NHS) England, and chaired by Dr. Hilary Cass, the 388-page report utilized systematic reviews, qualitative and quantitative research, as well as focus groups, roundtables and interviews with international clinicians and policy makers.

As part of the evaluation, they reviewed the research on social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones.

Social transition

“The systematic review showed no clear evidence that social transition in childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes, and relatively weak evidence for any effect in adolescence.

However, those who had socially transitioned at an earlier age and/or prior to being seen in clinic were more likely to proceed to a medical pathway.”

Puberty blockers

“The systematic review undertaken by the University of York found multiple studies demonstrating that puberty blockers exert their intended effect in suppressing puberty, and also that bone density is compromised during puberty suppression. However, no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated [emphasis added].”

“There was insufficient/inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on psychological or psychosocial wellbeing, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk or fertility.”

“Moreover, given that the vast majority of young people started on puberty blockers proceed from puberty blockers to masculinizing/ feminizing hormones, there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development.”

Cross-sex hormones

“The University of York carried out a systematic review of outcomes of masculinising/feminising hormones.” They concluded, “There is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone interventions in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence, and few studies that undertake long-term follow-up. No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial health, cognitive development, or fertility.”

“Uncertainty remains about the outcomes for height/growth, cardio-metabolic and bone health.”

The Cass Review further stated, “Assessing whether a hormone pathway is indicated is challenging. A formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria is frequently cited as a prerequisite for accessing hormone treatment. However, it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them.”

A 2024 German systematic review on the evidence for use of puberty blockers (PB) and cross-sex hormones (CSH) in minors with gender dysphoria (GD) also found “The available evidence on the use of PB and CSH in minors with GD is very limited and based on only a few studies with small numbers, and these studies have problematic methodology and quality. There also is a lack of adequate and meaningful long-term studies. Current evidence doesn’t suggest that GD symptoms and mental health significantly improve when PB or CSH are used in minors with GD.”[6]  

5. There are serious long-term risks associated with the use of social transition, puberty blockers, masculinizing or feminizing hormones, and surgeries, not the least of which is potential sterility.

Youth who are socially affirmed are more likely to progress to using puberty blockers and cross-sex (masculinizing or feminizing) hormones.

“Social transition is associated with the persistence of gender dysphoria as a child progresses into adolescence.”[7]

“Gender social transition of prepubertal children will increase dramatically the rate of gender dysphoria persistence when compared to follow-up studies of children with gender dysphoria who did not receive this type of psychosocial intervention and, oddly enough, might be characterized as iatrogenic.”[8]

Puberty blockers permanently disrupt physical, cognitive, emotional and social development.

Side effects listed in the Lupron package insert include emotional lability, worsening psychological illness, low bone density, impaired memory, and the rare side-effect of pseudotumor cerebri (brain swelling).[9]

A coalition of physicians and medical organizations from around the world submitted a petition to the Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requesting urgent action be taken to eliminate the off-label use of GnRH (growth hormone) agonists in children.[10]

Testosterone use in females and estrogen use in males are associated with dangerous health risks across the lifespan including, but not limited to, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, heart attacks, blood clots, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.[xi],[12]

Genital surgeries affect future fertility and reproduction.

6. A report from Environmental Progress released on March 4, 2024, entitled “The WPATH Files” revealed “widespread medical malpractice on children and vulnerable adults at global transgender healthcare authority.”[13]

“The WPATH Files reveal that the organization does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along.”

“Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of ‘gender-affirming care’ and, in some cases due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.”

In addition, developmentally challenged and mentally ill individuals were being encouraged to “transition”, and treatments were often improvised.

7. Evidence-based medical research now demonstrates there is little to no benefit from any or all suggested “gender affirming” interventions for adolescents experiencing Gender Dysphoria. Social “affirmation”, puberty blockers, masculinizing or feminizing hormones, and surgeries, individually or in combination, do not appear to improve long-term mental health of the adolescents, including suicide risk.[14]

8. Psychotherapy for underlying mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and autism, as well as prior emotional trauma or abuse should be the first line of treatment for these vulnerable children experiencing discomfort with their biological sex.

9. England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have all recognized the scientific research demonstrating that the social, hormonal and surgical interventions are not only unhelpful but are harmful. So, these European countries have paused protocols and are instead focusing on evaluating and treating the underlying and preceding mental health concerns.

10. Other medical organizations are adhering to the evidence-based medicine documented in the Cass Review Final Report.

The constitution of the National Health Service in England will be updated to state, “We are defining sex as biological sex.”[15]

The European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry issued a document titled “ESCAP statement on the care for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: an urgent need for safeguarding clinical, scientific, and ethical standards.”

In this paper, they stated, “The standards of evidence-based medicine must ensure the best and safest possible care for each individual in this highly vulnerable group of children and adolescents. As such, ESCAP calls for healthcare providers not to promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects and, therefore, to adhere to the “primum-nil-nocere” (first, do no harm) principle”.[16]

11. Health care professionals around the world are also acknowledging the urgent need to protect children from harmful “gender-affirming” interventions.

In a letter to the British newspaper, The Guardian, sixteen psychologists, some of whom worked at the Tavistock Center for Gender Identity Development Service, acknowledged the role clinical psychologists played in placing children on an “irreversible medical pathway that in most cases was inappropriate.”[17]

In the United States, a group of psychiatrists, physicians and other health care workers wrote an open Letter to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), calling on the APA to explain why it glaringly ignored many scientific developments in gender-related care and to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety, mental and physical health.[18]

12. Despite all the above evidence that gender affirming treatments are not only unhelpful, but are harmful, and despite the knowledge that the adolescent brain is immature, professional medical organizations in the United States continue to promote these interventions. Further, they state that legislation to protect children from harmful interventions is dangerous since it interferes with necessary medical care for children and adolescents.

The American Psychological Association states it is the largest association of psychologists worldwide. The organization released a policy statement in February 2024 stating, “The APA opposes state bans on gender-affirming care, which are contrary to the principles of evidence-based healthcare, human rights, and social justice.”[19]

The Endocrine Society responded to the Cass Review by reaffirming their stance. “We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care…. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care.”[20]

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Board of Directors in August 2023, voted to reaffirm their 2018 policy statement on gender-affirming care. They did decide to authorize a systematic review but only because they were concerned “about restrictions to access to health care with bans on gender-affirming care in more than 20 states.”[21]

Of note, Dr. Hilary Cass called out the AAP for “holding on to a position that is now demonstrated to be out of date by multiple systematic reviews.”[22]

In Conclusion

Therefore, given the recent research and the revelations of the harmful approach advocated by WPATH and its followers in the United States, we, the undersigned, call upon the medical professional organizations of the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the  Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to follow the science and their European professional colleagues and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.  Instead, these organizations should recommend comprehensive evaluations and therapies aimed at identifying and addressing underlying psychological co-morbidities and neurodiversity that often predispose to and accompany gender dysphoria. We also encourage the physicians who are members of these professional organizations to contact their leadership and urge them to adhere to the evidence-based research now available.

