the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

🇱🇧 Lebanese army soldiers remove an israeli flag in south Lebanon.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

Maybe threatening to send black kids on meds to work on farm is too on the nose

Link

President Donald Trump has instructed his administration to scrutinize the “threat” to children posed by antidepressants, stimulants and other common psychiatric drugs, targeting medication taken by millions in his latest challenge to long-standing medical practices.

The directive came in an executive order Thursday that established a “Make America Healthy Again” commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has criticized the use of those drugs and issued false claims about them.

The order said the commission should prepare a “Make Our Children Healthy Again” assessment within 100 days that examines “the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” The directive comes as children and teens endure a mental health crisis exacerbated by the covid pandemic.

Kennedy also has made childhood nutrition and healthful food a signature issue. He has been critical of the boom in weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro.

The medication review joins a slew of Trump administration policies upending the government’s approach to health, many of which are embroiled in legal challenges. They include attempts to remove vaccine information from health agency websites, to ban gender transition care for children and to cut billions in biomedical research funding.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said the order follows concerns about doctors overprescribing the drugs and harming Americans of all ages. The president called for a review of prescription practices and use of the drugs to determine whether the government should offer new guidance on the medication.

“The Trump administration will continue to review current best practices in patient care and scientific research to implement needed reforms,” Desai said in an email.

Marketa M. Wills, chief executive officer of the American Psychiatric Association, said psychiatric drugs can be very effective and generally are given to children carefully after front-line treatments such as talk therapy.

“In many cases, they can give children their lives back,” Wills said. “It’s a long, involved process before kids get started on medication, and it’s done judiciously.”

As with nearly every medication, medical professionals have debated the protocols for providing children psychiatric and weight-loss drugs, as well as ways to balance the risks and benefits.

In 2021, 8 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 17 received medication for their mental health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An analysis by MedPage Today found that in September 2024 there were more than 125,000 prescriptions written for GLP-1 weight loss drugs by pediatric and adolescent medicine specialists, up from nearly 60,000 in October 2022.

Jonathan Zhang, an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, said many drugs used to treat mental health conditions in the United States are being used off-label in children. Additional research would be beneficial, he said, but medication usage should be considered in the context of the limited availability of therapists and alternative treatments.

“There is a growing mental health crisis among youth so if there is overutilization of medication, in part it is also an access and provider shortage problem,” Zhang said.

Kennedy’s controversial mental health comments

Some mainstream public health experts have doubted whether Kennedy, a lawyer who founded an anti-vaccine organization, is qualified to craft sound policy given his lack of medical training and long history of promoting conspiracy theories and sloppy research.

In interviews and public statements over the years, Kennedy has compared antidepressants and weight-loss drugs to controlled substances. He has said antidepressants are harder to quit than heroin, a claim contradicted by research and experts. He told Fox News in October that pharmaceutical companies are counting on selling weight-loss medication to Americans because patients are “stupid” and “addicted to drugs.”

Kennedy has speculated that psychiatric drugs lead to mass shootings at schools, claims that are not grounded in credible research.

In an April 2024 interview with YouTuber George Janko, Kennedy said the National Institutes of Health should override medical privacy rules to determine whether mass shooters used SSRIs.

During his short-lived presidential campaign, Kennedy proposed creating wellness farms where young people could “get off” SSRIs and Adderall, a stimulant widely used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Those comments were first reported by Mother Jones.

A Washington Post review of Kennedy’s public appearances found he also promoted these centers as particularly beneficial for Black youth.

“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos which are known to induce violence and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens. You’ll actually have to talk to people,” Kennedy said in a June 2024 episode of the 19Keys online show.

Antidepressants

The rate of antidepressant prescriptions for adolescents has jumped sharply in recent years, rising 43 percent between 2016 and 2022, according to a paper published last year in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Wills, of the American Psychiatric Association, said antidepressants are not meant to be a front-line treatment for children. They are used when other treatment such as talk therapy is not working.

Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist in Cleveland, said there are legitimate questions surrounding proper use of psychiatric drugs in children because of side effects, limited data on long-term use and evidence that SSRIs are less effective in young people.

“Psychiatric medications are being used because there is a genuine clinical need,” Aftab said in an email. “The response should not be to restrict access to medication by thinking their use is unnecessary, but rather, the goal should be to increase access to high-quality clinical care that goes beyond reliance on medications.”

