Women Born Transsexual

From The Atlantic:  http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-very-real-danger-of-genetically-modified-foods/251051/

New research shows that when we eat we’re consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA.

Ari LeVaux
Jan 9 2012,

Update 1/12: Thanks to science and biology bloggers, Christie Wilcox and Emily Willingham at the Scientific American blog network and The Biology Files, respectively, we’ve learned of the scientific errors made in Ari LeVaux’s most recent Flash in the Pan column, which is syndicated by a number of newspapers and magazine websites. This column has been expanded and updated, with LeVaux discussing specific changes in the comments. We regret the errors.

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of rice ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to receptors in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA (abbreviated to miRNA) due to its small size. MiRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been implicated as players in several human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. They usually function by turning down or shutting down certain genes. The Chinese research provides the first in vivo example of ingested plant miRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function in this way.

Should the research survive scientific scrutiny — a serious hurdle — it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we’re eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but gene regulators as well.

That knowledge could deepen our understanding of many fields, including cross-species communication, co-evolution, and predator-prey relationships. It could illuminate new mechanisms for some metabolic disorders and perhaps explain how some herbal and modern medicines function.

This study had nothing to do with genetically modified (GM) food, but it could have implications on that front. The work shows a pathway by which new food products, such as GM foods, could influence human health in previously unanticipated ways.

Continue reading at:    http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-very-real-danger-of-genetically-modified-foods/251051/

I personally don’t see the problem with sterilization being a mandatory part of sex reassignment surgery.  I mean an orchiectomy or hysterectomy are after all part of the sex reassignment surgery process.

It kind of makes sense, after all women can’t sire children and men can’t bear them.  If you don’t get SRS and are transgender it is a different story and I can respect that transgender people are different from transsexual people and having SRS is different from  living the rest of one’s life as a member of the gender they identify as.  Sex and gender are different things.

Where things get tricky is when “gender” an amorphous construct is substituted for sex which is more or less based on certain physical evidence.

None of this is made any easier by TS/TG people playing post-modern word games that come back to bit the rest of us on the ass.

From The Local:    http://www.thelocal.se/38466/20120112/

Published: 12 Jan 12

A move to scrap Swedish laws requiring compulsory sterilization for people undergoing gender reassignment surgery has been put on ice following opposition from the Christian Democrats.

The Christian Democrats have convinced the other centre-right parties to set aside a new legislative proposal that would have scrapped the law, arguing that the issued is legally complex and needs to be examined further.

Opposition parties decried the move, claiming that a majority of members in the Riksdag support efforts to ditch the demand.

“It’s too bad that the government and prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt haven’t taken into account that there is wide support in the Riksdag to scrap the [sterilization] requirement,” Social Democrat MP Lena Hallengren, deputy chair of the Riksdag social committee, told the TT news agency.

According to legislation passed in 1972, to undergo a sex change operation a person must be over 18-years-old, a Swedish citizen, be sterilized and unmarried.

In the proposal for new legislation, to be be presented by the government this spring, the conditions that sex change candidates are unmarried and Swedish citizens will be dropped, according to TT. But not the sterilization condition.

In the autumn of 2011, both the Moderate Party and the Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) expressed support for changing the law.

Continue reading at:  http://www.thelocal.se/38466/20120112/

Before there was Rock and Roll there was Jazz and Blues.  Prior to the mid-1950s records were often as segregated as the schools in the south.

There were records know as race record with musicians that later became know as rhythm and blues musicians.  They play Black Music for Black Folks, sometimes really raunchy music.

And man some of those blues guitar pickers were enough to inspire some  kids who managed to find these records to pick up guitars and seek out that particular crossroad that Robert Johnson went down to.

Thanks to the folks that collected and preserved these race records, those young kids who learned how to play this music, the sound folks who re-engineered the records and put them on CDs and thanks to You Tube it is possible for folks to hear music that was obscure even when it was recorded.

