#junk science

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Steve Bannon isn't wrong: for his brand of nihilistic politics to win, all he has to do is "flood the zone with shit," demoralizing people to the point where they no longer even try to learn the truth.

This is really just a more refined, more potent version of the tactical doubt sown by Big Tobacco about whether smoking caused cancer, a playbook later adopted by the fossil fuel industry to sell climate denial. You know Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How To Lie With Statistics? Huff was a Big Tobacco shill (his next book, which wasn't ever published, was How To Lie With Cancer Statistics). His mission wasn't to help you spot statistical malpractice – an actual thing that is an actual problem that you should actually learn to spot. It was to turn you into a nihilist who didn't believe anything could be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

Corporations don't need you to believe that their products are beneficial or even non-harmful. They just need you to believe nothing. If you don't know what's true, then why not just do whatever feels good, man? #YOLO!

These bannonfloods of shit are a favored tactic of strongmen and dictators. Their grip on power doesn't depend on their citizens trusting them – it's enough that they trust no one:

http://jonathanstray.com/networked-propaganda-and-counter-propaganda

Bannonflooding is especially beloved of the food industry. Food is essential, monopolized, and incredibly complicated, and many of the most profitable strategies for growing, processing and preparing food are very bad for the people who eat that food. Rather than sacrificing profits, the food industry floods the zone with shit, making it impossible to know what's true, in hopes that we will just eat whatever they're serving:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460

Now, the "nothing can be known" gambit only works if it's really hard to get at the truth. So it helps that nutrition and diet are very complex subjects, but it helps even more that the nutrition and diet industry are a cesspool of quacks and junk science. This is a "scientific discipline" whose prestigious annual meetings are sponsored (and catered) by McDonald's:

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/my-trip-mcdonalds-sponsored-nutritionist-convention/

It's a "science" whose most prominent pitchmen peddle quack nostrums and sue the critics who point out (correctly) that eating foods high in chlorophyll will not "oxygenate your blood" (hint, chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of light, which is notably lacking in your colon):

https://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/

When the quack-heavy world of nutrition combines with the socially stigmatized world of weight-loss, you get a zone ripe for shitflooding. The majority of Americans are "overweight" (according to a definition that relies on the unscientific idea of BMI) and nearly half of Americans are "obese." These numbers have been climbing steadily since the 1970s, and every diet turns out to be basically bullshit:

https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/what-does-ozepmic-actually-do-with-dr-dhruv-khullar

Notwithstanding the new blockbuster post-Ozempic drugs, we're been through an unbroken 50-year run of more and more of us being fatter and fatter, even as fat stigma increased. Fat people are treated as weak-willed and fundamentally unhealthy, while the most prominent health-risks of being fat are roundly neglected: the mental health effects of being shamed, and the physical risks of having doctors ignore your health complaints, no matter how serious they sound, and blame them on your weight:

https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/11968083-glorifying-obesity-and-other-myths-about-fat-people

Fat people and their allies have banded together to address these real, urgent harms. The "body acceptance" movement isn't merely about feeling good in your own skin: it's also about fighting discrimination, demanding medical care (beyond "lose some weight") and warning people away from getting on the diet treadmill, which can lead to dangerous eating disorders and permanent weight gain:

https://www.beacon.org/You-Just-Need-to-Lose-Weight-P1853.aspx

Fat stigma is real. The mental health risks of fat-shaming are real. Eating disorders are real. Discrimination against fat people is real. The fact that these things are real doesn't mean that the food industry can't flood the zone with shit, though. On the contrary: the urgency of these issues, combined with the poor regulation of dietitians, makes the "what should you eat" zone perfect for flooding with endless quantities of highly profitable shit.

Perhaps you've gotten some of this shit on you. Have you found yourself watching a video from a dietitian influencer like Cara Harbstreet, Colleen Christensen or Lauren Smith, promoting "health at any size" with hashtags like #DerailTheShame and #AntiDiet? These were paid campaigns sponsored by General Mills, Pepsi, and other multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations.

Eugenics was a pseudoscience created before anyone even knew what DNA was, let alone understood. Eugenics goes as far back as Ancient History. Breed the "best" humans through various methods including infanticide.

Modern eugenics began with Francis Galton in Great Britain in the late 19th century. It quickly spread and was enthusiastically embraced in the U.S. where methods including forced sterilization and forced abortions were strongly encouraged. And employed.