[compassionatereminders]

i thought youd get a kick out of this story! for context, im american and have been perscribed adderall since i was a young teen.

so i knew this girl in college (18 at the time) who wanted to throw a party where she gave everyone adderall for the purpose of "finding out who has adhd". which brings up two things, imo:

1.) the grim reality of self diagnosis and false tiktok knowledge and a doomed youth that has come to accept that they will always be too poor to afford healthcare...these are all horrible truths.

but also...tbh,

2.) that would be the WILDEST party. EVERYONE wpuld be functioning at either 100%, 20000%, or -3%, and theres no in between. think of the rants people would go on. the confidence. hours of dancing. the fixations on dumb 3 hour long board games. it would be so silly

i graduated and never got to see it come to fruition but ill have to reach out and see how it went

I desperately wanna go to that party. For science purposes. Well, maybe also because free Adderall. But it's such an intriguing concept that I would pay to get to be there

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

deAdder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 12, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.

When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden was clear that he intended to launch a new era in America, overturning the neoliberalism of the previous forty years and replacing it with a proven system in which the government would work to protect the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. Neoliberalism relied on markets to shape society, and its supporters promised it would be so much more efficient than government regulation that it would create a booming economy that would help everyone. Instead, the slashing of government regulation and social safety systems had enabled the rise of wealthy oligarchs in the U.S. and around the globe. Those oligarchs, in turn, dominated poor populations, whose members looked at the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people and gave up on democracy. 

Biden recognized that defending democracy in the United States, and thus abroad, required defending economic fairness. He reached back to the precedent set by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and followed by presidents of both parties from then until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Biden’s speeches often come back to a promise to help the parents who “have lain awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering how they will make rent, send their kids to college, retire, or pay for medication.” He vowed “to finally rebuild a strong middle class and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, giving hardworking families across the country a little more breathing room.” 

Like his predecessors, he set out to invest in ordinary Americans. Under his administration, Democrats passed landmark legislation like the American Rescue Plan that rebuilt the economy after the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, and airports, as well as investing in rural broadband; the CHIPS and Science Act that rebuilt American manufacturing at the same time it invested in scientific research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, invested in addressing climate change. Under his direction, the government worked to stop or break up monopolies and to protect the rights of workers and consumers.

Like the policies of that earlier era, his economic policies were based on the idea that making sure ordinary people made decent wages and were protected from predatory employers and industrialists would create a powerful engine for the economy. The system had worked in the past, and it sure worked during the Biden administration, which saw the United States economy grow faster in the wake of the pandemic than that of any other developed economy. Under Biden, the economy added almost 16 million jobs, wages rose faster than inflation, and workers saw record low unemployment rates.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law. 

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

The Republican Party’s roots were in the Midwest, where ordinary people were determined to stop wealthy southern oligarchs from taking over control of the United States government. That determination continued after the war when people in the Midwest were horrified to see industrial leaders step into the place that wealthy enslavers had held before the war. Their opposition was based not in economics alone, but rather in their larger worldview. And because they were Republicans by heritage, they constructed their opposition to the rise of industrial oligarchs as a more expansive vision of democracy. 

In the early 1870s the Granger movement, based in an organization originally formed by Oliver H. Kelley of Minnesota and other officials in the Department of Agriculture to combat the isolation of farm life, began to organize farmers against the railroad monopolies that were sucking farmers’ profits. The Grangers called for the government to work for communities rather than the railroad barons, demanding business regulation. In the 1870s, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois passed the so-called Granger Laws, which regulated railroads and grain elevator operators. (When such a measure was proposed in California, railroad baron Leland Stanford called it “pure communism” and hired former Republican congressman Roscoe Conkling to fight it by arguing that corporations were “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.)

Robert La Follette grew up on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, during the early days of the Grangers and absorbed their concern that rich men were taking over the nation and undermining democracy. One of his mentors warned: “Money is taking the field as an organized power. Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” 

In the wake of the Civil War, La Follette could not embrace the Democrats. Instead, he and people like him brought this approach to government to a Republican Party that at the time was dominated by industrialists. Wisconsin voters sent La Follette to Congress in 1884 when he was just 29, and when party bosses dumped him in 1890, he turned directly to the people, demanding they take the state back from the party machine. They elected him governor in 1900.

As governor, La Follette advanced what became known as the “Wisconsin Idea,” adopted and advanced by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. As Roosevelt noted in a book explaining the system, Wisconsin was “literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” La Follette called on professors from the University of Wisconsin, state legislators, and state officials to craft measures to meet the needs of the state’s people. “All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote.

In the late twentieth century, the Republican Party had moved far away from Roosevelt when it embraced neoliberalism. As it did so, Republicans ditched the Wisconsin Idea: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to do so explicitly by changing the mission of the University of Wisconsin system from a “search for truth” to “improve the human condition” to a demand that the university “meet the state’s workforce needs.” 

While Republicans abandoned the party’s foundational principles, Democratic governors have been governing on them. Now vice-presidential nominee Walz demonstrates that those community principles are joining the Democrats’ commitment to economic fairness and civil rights to create a new, national program for democracy. 

It certainly seems like the birth of a new era in American history. At a Harris-Walz rally in Arizona on Friday, Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, said: “I do not recognize my party. The Republican Party has been taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party…. [Y]ou don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt…. [I]n the spirit of the great Senator John McCain, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump, and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution, and protecting the democracy of this great country. That is why I’m standing with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”

Vice President Harris put it differently. Speaking to a United Auto Workers local in Wayne, Michigan, on Thursday, she explained what she and Walz have in common. 

 “A whole lot,” she said. “You know, we grew up the same way. We grew up in a community of people, you know—I mean, he grew up… in Nebraska; me, Oakland, California—seemingly worlds apart. But the same people raised us: good people; hard-working people; people who had pride in their hard work; you know, people who had pride in knowing that we were a community of people who looked out for each other—you know, raised by a community of folks who understood that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down. It’s based on who you lift up.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[starborn15]

Growing up ultra conservative Fox News was always on in my house.

I was watching Glen Beck when Obama won the election comfort eat ice cream.

I was listening to Shawn Hannity saw horrifically misogynistic things about The Chicks after they stood up to George Bush.

I had to listen to Agenda 21 which is a science fiction totalitarian dystopian novel written by Glen Beck on a 7 hour car ride with my dad.