Stimulants

The scrutiny of stimulants such as Adderall comes as parents and children have confronted shortages.

The use of stimulants by adults has spiked in recent years but has been largely stagnant or declining in children and teenagers, according to an analysis of commercial insurance claims by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, about 10 percent of boys and 5 percent of girls ages 10 to 14 received a stimulant, the review showed.

“I’m worried about the proliferation of stimulants and mind altering substances,” Kennedy said during a 2023 C-SPAN appearance. “I don’t think it’s a good thing for people.”

Max Wiznitzer, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Case Western University and specialist in ADHD, said research has shown stimulants are highly effective and side effects such as decreased appetite rare.

He said that stimulants are best used as a bridge to help children develop good behavioral habits. But he questioned whether the Trump administration is acting in good faith in evaluating their use.

“That is not an open-minded approach to the medication by using the word threat,” Wiznitzer said.

Weight-loss drugs

The Food and Drug Administration approved Ozempic for use in children in 2023. The same year, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its guidance to recommend use of the drugs for children ages 12 and up with obesity and, in some cases, for children as young as 8.

Mark Fendrick, professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan, said it was “very surprising” to see weight-loss drugs grouped in with other medications that Trump said should be assessed as potential threats.

He said there have been numerous recent peer-reviewed studies — including one published in January in Nature Medicine that have shown the drugs to be safe and effective for a wide range of indications.

Fendrick said he supports Kennedy’s emphasis on healthy eating as a way to combat the nation’s obesity epidemic. However, he said that being able to treat children with GLP-1 medications will pay off in future health gains.

“Many people only have a short window for success, and these efforts that are outlined like reducing ultra-processed foods can take multiple decades to achieve,” Fendrick said.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

MAGA sees sex traffickers as allies in paternalism and misogyny. Always.

The anti-trafficking is all performative.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

The elephant

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

personally, i want to overwhelm them with too much good stuff. A good card isn't scary. Hell, the card on it's own could be mediocre. But then combine it with another, and now we have a problem. Not straight up combos, but synergy or control pieces that accrue advantage. Now they have too many things that need to be removed or dealt with, so they either have to board wipe or only deal with part of the issue.

Trivia Tuesday: Fair Play

I know there are a lot more nuanced ways, but these are a few that came to mind. Some strategies are a lot more open in constructed than limited, but hey, if you got 'em, you gotta play 'em, right?

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

Americans saying this isn't a burger because "a burger is the patty" have got me thinking about what Americans would think of the opposite:

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

So many people are finding screenshots of celebrities allegedly doing a 'nazi salute,' to try and discredit what people have been saying about Elon Musk.

My favourite most recently has been a picture of Sabrina Carpenter which can easily be discredited.

This is the picture:

And this is the video:

Yep, it's just a young woman waving to her fans.

And this is why when you ask any of them who post the screenshots for a video, they refuse to add it in. Because they know the video is of somebody doing something very normal.

We are so absolutely screwed.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

dear universe give me ten billion dollars and infinite free time and indestructible hands so i can do every hobby ever

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

i do think it is funny that games workshop invented a setting where fascism is objectively true and then keep acting surprised when nazis love their game

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

antique.alchemist : instagram

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

The urge to build a thallid deck with Tayam despite not having played MTG in like two years

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

Hey uhh an annual bill we forgot about just came out and it looks like we're kinda short this month now, especially since we have to get meds too. If someone wants to comm us we can draw you up something for like 30-50$ depending on complexity. If you want an example of our stuff, we'll toss it under the read more. Donos are also appreciated.

Ko-fi

PayPal

Please message first if you wanna commission.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

so sometime next year?

Assuming there was enough demand for a "universes within masters" to make one, roughly how many UB sets would need to be out for that masters set to be reasonably doable?

To make a good Masters set, we like to have six+ sets to pull from.

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

[the-phyrexian-is-a-part-timer]

Dehumanizing bigots is bad, not because I want to be nice to them, but because they are human beings and they serve as a reminder that anyone is capable of evil ideation and action. Violent bigots are not fundamentally different beings from you. They are human beings, who have developed a reactionary and destructive belief system due to their circumstances combined with their biases. In a different timeline, that could've been you. Anyone can be radicalized. Nobody is immune to propaganda, not even the person reading this.