The U.S. was a leading proponent of eugenics to the point that Hitler (yes, THAT Hitler) was inspired to further develop his own concept of a "master race". Hitler believed that the U.S. would approve of his plans. (Side note- antisemitism was widespread throughout Europe and quite common in the U.S. in the early 20th century.)

Imperial Japan had its own version of eugenics tied to its extraordinarily racist world view. Japanese soldiers considered Chinese and Koreans to be subhuman. Again I will point out that extremely racist national ideologies were very common. It does not excuse them. Obedience is not a virtue and it makes you complicit in any atrocity.

Racism is only a small part of eugenics. Classism and cultural arrogance play a role as well. "Scholars" of eugenics in the U.S. extended the notion of "undesirables traits that should be eliminated" to include anti-social behaviour, homosexuality, proponents of degenerate arts (Picasso was included in that category. Yeah.), opponents of government rule, people prone to depression or mania, unattractive people (Yes that standard is not objective at all) and they wanted to control the number of common laborers because yes they were needed, but if there were too many they might decide they don't care for being bred like livestock.

These pendants are sold with bunk science claims, but we can use real science to prove how dangerous they are.

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jan 29, 2025

A society that harms its children cannot be said to be civilised. For all that we in the west pride ourselves on our liberal consensus, we have nonetheless enabled the rise of an ideology that has been responsible for the sterilisation and mutilation of children on the basis of a pseudoscientific and cultish faith in ‘gender identity’. Young people who desperately required therapeutic support were instead fast-tracked into medicalisation. Countless lives have been ruined, and all because the so-called ‘adults in the room’ allowed themselves to be cowed by the demands of the high priests of a dangerous new religion.

Donald Trump has now signed an executive order – ‘Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation’ – which seeks to halt this barbaric state-sanctioned practice. It bans federal agencies from promoting ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ for minors. This is long overdue, and it should be celebrated irrespective of one’s political affiliation. After years of word games and euphemism, the phrasing of this executive order is refreshingly frank.

‘Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end. Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization. Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.’

In a section entitled ‘Ending Reliance on Junk Science’ – again, the candour is wonderful to read – the government specifically blames the influence of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It orders agencies to ‘rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”’.

For those who don’t know – and this will be many who rely solely on the mainstream media – WPATH is a US-based activist body that has been regarded as the leading global authority on ‘gender medicine’, influencing policy decisions in various countries, including here in the UK via the NHS. Files leaked from WPATH in March 2024 revealed a shocking flouting of basic ethical standards. Internal memos and video recordings of leading WPATH members showed that they were fully aware that many patients were unable to give informed consent to these life-altering procedures, either because they were too young or suffering from psychological disorders.

For instance, when one nurse contacted WPATH to discuss her ethical qualms about allowing a schizophrenic patient to undergo treatment, one of the authors of WPATH’s Standards of Care replied: ‘I’m missing why you are perplexed. The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones if they have persistent gender dysphoria, capacity to consent, and the benefits of starting hormones outweigh the risks. So why the internal struggle as to the “right thing to do?”’ One therapist in California mentioned that he was able to secure treatment for patients who were homeless, suffering from PTSD or depression, and that in one case this had led to an orchiectomy (removal of the testicles). It seemed almost boastful.

The leaked details about children were even more disturbing. Young people who could not possibly comprehend the implications of an existence without fertility or even basic sexual function were allowed to be put on a pathway to lifelong treatment. One leading WPATH ‘expert’ acknowledged in one message:

‘It’s out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them… They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair, right?’

And then there was the endocrinologist who admitted that ‘we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet’.

The leaking of these internal memos and recordings should have been the end of the ‘gender-affirming’ mania. Thanks to the work of journalists Michael Shellenberger and Mia Hughes, with support from Genspect and other campaigners, the ‘WPATH Files’ were widely disseminated. A comprehensive overview was written by Mia Hughes for the Environmental Progress think-tank. The title said it all – The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults.

Yet the scandal went largely unreported in the mainstream media. The BBC has, to date, not once mentioned the WPATH Files or their significance in exposing the greatest medical scandal of the century. I was able to produce a special edition of Free Speech Nation on the subject in March 2024, which can be watched in full here.