Oddly enough…I was also made to sit down and watch 1984.

I watched Animal Farm.

When I was 18 my dad took me and registered me to vote.

I was mad initially because I grew up that way. I grew up on the side opposing the views I have now.

I understand the rage and anger of the right because a small part of me has felt that sense of injustice. It’s a mirage, it’s a story, it’s divisiveness.

There’s a 2003 conversation Bernie Sanders (who my dad had me convinced was a communist set to destroy the country.) but he’s talking to a group of kids and he says exactly what the republican — but even more so now with MAGA does.

Divide and conquer.

College is for left wing radicals — while JD Vance is a Yale graduate and best selling author.

Public Education makes kids stupid and feeds the liberal agenda — public education gives ALL students equal access to education and college and athletics (scholarships, grants).

Immigrants are taking your jobs! — Hiring migrant workers is nothing new…living in Maine workers here on visas often come in the summer time to help manage the influx of tourists because we do not have the capacity to staff our industry. As Mainers all of us. They help…they don’t hurt.

Women just want to have sex without any consequences! — All American women should have the right to do whatever they like with their body, the right to choose does not take away the right to life.

But these questions divide and make one side “evil” and the other side “the loser.” Or feeling a sense of loss. And that loss turns to rage and anger like something has been taken away from them. Even when it hasn’t.

The economy: a big one.

I think if our taxes paid for things that everyone could benefit from people wouldn’t complain about paying them.

But right now our taxes fund the U.S. war machine. And we don’t see any benefit.

Whereas if we offered Medicare for all therefore insurance didn’t have to come out of your paycheck if you chose for it not to maybe people wouldn’t complain.

Or if there was a discounted rate on daycare services for parents because a portion of that was taxpayer funded — like schools. Parents wouldn’t complain.

Because all of these things are added cost without any benefit so our taxes seem useless because they are.

Why is the military able to offer: free healthcare for life? Free college? And 0% loans on homes and cars? Because of government backing. (Not me bashing any military people it just is reality that these social programs are a benefit to the military it’s why they promote them.)

So yeah….

That’s all….

[pierayanna]

watching smallville is helping me unpack the ethos of white America.

They completely misrepresented human nature in order to perpetuate capitalism and colonialism.

Instead of the reality of humans being and existing as animals within nature and noting that our evolution and beginning of society was because of our innate sense of empathy and drive for community, our first sign of civilization being that of a healed bone showing that someone protected, fed, cared for, etc. someone else while they healed, we developed sciences, math, art, healing practices not simply for ourselves but to connect and enjoy one another, we have a manufactured reality that we are “born in sin,” innately greedy, selfish, yearning for power. This manufactured misrepresentation is because we are only “allowed” to study white men. Value and humanity is only allotted to white men who now represent human nature. We ignore and devalue indigenous teachings and practices. This makes us accepts the ideas and implications of capitalism and colonialism. We accept the idea that we need to be policed and governed despite the fact that crime diminishes without poverty (why aren’t white neighborhoods as policed and still safe and functioning??) and our accountability to community is what kept society safe and functioning. We accept imperialism and European paternalism. We accept individualism over collective. It endangers us. We accept racism: “there’s always going to be an in group and out group. An us vs them.” Something I’ve heard from peers in “anti-racist” classrooms. We accept this murder of the earth.

We accept the idea that we have to do things. I just realized how powerful the joke, “all I have to do is be Black and die,” is: all we have to do is be and then stop being. We most definitely don’t have to live this uniform, crappy, traumatizing life. We now believe our deserving of love and rest is depending on our productivity. We accept uniform lifestyles despite how unique we all are. We accept unlivable wages, no access to healthcare, inflation, having to pay to exist (food, shelter, water, etc.), horribly lacking miseducation systems, the majority of our lives dedicated to bringing wealth to 1% who spend it on sick shit. We accept wage slavery. We accept chattel slavery (mass incarceration). We accept the fact that children must be enslaved and maimed to give us phones and clothing. We blindly accept propaganda. We accept the fact that America can not fund any of these things for community but can fund wars and ethnic cleansing. But if they were to do anything remotely similar here, we would meddle in their continent for years!! We claim the existence of first world countries and this world countries when our “first world country” is surviving on the land, labor and people of “third world countries.” We accept food apartheid that prevents a lot of people from boycotting heinous companies. We accept the alienation and are lonely with no sense of community.

We accept the idea of anarchy as unbridled chaos, raping, pillaging, murder. No. That’s what’s happening now under this policing institution. Under capitalism and colonialism. Smallville ended an episode about a child veteran who lost his life in combat with the line that he sacrificed his life [in the US military] “saving the world.” Nevermind the fact that he enlisted because he was too poor to pursue college and football like he wanted, but to equate, unequivocally, the US military with saving the world was a powerful statement. How unchecked our propaganda media is. To end an episode with this assertion, left no room for it to be questioned: no thought into why the boy was in this foreign country or what he was doing there and how was it “saving the world.” No room for knowledge. I recall photos and accounts that resurface much later detailing what Americans really do in these foreign countries. What they do to the people. “Winners write history.” For the first time, I am able to see just how one-sided mainstream news outlets are. They show, and now force Americans to live in, a false reality. Journalists are supposed to be protected. But apparently only the ‘winner’s’ journalists are.

People like to claim tv shows, social media, etc. isn’t important and shouldn’t be taken serious. To focus of politics in government. This is art. This is what people are spending most of the free time allotted them consuming. This is an institution. Just as government. Just as religion.

Even in their falsehoods, we can still see the truth. Speaking of this institution that has been weaponized by those in power, didn’t Jesus save us? By your own logic, did he not free us from this so called evil human nature? As someone who has descended from people who were enslaved during chattel slavery, my lens for Christianity has always been different. I never identified with the whitewashed, white supremacist, policing, institutional state force misrepresentation of Jesus and questioned the attempts of the Black church to make him so. Why would he subscribe to the made up idealogy of gender that only exist to reinforce white supremacy? Why would he want me silenced? Why do I have to wear a dress? Why is being ladylike important as a Christian? Why would homosexuality be considered wrong while murdering and spreading hatred was not (mistranslation closer to pedophilia and mostly mentioned in the Old Testament)? I learned to contextualize and understand the history during the Bible and its translations over time. I identified with the wooly haired and “burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace” Jesus that was yelling and flipping tables. I identified with the Jesus that was about listening to sex workers and against policing. I identified with Jesus that ate with people deemed unsavory by the white regime and others of his own people that were hypocrites. I identified with the Jesus that sacrificed for his community, died young, and was about love for oneself and one’s neighbors. Religious trauma has pushed many Black spiritualists away, but I urge people to learn from the theology and not from what it has been weaponized to propose. God is in us. We are made in their image. We are reflections of one another. I feel this when I observe nature. When I experience humanity. I see the patterns throughout other religions as well that seem to reinforce this same premise. I recall indigenous cultures that “worship,” another westernized concept, or express gratitude to things in nature by name. Why not if you see these living things just as valuable as you are? Christians express gratitude for these specific things in nature to One being.