One of these days we are going to never again have the first, oldest, tallest etc. Transsexual or transgender woman to come out.

One of these days being TS or TG is going to be like being gay or lesbian.  As in: “Did you hear so and so came out as transsexual?” Oh yes, she had talked about it for months, and we were wondering when it would happen.

I seriously thought it had stopped being a source of fame and fortune in about 1974.

I guess nice straight liberals are just slow on the uptake and are easily amused.

Still when I hear of a sister or brother screwing up their courage and coming out to live their lives as a reflection of who they are inside at least a little congratulations are in order.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/04/tallest-transsexual-lindsay-walker-worlds-transgender_n_1183766.html

Felicity Morse
Posted: 5/1/12

Lindsey Walker used to be a 7ft tall basketball player called Greg.

Until she reached 21, Walker had muscles, dated a string of pretty girls and got a “manly” tattoo.

With his good looks, regular weight lifting sessions, and size 17 feet, no one would have guessed that Walker secretly longed to come out as the woman she felt she should be.

Walker, 26 from Ohio, USA, told Huffington Post UK of the moment she knew she’d finally had enough pretending to be a macho man, and how it feels to be one of the world’s tallest transsexuals.

“I just snapped,” she said. “I was playing basketball, it was my third season at college, I was really depressed and angry all the time and I ended up quitting the team halfway through the season.

“I didn’t call or talk to anyone and I didn’t come out right away. I went to talk to a therapist: I just didn’t know if I could be 7ft tall and transition into being a woman.

“That was probably the worst part of my life, I felt like I hit rock bottom. There were weeks when I was drunk every day for a while just to get through.”

However after Walker decided to come out, she contacted Guinness World Records to ask if she could be the tallest transsexual.

Continue reading at:   http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/04/tallest-transsexual-lindsay-walker-worlds-transgender_n_1183766.html

From RH Reality Check:   http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/01/04/female-genital-mutilation-breast-implantation-why-do-they-happen-and-how-do-we-st

by Marianne Møllmann, Amnesty International
January 10, 2012

Last week, a UK government review of the French breast implants that have caused panic from Australia to Uruguay concluded that there is no evidence the implants should be removed. The Australian Medical Association thinks women should at least get their implants checked out. But neither the reviews nor the media coverage of the implant panic has dealt with the real question at stake: what makes women voluntarily cut open their bodies to permanently implant foreign objects to the potential detriment of their health?

The answer to this question is potentially uncomfortable. I have often asked the students in my health rights seminars to articulate the principles that make us distinguish between voluntary female genital mutilation in adult women and voluntary breast augmentation surgery. Apart from the fact that the former makes us queasy and the second doesn’t, there really is none.

To be sure, female genital mutilation (FGM) is often performed on girls who are unable to consent to—or, indeed, understand—the violence asserted on their bodies. And, because FGM is prevalent mostly in places where health infrastructure is weak or non-existent, the intervention is often unsanitary and ultimately can be deadly.

But even if FGM were carried out in the best of clinical conditions on a consenting adult woman, we call it a human rights violation. Why? Because it is an intervention which is carried out solely to satisfy stereotyped notions of what a women could or should be, and which has:

1. no discernible health benefits;
2. a negative impact on women’s sexual health; and
3. permanent effects on women’s health more generally.

Continue reading at:    http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/01/04/female-genital-mutilation-breast-implantation-why-do-they-happen-and-how-do-we-st

Patrick Buchanan has a history of opposing the deportation/extradition of Nazi Death Camp Guards to their homelands for prosecution.  This make him a Nazi Sympathizer.

He is also a misogynistic, homophobic racist.