I had repeatedly contacted the BBC press office to ask why there had been no coverage, an extraordinary omission for the state broadcaster. Even after the release of the Cass Review and its explicit criticism of the influence of WPATH on the NHS, the BBC refused to respond to my enquiries. Finally, in April 2024, a reply was sent, which read: ‘News items are chosen by the news editors of the day based on a number of factors.’ While this did not even begin to answer the question, it did prove that the press office would rather take an evasive approach than face a challenge about the organisation’s ideological bias.

There has never been any justification for medicalising children who are experiencing psychological difficulties around the issue of gender. As Helen Joyce has pointed out in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, research shows around 80 per cent of children eventually become reconciled with their sex, either before or in the early stages of puberty, if they ‘are permitted to express themselves how they wish but not encouraged to believe that they are members of the opposite sex’. In other words, doctors were blocking the cure.

In almost all cases, puberty blockers lead to the prescription of cross-sex hormones, which are sometimes followed by surgical intervention. As psychiatrist Dr Az Hakeem has pointed out, puberty blockers amount to a form of chemical castration. ‘We watch a film about Alan Turing and feel sorry for him and say how can we possibly have done this,’ he says, ‘but we’re doing the same thing to our children’. Following the recommendations of the Cass Review, the UK government has now banned puberty blockers entirely. But the likes of Susie Green – the former head of trans youth charity Mermaids, who took her son to Thailand on his sixteenth birthday to have him castrated – are still seeking loopholes to inflict similar damage on other children.

Such people will not be stopped until the law steps in, which is precisely why the recent measures by Wes Streeting for the Labour government in the UK, and now the executive order by Donald Trump, are so seismic. We should never forget that the WPATH ‘Standards of Care’ include an entire chapter on ‘eunuchs’, and urge medical practitioners to remove the testes of patients if they feel that they have an innate ‘eunuch identity’. That such insanely medieval guidelines were, for a while at least, promoted by the NHS, tells us all we need to know about how far the medical establishment had descended. They may as well have been prescribing bloodletting and exorcisms.

Trump will doubtless be accused of ‘fascism’ and ‘trans genocide’ for signing this executive order. But as the woke orthodoxy continues to evaporate, such histrionic language is already losing its power. This is a decisive blow against the state-approved abuse of children. Gender identity ideology still prevails in many schools and public institutions, so complacency would be a mistake. We are not quite out of the woods yet, but we are certainly beginning to see glimmers of daylight.

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I asked Grok how this Executive Order goes about achieving its aims.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/ZcD5TvrcvCRwoK5IEjgILoDX5

The executive order titled "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation" bans what it defines as "chemical and surgical mutilation" through several key measures:

1. Policy Declaration: The order declares it the policy of the United States not to fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the "transition" of a child from one sex to another. It commits to rigorously enforcing laws that prohibit or limit these procedures, which it deems "destructive and life-altering."

2. Defunding Practices:

• Federal Grants: It mandates that heads of executive departments or agencies providing research or education grants to medical institutions must ensure that these institutions cease practices defined as "chemical and surgical mutilation" of children under 19. This includes withholding federal funding from institutions that provide these treatments.

3. Regulatory Actions:

• HHS Review: The Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) is tasked with reviewing literature and best practices for promoting the health of children with gender dysphoria or related conditions within 90 days, aiming to increase data quality on these issues.

• Guidance Withdrawal: HHS is directed to withdraw previous guidance documents related to gender-affirming care and issue new guidance protecting whistleblowers who ensure compliance with this order.

4. Legal Actions:

• DOJ Involvement: The Department of Justice is directed to prioritize investigations and prosecutions related to these practices, including under laws against female genital mutilation. It also encourages the DOJ to work with Congress to draft legislation allowing children and their parents to sue medical professionals for damages from these procedures.

5. Healthcare Coverage:

• Insurance Exclusion: The order effectively affects federal health insurance programs like TRICARE, Medicaid, and others by excluding coverage for these procedures for individuals under 19.

• Parental Rights: It aims to protect parents who support the "healthy development" of their children by ordering investigations into practices by states that facilitate stripping custody from parents over disagreements on these medical interventions.

This executive order uses a combination of funding restrictions, regulatory changes, and legal enforcement to ban what it terms "chemical and surgical mutilation," primarily targeting transgender medical care for minors.

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This isn't bulletproof. As Grok's summary explains, it doesn't ban it across the board, it removes all federal involvement in the mutilation of children. Private insurance, private funding can get around this, but the federal government will no longer facilitate this medical scandal.