I implore people to alchemize their anger and frustration and guilt. Allow these things to radicalize you. What other purpose right now besides liberation?

[thatweirdtranny]

what does it mean to be an American to you? what does your perfect america look like?

i don’t really have a concept of a perfect america or what it is to be an american beyond “person who lives in the usa” but i’ll give it a shot.

what it is to be an ideal american:

open to new ideas and different perspectives, we are a huge and diverse nation that’s honestly incredibly polarized at the moment politically and my favorite flavor of fellow citizen is one who can disagree while still respecting the other side

understanding of different cultural backgrounds because most of us come from immigrant backgrounds at some point (obviously excluding ppl who are first nations), we are a melting pot culture

progressive, always looking to the future while remembering/honoring the past, we have a relatively short history as a country compared to many but we’re a people who are always looking for new possibilities while remembering both the good and bad parts of our past (good would be our dedication to innovation, bad would be…. well that’s a long list, this country has fucked up a lot)

caring about human rights, equality/equity, most of us are descended from people who came to america to escape something going on in our ancestors’ home countries so i believe it’s our job to create a society where we don’t have to worry about oppression no matter where it comes from

cares about the land and its history — what did your area look like before european settlers colonized it? who lived there and what was their language/culture/general mode of existing? was the land taken care of or maintained a certain way by the local tribes/nations before it was colonized?

what is my idea of a perfect america:

native communities have the resources they need to live happy healthy lives in their homelands, with their languages maintained and the land maintained the way it has been historically and with science in mind (controlled burns, cultivated forests and natural habitat intermixed with holistically farmed land, wildlife corridors, etc)

education is entirely secular and well funded so that people don’t need to resort to private schools to educate their kids well

less funding for the military generally speaking, redirect those funds towards socialized healthcare and higher education

less funding for police, redirect that funding towards community services

in fact completely overhaul the police system, require psychological evals to root out the bullies and corrupt people, give them a minimum of 2-4 years of schooling specifically for law enforcement, require unconscious bias training, and make it so that every lawsuit for police misconduct comes out of the police’s pension funds

NO MORE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, implement ranked choice voting, do anything to end the two party system

progressive tax, better labor laws, let’s make america the land of people who don’t have to exist from paycheck to paycheck like most of us do now

restoration of native habitats and species. when there’s 20 million bison roaming the plains and wolves in most of the lower 48 again and the wetlands are wetlanding and the forests are foresting and the deserts not expanding and the amphibians and insects and fish are all at healthy population levels i will be happy

let’s talk “american freedom” for a second. i HATE the wet dream conservatives have about a very militaristic ideal of freedom. to me when i envision what i wish “american freedom” meant i yearn for a future where everyone has opportunity, can participate in democracy (our democracy isn’t perfect, we have to strengthen it), can do/be anything they want, etc

to achieve these ideals i think i most like the term “social democracy” with a mixed economy — i like the ideal of other more complete types of socialism but believe that a mixed economy is a more reasonable goal. healthcare and education would be socialized, housing and other things would be at least partially socialized, and social services would have more resources.

look i really just want everyone to be healthy, happy, without giving assholes the opportunities they currently have to hurt others, to oppress minorities/the poor/homeless, etc

ok i’m running out of spoons so i’m done for now

[studyabroadconsultancies]

Top 10 Exams to Study Abroad

Studying abroad is a coveted aspiration for many students as it offers the chance to receive a top-notch education, immerse oneself in a new culture, and broaden horizons. However, before embarking on this exciting journey, it's crucial to be well-versed in the exams required for admission to foreign universities and colleges.

These exams act as a standardized measure to assess the academic prowess and English language proficiency of international students. In this blog post, we'll delve into the top 10 exams for studying abroad that you may encounter on your academic journey.

TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language):

This widely accepted English language proficiency test evaluates your ability to comprehend and utilize English at a university level.

IELTS (International English Language Testing System):

Similar to TOEFL, IELTS is another widely recognized test assessing proficiency in listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test):

Widely used for U.S. college admissions, SAT evaluates skills in reading, writing, and math. Many international universities, especially in the U.S., require SAT scores for undergraduate admissions.

ACT (American College Testing):

Another U.S.-centric standardized test measuring proficiency in English, math, reading, and science. Some universities accept either SAT or ACT scores.

GRE (Graduate Record Examination):

This standardized test is essential for admission to graduate programs, particularly in the United States, assessing verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing skills.

GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test):

Tailored for business school admissions, GMAT evaluates analytical writing, integrated reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and verbal reasoning skills.

MCAT (Medical College Admission Test):

Required for medical school admissions in the U.S., Canada, and other countries, MCAT assesses knowledge and skills in natural, behavioral, and social sciences, along with critical analysis and reasoning.

LSAT (Law School Admission Test):

Mandatory for law school admissions in the U.S., Canada, and some other countries, LSAT measures reading comprehension, analytical reasoning, and logical reasoning skills.

DAT (Dental Admission Test):

Essential for dental school admissions in the U.S. and Canada, DAT evaluates knowledge and skills in natural sciences, perceptual ability, reading comprehension, and quantitative reasoning.

OET (Occupational English Test):

Specifically designed for healthcare professionals, OET assesses English proficiency in a healthcare setting.

Understanding the specific exam requirements for your desired country, university, and program is paramount. Early research and preparation are key components to success. Enrolling in preparatory courses, utilizing study materials, and taking practice tests can significantly aid in familiarizing yourself with the exam format and content.

In conclusion, the exams for studying abroad play a pivotal role in the application process, serving as benchmarks for academic and language proficiency. By staying informed about the required exams and starting your preparation well in advance, you can pave the way for a successful study abroad experience. Best of luck on your exams and may your study abroad adventure be fulfilling and enriching!

Read for more info: https://www.tumblr.com/studyabroadconsultancies/739101341234921472/top-10-exams-to-study-abroad

[prasadmedicals]

How to Get a Medical Residency in the USA as an International Medical Graduate

Choosing to the medical residency for IMG medical students in USA is the best opt. With world-class training opportunities and state-of-the-art facilities, landing a coveted US residency spot allows you to advance your skills and expertise to the highest level.

However, getting a US medical residency as an IMG involves a step-by-step process with many requirements along the way. By understanding and following the key steps, you’ll place yourself in the best position to match into your desired residency program.