From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/11/buchanan-van-jones-and-militant-gays-are-out-to-get-me/

Pat Buchanan on Tuesday blamed “militant gay rights groups” and former Obama administration official Van Jones for a campaign to oust him from his commentator gig at MSNBC.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin suggested last week that the former Republican presidential candidate had been indefinitely suspended from MSNBC after the publication of his book “Suicide of a Superpower,” which contains chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

“The reports of my suspension are highly overrated,” Buchanan chuckled to Sean Hannity Tuesday. “In November, I had a medical condition, shakes, fever, chills, and I was in the hospital for 11 days, and pretty big hit. … There’s been no formal notification of anything like that.”

“Look, for a long period of time, the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant — they call themselves civil rights groups, but I’m not sure they’re concerned about civil rights — people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV and deny him speeches, get his column canceled,” Buchanan noted, speaking about himself in the third person.

“This has been done for years and years and years. And it’s the usual suspects doing the same thing again. But my view is you write what you believe to be the truth.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/11/buchanan-van-jones-and-militant-gays-are-out-to-get-me/

From Death and Taxes:  http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/173705/uk-bans-creationism-from-being-taught-as-science-in-free-schools/

By DJ Pangburn
January 11, 2011

“What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say ‘I know’ instead of ‘I am learning,’ and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish playwright and polemicist, in the preface to his play The Doctor’s Dilemma.

To adapt Shaw’s quotation to the current cultural and metaphysical divide between atheists and theists (Jews, Christians and Muslims, to highlight the big three), we might say that the true atheist should also refrain from any similar proclamations of “I know.” An occupation of skepticism’s scientific grounds is much preferred, for no man can positively prove the existence of a singular God or a trinity.

To that end, it seems that the UK government, in a move sure to incite the religious passions of the faithful, has closed a loophole that allowed creationist school founders to use public monies to preach the creationist gospel, or intelligent design, as a science.

This is as it should be: one is perfectly free to ponder the question of whether some supernatural force, endowed with supreme powers, not to mention omniscience, might have constructed the atomic and subatomic detail of the universe; but one is not entitled to teach or, rather, fascistically imprint these ideas upon children’s minds while passing them off as science.

The British Humanist Association had launched the “Teach evolution, not creationism!” idea as a petition, alongside thirty leading scientists and science educators, including Sir David Attenborough, Professor Richard Dawkins and Professor Michael Reiss, as well as five national organizations.

Continue reading at:  http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/173705/uk-bans-creationism-from-being-taught-as-science-in-free-schools/

From Raw Story:   http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/10/court-allows-texas-to-force-women-into-medically-unnecessary-sonograms/

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that  Texas may enforce a law passed last year which requires women seeking abortion services to undergo an invasive, medically unnecessary trans-vaginal sonogram procedure before ending their pregnancy.

The ruling overturned a restraining order issued by a lower court in August by striking down the argument that requiring doctors to show women their fetus and hear sounds from inside their uterus stands as a type of “compelled speech” that violates the doctors’ rights.

However, the Fifth Circuit Court said that is not the case, citing a 1992 Supreme Court decision that placed “informed consent” above the doctors’ right to be free from “compelled speech.” The legal standard for regulations on “compelled speech,” the 1992 decision held, is that the information a doctor is being ordered to present must be “truthful, non-misleading and relevant.”

From Natural News:  http://www.naturalnews.com/034620_Monsanto_diplomats_GMOs.html

by: Anthony Gucciardi
Wednesday, January 11, 2012

(NaturalNews) Biotech giant Monsanto has been genetically modifying the world’s food supply and subsequently breeding environmental devastation for years, but leaked documents now reveal that Monsanto has also deeply infiltrated the United States government. With leaked reports revealing how U.S. diplomats are actually working for Monsanto to push their agenda along with other key government officials, Monsanto’s grasp on international politics has never been clearer.

Amazingly, the information reveals that the massive corporation is also intensely involved in the passing and regulations concerning the very GM ingredients they are responsible for. In fact, the information released by WikiLeaks reveals just how much power Monsanto has thanks to key positions within the United States government and elsewhere. Not only was it exposed that the U.S. is threatening nations who oppose Monsanto with military-style trade wars, but that many U.S. diplomats actually work directly for Monsanto.