1) Register with the USMLE

Your first step when applying for US residency positions is registering with the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). The USMLE is a three-step exam assessing an IMG’s medical knowledge and clinical skills. It is a core requirement when applying to US residency programs.

Registering is an easy process online via the USMLE website. You’ll need to create an account and provide background information on your medical education and credentials. This allows you access to schedule test dates and testing center locations.

Registering with the USMLE is the vital first step for IMGs seeking US medical residencies.

2) Pass the USMLE Exams

The next step is successfully passing all required USMLE exams. These are challenging, marathon tests covering a wide range of topics. Thorough preparation through dedicated study time and practice questions is a must.

The USMLE step structure is:

Step 1 - Assesses core concepts in basic medical sciences. Often taken after 2nd year of med school.

Step 2 CK - Focuses on medical knowledge application in clinical settings. Taken during 3rd year typically.

Step 2 CS - Evaluates clinical and communication skills through interactions with standardized patients.

Scoring well on your USMLEs signals to residency programs your strong medical knowledge foundation. It also indicates readiness for the fast-paced rigors of a US residency.

Many IMG applicants space out their exam schedule over a 1-2 year timeframe. Create your own prep timeline backward from desired residency start dates.

Allow plenty of dedicated study time to pass the USMLE exams.

3) Get Valuable Clinical Experience in the USA

In addition to tests, US residencies want applicants exposed to the American healthcare system and culture.

Gaining clinical experience in the US through observerships and clinical electives are a big advantage. These allow you hands-on learning of workflows, systems, treatments, technologies, patient populations, documentation, communication norms and more in American hospitals and clinics.

Observership organizations like Prasad Medical Center (+1 718-774-6060) assist IMGs in securing observership positions across the country. Be sure to research and understand program eligibility terms before applying.

Even a few weeks of US clinical experience can give that important edge among competitive applicants.

US clinical experience highlights adaptability to American medical norms.

4) Register with the AAMC

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has two key systems you must access during your application process:

MSPE (Medical Student Performance Evaluation) – Official record of medical education including grades, rankings and assessment.

ERAS (Electronic Residency Application Service) – Centralized online application portal distributing all materials to selected residency programs.

Register with AAMC early to get your credentials verified, understand each platform and have ERAS documentation ready when application season starts.

Connecting with the AAMC is essential throughout the residency hunt.

5) Pick your Residency Programs

When deciding which residency programs to apply for, start broad. Identify specialties matching your interests, strengths and USMLE scores. Use online directories to make a list of reach, reasonable match and safety options across several states or regions.

Factors like location competitiveness, program size, IMG match history and curriculum emphasis can help you categorize options. Have a few safety choices with higher IMG acceptance rates.

Research programs thoroughly to have residency options at each level.

6) Get your ECFMG Token and Register with ERAS

Once programs are selected, activate your ECFMG (Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates) token. This allows ERAS to verify your test scores, credentials and identity when applying.

Next, access your MyERAS applicant profile. Add your exam history, experiences, publications and other credentials that programs will review.

Double and triple check all entries for accuracy before submitting to avoid costly mistakes or delays.

MyERAS is your central application hub throughout the residency process.

7) Finalize Documentation and Submit ERAS Application

With your MyERAS profile complete, finalize all required documentation:

Personal statement

Medical school transcripts

MSPE Dean’s letter

Letters of recommendation (3+)

School catalogues

Proofread all materials thoroughly before uploading to ERAS by the deadlines. Activate program selections and assign supporting documents for each.

Carefully prepare all pieces of your ERAS application package.

8) Medical Residency Interview

With a strong application submitted early, interview offers should follow!

Interview formats vary widely across residencies. Common options include one-on-one, panel interviews, multiple mini interviews (MMIs) and virtual interviews.

Careful preparation is key. Research programs, polish answers to common questions, hone your communication style, dress professionally and send prompt thank you notes.

Treat travel associated interviews as 24/7 assessments of fit. Be gracious, avoid complaining and share your passion for medicine and interest in the program.

Interviews are critical to sealing a residency position – make the most of them!

9) Register with the NRMP

After interviewing, register with the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) by late January. Creating your NRMP account starts the matching process based on how you rank programs and how they rank applicants.

The yearly Match Day in mid-March reveals results simultaneously to applicants across the country. This coordinated effort fills nearly 40,000 residency roles each spring.

Understand match statistics for given specialties and programs to set realistic expectations before this nerve-wracking day!

Learning match nuances helps ease the anticipation leading up to Match Day!

10) Residency Post-Match Focus

If matched, congratulations on achieving that coveted US residency program spot! Notify all relevant parties, celebrate thoroughly and handle any needed visa application processes.

Review program details to address required paperwork, licensing, preparations or moving requirements before start dates. Share excitements and ask graduated residents for advice as you transition to this intense but rewarding new chapter!

For those not matched, don’t be discouraged! Strategize about strengthening certain areas of your application and discuss options with mentors. Often success comes with perseverance and giving yourself the best opportunities the following year.

We hope this overview gives international medical graduates more clarity on the pathway to getting a US medical residency. While challenging, thousands achieve this goal annually through careful planning, dedication to preparation, and showing your passion for serving US patient populations.

If you still need assistance securing clinical experience or have any other questions along your journey, don’t hesitate to contact the knowledgeable team at Prasad Medical Center at (+1 718-774-6060) or visit https://www.prasadmedicalcenter.com/ We wish you the best of luck in achieving your American medical career dreams!

[itsme-nana]

What are the significant contribution of the spaniards and american to the development of the science and technology in the Philippines?

Significant advances in science and technology were accomplished in the Philippines by Americans and Spaniards. Among their contributions are the following:

1. The Spanish:

- Western medicine was introduced to the Philippines by the Spaniards, who also built hospitals and medical educational institutions. They greatly enhanced the nation's healthcare system by introducing medical equipment, surgical methods, and vaccines.

- Creation of educational institutions: The Spanish founded schools and universities, such as the University of Santo Tomas, which developed into a hub for the teaching of science and medicine. These organizations were vital to the advancement of scientific inquiry and knowledge.

- Introduction of agricultural techniques: The Spanish brought new crops and farming methods, like sugarcane, tobacco, and coffee.

2. The American

- Modernization of education: A new educational framework with a focus on science and technology was established by Americans. They founded technical colleges and vocational schools that offered instruction in a range of subjects, including as engineering, agriculture, and medical.

- Telecommunications development: The Americans introduced telephone networks and the telegraph to the Philippines, improving communication infrastructure there. They also founded the Bureau of Posts, which promoted information and knowledge sharing in the scientific community.

- Encouragement of invention and research: The Americans founded research organizations like the Bureau of Science, which carried out investigations across a range of scientific fields. Through grants and scholarships, they promoted scientific research as well as innovation and technological developments.

- Creation of modern infrastructure: In order to improve trade and transportation, Americans built ports, highways, and bridges. In addition, they constructed power plants and invented electricity.

How does school science shape science and technology in the country?

School science plays a crucial role in shaping science and technology in a country.

some ways school science can contribute to development of science and technology in the Philippines:

1. Building foundation knowledge.

2. Fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

3. Promoting scientific literacy.

4. Encouraging interest and curiosity in science.

5. Bridging the gap between academia and industry.

6. Providing access to scientific resources and tools.

School science plays a vital role in shaping science and technology in a country, it lays the groundwork for future advancements in scientific research, technological innovation, and societal development.

What can you say about the implementation of some science and technology policies and project in the country?

The implementation of science and technology policies and project in the Philippines has had varying degrees of success.

Here are some points to consider:

1. Creation of Government Agencies.

2. Research and Development (R&D) Funding.

3. Infrastructure and Facilities.

4. Technology Transfer and Commercialization.

While these policies and project aim to drive scientific and technological advancement, there are challenges that hinder their effectiveness. Some of these challenges include limited funding, inadequate infrastructure, brain drain ( or the migration of skilled scientists) and a gap between academia and industry collaboration.

To fully harmness the potential of science and technology in the Philippines, it is crucial to address these challenges and create an environment that encourages collaboration, investment, and innovation.

[krujuice]

The Heart truth about energy drinks and meat:

L-Carnitine is an amino acid that is often promoted as a dietary supplement for weight loss, energy enhancement, and muscle development. However, recent studies have raised concerns about the potential harmful effects of L-Carnitine on the heart, particularly its role in the hardening of arteries.

Hardening of the arteries, also known as atherosclerosis, occurs when fatty deposits build up in the arteries, causing them to narrow and stiffen. This can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and other serious health problems. According to a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, L-Carnitine can contribute to the development of atherosclerosis by promoting the formation of plaque in the arteries.

The study found that when L-Carnitine is metabolized by gut bacteria, it produces a compound called trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), which has been shown to promote atherosclerosis in animal models. The researchers also found that people who regularly consumed L-Carnitine supplements had higher levels of TMAO in their blood, as well as a higher risk of heart disease.

But why does meat consumption lead to the hardening of arteries? Well, according to Dr. Neal Barnard, a physician and advocate for plant-based diets, meat is high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and heme iron, all of which can contribute to the development of atherosclerosis. In addition, meat consumption can lead to the production of TMAO in the gut, just like L-Carnitine.

So, what does this mean for people who are interested in maintaining good heart health? It's important to avoid supplements and energy drinks that contain L-Carnitine, as well as limit meat consumption. Instead, focus on consuming a plant-based diet that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. These foods are high in fiber, antioxidants, and other nutrients that can help promote heart health and reduce the risk of atherosclerosis.

In fact, a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that a plant-based diet can help prevent and even reverse the progression of heart disease. The study found that patients who followed a plant-based diet for a year experienced significant improvements in their cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and other markers of heart health.

But what about athletes and bodybuilders who are looking to enhance their performance and build muscle? It's important to note that there is no evidence to suggest that L-Carnitine supplements offer any significant benefits for athletic performance. In fact, a review of studies published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism found that L-Carnitine supplementation had no effect on athletic performance or muscle development.

So, if you're looking to support your athletic endeavors or simply maintain good heart health, it's best to focus on consuming a healthy, plant-based diet that is rich in a variety of nutrients. And if you're concerned about your L-Carnitine intake or your risk of atherosclerosis, it's always a good idea to talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian for personalized advice and guidance.

In conclusion, L-Carnitine has been found to be harmful to heart health due to its role in promoting atherosclerosis. Meat consumption can also contribute to the hardening of arteries. Therefore, it's best to avoid L-Carnitine supplements and energy drinks, as well as limit meat consumption and focus on consuming a healthy, plant-based diet. As always, consult with a healthcare professional for personalized advice and guidance.

Source Links:

"Intestinal Microbial Metabolism of Phosphatidylcholine and Cardiovascular Risk," published in Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3145

"Atherosclerosis: Diet and Drugs vs. Exercise and Plant-Based Diets," published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109714006948

"L-Carnitine Supplementation and Athletic Performance: A Systematic Review," published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism: https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ijsnem/24/6/article-p667.xml

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin

Published: Sep 17, 2023

At least 30 states are considering legislation to defund DEI initiatives in public universities and state agencies. At the same time, conservative activists, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, are suing companies to stop DEI initiatives. These challenges come on the heels of the growth of corporate DEI programs after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020.  

Meanwhile, advocates for DEI—which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion—have bemoaned the fact that after decades of diversity training, many university faculties, state agencies and corporations have made little progress on diversifying the workforce.

Are the right and the left on the same page here—is diversity training a hopeless cause?

We are a psychologist and a sociologist who have been studying bias and organizational diversity programs, respectively, for decades. The research makes it clear that Americans desperately need education about bias, because even people who value fairness and equality hold biases—without being aware of it. They need to understand that bias operates systemically and must be addressed at the individual, institutional and societal levels.

Education offered on these matters is very much in the national spirit. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in “Democracy in America” in 1835: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

What research shows

The social and behavioral sciences have developed strong evidence about conscious prejudice and implicit bias. Three lines of research, together, are pertinent. One provides good news. As our colleague Larry Bobo has documented, conscious unabashed racial prejudice has fallen consistently since the 1960s. White Americans today largely believe in racial equality.

This isn’t to say that explicit expressions of prejudice have evaporated; in fact they pop up with surprising regularity. The pandemic witnessed precipitous increases in anti-Asian hatred, and according to the Anti-Defamation League, instances of antisemitism are at a record high. 

A second line of research shows that less conscious, or implicit, bias has declined more slowly. Bias against some groups has barely budged. If only explicit values and biases drove discrimination, unfair treatment of, say, Black workers would be low. But implicit bias taints employer behavior and decisions. Our colleague Mandy Palais and collaborators find, for instance, that implicit racial bias in grocery-store managers still influences worker performance.

A third line of research uses audit studies, in which matched Black and white people, for instance, apply to the same job. Who gets called in for an interview, or hired? Scores of studies show discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender and disability. These studies show, among other things, that white applicants are about 50% more likely than identical Black applicants to be called back for an interview or offered a job. Other audit studies show discrimination in real-world access to financial resources, healthcare and treatment by the law and law enforcement.    

Research by Lincoln Quillian and colleagues compares the results of audit studies over time, finding that discrimination against Black job applicants is virtually unchanged from a generation ago. And the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues not only show a shocking drop in American upward mobility over time, but also show that in regions with high levels of implicit bias, Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to move up the economic ladder.