In 2007 it was requested that specific nations inside the European Union be punished for not supporting the expansion of Monsanto’s GMO crops. The request for such measures to be taken was made by Craig Stapleton, the United States ambassador to France and partner to George W. Bush. Despite mounting evidence linking Monsanto’s GM corn to organ damage and environmental devastation, the ambassador plainly calls for ‘target retaliation’ against those not supporting the GM crop. In the leaked documents, Stapleton states:

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices.”

From Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bryan-fischer-aids-denialist

by Kyle Mantyla
January 4, 2012

It really should come as no surprise that there is no depth to which Bryan Fischer will not sink in his relentless assault against all things gay, as he is now openly promoting the idea that the HIV virus is not the cause of AIDS.

Fisher dedicated two segments on his program yesterday to interviewing Peter Duesberg, author of “Inventing the AIDS Virus,” who asserts that the idea that HIV causes AIDS was a scheme concocted by scientists in order to get research grants and that the symptoms attributed to AIDS are really caused by massive recreational drug use among gay men.

And it is a theory which Fischer wholeheartedly endorses:

Complete article at:  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bryan-fischer-aids-denialist

From In These Times:   http://inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12515/anonymous_takes_on_neo-nazi_groups/

By Patrick Glennon
Tuesday Jan 10, 2012

No stranger to controversy, the elusive and disperse “hacktivist” group Anonymous has set its sights on a new foe—German neo-Nazis.

Hackers identifying themselves as Anonymous have set up a German-only website that hosts leaked information pertaining to the country’s far-Right scene.

The website, named “Operation Blitzkrieg,” boasts a wide swath of internal data and private information, including the names of people who have patronized online Nazi-affiliated stores, subscribers to Germany’s far-right weekly Junge Freiheit and donors to the fringe National Democratic Party (NPD).

While the bulk of the data is about German neo-Nazis, information on white supremacists from a handful of other nations has also appeared on the site, including details on individuals from Italy, Brazil, Slovenia, Belgium, Britain, Canada and the United States.

U.S. groups with material in the leaked data include Blood and Honour, the American Nazi Party and Ohio White Pride.

The hacker collective’s activity comes in the wake of increased public attention toward neo-Nazism in Germany. In November, a terror cell calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was discovered in Zwickau, a provincial town located on the German-Czech border.

Continue reading at:   http://inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12515/anonymous_takes_on_neo-nazi_groups/

From Good News:   http://www.good.is/post/seeing-red-millennials-are-cooler-with-socialism-than-capitalism/

Nona Willis Aronowitz
January 5, 2012

Despite the fact that Obama is as centrist as they come, the right-wing cries of “socialist takeover!” may be based in more than paranoia. According to a new studyconducted by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of Obama’s biggest fans—Millennials age 18 to 29—view socialism in a favorable light, compared to 43 percent who view it unfavorably. (Eight percent had no opinion at all.) What’s more, they like the sound of “socialism” slightly better than capitalism—46 percent of people age 18-29 have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views. This is dramatically different from the country’s population overall: 60 percent say they have a negative view of socialism, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view. Young people are the only age group whose support for socialism outweighs that of capitalism.

It’s telling that the number of socialism-friendly young people is on the rise from just 20 months ago, when 43 percent of Millennials favored the word. Between now and then, Occupy Wall Street has swept the country and the headlines, and there are more unemployed teens and 20-somethings than ever. It’s not hard to figure out why our generation isn’t so gung-ho about capitalism—it has disappointed and, in some cases, straight-up failed us.

Complete article at:   http://www.good.is/post/seeing-red-millennials-are-cooler-with-socialism-than-capitalism/

From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/11/poverty-america-likely-worse-report

Indiana University study says 46 million Americans are living below the poverty line – up 27% since start of recession