Research by Lincoln Quillian and colleagues compares the results of audit studies over time, finding that discrimination against Black job applicants is virtually unchanged from a generation ago. And the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues not only show a shocking drop in American upward mobility over time, but also show that in regions with high levels of implicit bias, Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to move up the economic ladder. 

Research from one of us, Frank Dobbin (with Alexandra Kalev), meanwhile, shows how likely a worker in a U.S. firm is to have a management job, by group. Women and people of color see increases until the mid-1980s. But progress stalls for Black and Hispanic workers after that. Men from those groups make no progress between then and 2021, and women make almost no progress. We clearly have more work to do to equalize opportunity.

Falling short

It’s not hard to conclude from all these studies that we are not the land of opportunity for everyone we claim to be. An enlightened society should see that education about the prevalence of discrimination is imperative. In fact, it would be downright dumb not to educate people. 

But, as Dobbin and Kalev have shown, the typical DEI training doesn’t educate people about bias and may even do harm.

Most training programs fall short on two fronts. First, they use implicit-bias education to shame trainees for holding stereotypes. Trainers play gotcha, sending trainees to take an online test co-developed by one of us, Mahzarin Banaji, for education and research. Instead of training people about research that finds that bias is pervasive, trainers use the test to prove to trainees that they are morally flawed. People leave feeling guilty for holding biases that conflict with American values.

“Gotcha” isn’t going to win people over. The approach is disrespectful, and misses the main takeaway from implicit bias research: Everyone holds biases they don’t control as a consequence of a lifetime of exposure to societal inequality, the media and the arts. Trainers should introduce these ideas with humility, for trainers themselves can’t help but hold these very biases. They could easily educate themselves about the implicit bias research with resources at outsmartingimplicitbias.org.

The second problem with most trainings is that they seek to solve the problem of bias by invoking the law to scare people about the risk of letting bias go unchecked. Trainers recount stories of big companies brought to their heels by discrimination suits. They detail rigid do’s and don’ts for hiring, disciplining and firing people. They require trainees to pass tests on what the law forbids. All of this makes it clear that the CEO approved the training solely to avoid litigation. Trainees leave scared that they will be punished for a simple mistake that may land their company in court.  

Trainings with this one-two punch—you are biased and the law will get you—backfire. The research shows that this kind of training leads to reductions in women and people of color in management.

Why would diversity training actually make things worse? Making people feel ashamed can lead them to reject the message. Thus people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups (“There’s no way I’m biased!”). And threats of punishment, by the law in this case, typically lead to psychological “reactance” whereby people reject the desired behavior (“Nobody’s telling me what I can’t say!”). This kind of training can turn off even supporters of equal-opportunity programs. 

A better way

It doesn’t have to be this way, and Dobbin and Kalev’s research on training points to a better alternative. Instead of using legal scare tactics, training programs should give managers a way to counter biases—namely, training in strategies for cultural inclusion. This kind of training teaches skills in listening, observation and intervention. It thus helps managers to hear employee concerns, notice when workers are feeling shunned or dissed, and intervene. It also offers skills for starting tough conversations about how to treat colleagues at work.

Those are skills from Management 101, but managers often don’t want to hear bad news, so they don’t ask employees about troubles, watch teams for signs of bullying, or speak up when they sense a problem. Reminding managers that they can use these tools to suss out problems and nip them in the bud helps them to feel capable of managing biases and microaggressions. When managers use these skills, they retain women and people of color for long enough to come up for promotion. That’s how good diversity training can boost diversity. Unfortunately, only about a quarter of diversity trainings emphasize cultural inclusion. 

Moreover, if training succeeds in conveying the findings from bias research—that bias is unseen but pervasive—it can build support for wider systemic changes designed to tear down obstacles to equal opportunity. In that sense, training isn’t designed to blame people for their moral failings. Instead, it’s galvanizing them to support organizational change by arming them with knowledge.

In the end, DEI training can’t squelch implicit bias; nothing short of changing people’s life experiences can do that. But when done right, implicit-bias education can alert students to the fact that people committed to equality nonetheless hold biases. And that knowledge can, in turn, motivate them to reshape their workplaces to counter discrimination by democratizing key parts of the career system.

That means extending recruitment visits from Harvard to Howard; offering mentors to each and every worker; and inviting all employees to nominate themselves for skill and management training programs. It means offering work-life supports to people up and down the ladder. Each of these changes has been shown to produce significant increases in managerial diversity.

The lesson here, the one that should be at the core of DEI training, is that implicit bias resides in individuals, but it resides in organizational career systems as well. And fixing those systems is as simple as democratizing them.

Mahzarin Banaji is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and co-author of “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.” Frank Dobbin is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and co-author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t.” They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

[ Via: https://archive.is/0D4kV ]

==

[astropithecus]

The (only) great thing about America trailing behind most of the rest of the industrialized world on social policies is we don't have to guess anymore. We can know with empirical certainty exactly what would happen if policies like free college were implemented, because other countries have already implemented them, sometimes decades ago so we even get long-term data. In a lot of cases, we've even already run trials and done studies right here in the US, so even arguments like "just because it worked somewhere else doesn't mean it would work here" are spurious.

The right loves to bring up Soviet Communism and failed South American states like they're the only historic examples of progressive economic policies. This is ironic, considering those regimes weren't actually very economically progressive at all, but I think that argument starts at the politician/media level as a calculated choice to stymie discussion by focusing on the irrelevant. It's then accepted as fact and parroted by people that lack the media literacy and critical thinking skills to judge the validity of those statements.

"USSR!" works to derail discussion, because by acting like nobody's ever really implemented effective progressive economic policies, they sweep all the scientific evidence under the rug. By implying "nobody can really know what would happen because we only tried it a few times and it didn't work, so we just have to guess" they obscure the truth - that we don't have to guess, we already know, with the same degree of certainty we know anything about economics and human behavior.

Unfortunately for Boomer Dads everywhere, the objective reality is that when college is affordable, more poor people really do go to college, and they do just as well in school as people that had to pay tuition. When people's livelihood doesn't depend on their work, they value their career more and advance further. "Handouts" don't make people lazy, if anything strong social safety nets make people work harder. Crime and drug use decrease when you give people free healthcare - suggesting the way to turn "criminals" and "addicts" into productive members of society isn't more cops or more jails, it's better access to healthcare. In short - handouts make people better people. If someone "doesn't deserve" help, then the best thing for society as a whole is to help them. These aren't opinions, these are facts. Unlike opinions, facts aren't subjective, it doesn't actually matter if you disagree - because the word for a disagreement with objective reality is "delusion."

I realize that link-dump looks like something to bookmark for Thanksgiving dinner with the family this year, but remember when dealing with people suffering from delusion, it's not usually productive to dispute their delusions with them. This seems counterintuitive, but providing a delusional person with conflicting evidence would generally make them cling to the delusion more tightly, and sometimes cause them to create even more elaborate paranoid fantasies to protect it (those studies aren't real science, fact checking is a liberal conspiracy, peer-reviewed journals are fake news, everyone is lying to me, I can't trust anything I read, you're working for the bad guys, etc). Any attempts to reason with them - even kind, well-intentioned ones - are only likely to reinforce the delusion. Instead (from the link)

one approach that may be effective is to validate the fear associated with the delusion while calmly explaining you see the situation differently. One way my sister did this was by adopting a calm demeanor, looking me in the eyes and listening to my paranoid statements without judgment. She listened without insisting on disproving my delusions, while at the same time not going so far as to legitimize them. I recall one such interaction as I was walking around my neighborhood with my sister. I began pointing out all the houses with their blinds closed tightly and told her, “Those blinds are closed for a reason. It’s part of the investigation. The people inside are trying to make it appear as though they’re not home.” My sister thought over what I had said, then offered, “It’s interesting you see it that way, because I see it a little differently. I see that the sun is shining pretty intensely on those windows right now, so maybe the people have shut the blinds tightly to block out the sun.” As I reflect on how my sister handled that situation and many others, what I appreciate most is that she remained calm and offered another way of looking at the situation without insisting it was more rational. This technique enabled me to consider other explanations without leaving me feeling as though I was being dismissed as irrational. My sister’s approach allowed me to challenge my delusions myself, to consider that my theories weren’t the only possible explanations for what was happening around me.

You've got to give them the space to recognize on their own that maybe they're not the financial and psychological experts that they think they are. They have to make the connection for themselves that they don't have enough evidence to warrant their faith in their delusion. They have to sort of accidentally stumble upon the self-awareness that they don't have any relevant educational or occupational experience to refute the conclusions of an entire worldwide community of economists and social scientists. You can't force it on them (even if you could, can you imagine how condescending you'd have to be?) but by gently raising alternate explanations to their delusional reasoning, without invalidating them or making a judgement about who's "right" (you know you are, but remember a delusional person is just as convinced that they are) you'll usually have a less contentious relationship. You may actually be a positive influence on their mental health, as well, but at least you won't make things worse.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Parsons :: @ParsonsGuy

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

[There is a discussion of rape in paragraph 12.]

Three big stories today. First of all, the Democrats are taking a victory lap on the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a law that has transformed the U.S. economy and for which not a single Republican voted. 

The IRA was the eventual form President Joe Biden’s initial “Build Back Better” plans took. It offered to lower Americans’ energy costs with a 30% tax credit for energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, or newer models of appliances; capped the cost of drugs at $2,000 per year for people on Medicare; and made healthcare premiums fall for certain Americans by expanding the Affordable Care Act. 

By raising taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations and bringing the Internal Revenue Service back up to full strength so that it can crack down on tax cheating, as well as saving the government money by permitting it to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, the IRA was expected to raise $738 billion. That, plus about $891 billion from other sources, enabled the law to make the largest investment ever in addressing climate change while still bringing down the federal government’s annual deficit.

“This is a BFD,” former President Barack Obama tweeted a year ago.

“Thanks, Obama,” Biden responded.

The law has driven significant investment in U.S. manufacturing. Indeed, the chief executive officer of U.S. Steel recently said the law should be renamed the “Manufacturing Renaissance Act,” as manufacturers return previously offshored production to the U.S. That same shift has brought supply chains back to the U.S. These changes have meant new, well-paid manufacturing jobs that have been concentrated in Republican-dominated states and in historically disadvantaged communities. 

Scientists Alicia Zhao and Haewon McJeon, who recently published an article in Science, today wrote that the IRA “brings the US significantly closer to meeting its 2030 climate target [of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50–52% below 2005 levels], taking expected emissions from 25–31% below 2005 levels down to 33–40% below.”

While Republican presidential candidates took shots at the IRA today—former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley called it “a communist manifesto”—Democrats have pointed out that Republicans have been eager to take credit for IRA investments in their districts without mentioning either that they voted against the IRA or that they are still trying to repeal it.

If the Democrats are taking a victory lap for passing this transformative law a year ago, the second big story today showed the effort to steal the 2020 presidential election was fully formed earlier than had been established previously. That story came from MSNBC’s Ari Melber, who revealed a video taken by Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen of Trump ally Roger Stone plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election on November 5, 2020, two days before the election was called for President Biden. 

In the video, Stone dictated to an associate a statement saying that “any legislative body may decide on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud to send electors to the Electoral College who accurately reflect the president’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud. We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures…by personal contact and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in their state—in each state—that this may need to happen,” he said. 

This video, recorded while the election was not yet decided, recalls the statement of Trump ally Steve Bannon, who told a group of associates on October 31, 2020—before the election—that Trump simply planned to declare he had won, claiming that the expected wave in favor of Biden was fraudulent. “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon said. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

The third big story of today shows how Trump Republicans think about women. It hits hard in the wake of this week’s story in Time magazine of the 13-year-old Mississippi girl who just gave birth after being raped by a stranger in her yard. She was unable to obtain an abortion because of Mississippi’s abortion ban. She is scheduled soon to start seventh grade.

Yesterday, far away from the home of that Mississippi girl, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down a decision about the use of the abortion drug mifepristone in the case of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Last year, as soon as the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, antiabortion doctors tried to get mifepristone taken off the market by arguing that the FDA should never have approved it when it did so in 2000. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was incorporated just after last June’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

In April 2023, Trump appointee and longtime abortion opponent Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary ruling invalidating that approval. The federal appeals court yesterday said the drug should be legal, but significantly limited its use by saying it could not be sent through the mail or prescribed without an in-person visit to a doctor, cutting midwives and other healthcare providers out of the process. 

Judge James Ho, who was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018 (Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was also there), wrote his own opinion in the case in order to expand on what he sees as “the historical pedigree of Plaintiffs’ conscience injury, and to explore how Plaintiffs suffer aesthetic injury as well.” 

Antiabortion doctors suffer a moral injury when they are forced to help patients who have complications from the use of mifepristone, Ho wrote, because they are forced to participate in an abortion against their principles. 

Those doctors also experience an aesthetic injury when patients choose abortion because, as one said, “When my patients have chemical abortions, I lose the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” Indeed, Ho wrote, “It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”

In cases where the government “approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy…animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy,” that injury “is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval. And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs [that is, the antiabortion doctors] have an interest.” 

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients—and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.” 

The decision will be on hold until the appeals process is completed.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON