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Cost of keeping Britons out of energy poverty revealed

Samizdat | August 15, 2022

The UK government will need to spend a further £12 billion ($14.5 billion) on a support package for households to keep pace with higher-than-expected energy prices, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in a report on Monday.

According to the research, the money is required if the government still wants to provide the same level of aid it set out this spring.

In May, former UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the government’s aim was to make up for half of the cost of energy price increases to households. The effect of that support has shrunk as energy costs continue to soar. In May, energy prices were expected to rise by 95% in 2022-23, but are now expected to rise by 141%, according to the report.

The IFS said the cost of living is now expected to be 11.3% higher this financial year than last, with inflation peaking in the last quarter of 2022 at 13.1%.

The think tank warned that the poorest households will experience inflation of an “eye-watering” 18% in October due to energy price growth, compared to 11% for the richest households.

“The government is still playing catch up as inflation and the cost of energy continue to spiral upwards,” IFS Director Paul Johnson said. “Just achieving what they wanted to achieve back in May will cost an additional £12 billion, and a package on that scale will still leave many households much worse off.”

August 15, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Canada, Sweden and Finland announce dispatch of military instructors to Ukraine 

By Lucas Leiroz | August 15, 2022

The West continues to insist on indefinitely prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The policy of sending military aid seems to have no limits. In addition to financial remittances and arms shipments, Western countries are also mobilizing to give military instructions to Kiev. Considering the war crimes and human rights violations repeatedly committed by Ukrainian forces, supporting Kiev militarily means co-participating in the crimes – and the West must be judged responsible for that.

On 12 August, Canada and Sweden announced that they had sent teams of military instructors to participate in a joint program with the UK to train Ukrainian troops. Currently, London leads a project of military assistance to Ukraine by training soldiers with Western instructors. The objective is to pass on the technical and practical knowledge necessary for the Ukrainians to use the military equipment received from the West in the best possible way, thus helping Kiev to continue its “resistance” against the Russian special military operation.

Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said that 225 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officers will be sent to the UK to participate in the project. The first phase of participation would consist of a four-month period of joint military actions, in which Ukrainian combatants would be instructed in knowledge “related to frontline combat, weapons handling, first aid, field craft, patrol tactics, and include the law of armed contact”. She also made it clear that, in addition to training soldiers, Ottawa will also be contributing by sending 39 armored vehicles to Kiev. 

On the same day, the Swedish government also made it clear that it intends to actively participate in this London-led international mobilization. Stockholm announced the deployment of 120 military instructors to participate in the program. The act follows a previous announcement, in which Finland also committed to act in the training, albeit in a more moderate way, sending about 20 instructors. This is just another step towards militarization, revealing the bellicose turn that both countries have taken since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, when Sweden and Finland started to react irrationally to Moscow’s measures, even asking for NATO membership.

In fact, it must be noted that countries like Canada, Sweden and Finland are historically weak nations from a military point of view, whose security has always depended on two key factors: neutrality or automatic alignment. In the case of the Scandinavian nations, neutrality has always been a central factor, which began to be reversed as local governments adopted more favorable stances towards NATO – culminating in the current application for membership. In the Canadian case, however, the pillar of defense policy has always been automatic alignment with the US, complying with all decisions taken by Wasington in exchange for a place in the security umbrella.

These countries remain militarily weak. Their participation in the program does not imply real changes. Most Canadian, Swedish and Finnish military officers do not even have real war experience, which shows the practical irrelevance of being participants in the UK-led project. More than that: the very existence of a training program is of questionable relevance. Although the UK and other NATO countries have great military expertise and undoubtedly have qualified instructors to train their allies, the short training time makes it almost impossible for soldiers to prepare properly.

British military assistance to Kiev with training of personnel is not new. Since 2014 London has been assuming projects to train Ukrainian soldiers. Some of these programs took place publicly, while others were conducted secretly – such as the clandestine “Operation Orbital”, in which more than 22,000 Ukrainian troops were trained by British agents. What the UK is doing now is simply continuing its actions of the last eight years, with the only difference that now NATO’s plans for Ukraine have already failed. The aim is no longer to arm Kiev so that it can become a local power against Russia – it is simply to prolong the conflict indefinitely in order to “postpone” Russian victory.

For the UK, continuing the instruction is an opportunity to encourage the use of Western military equipment and thus trying to extend the conflict. For Canada, Sweden and Finland, it is a mere gesture of “political goodwill”, without any relevance. But, above all, those involved in this training and in all forms of military aid to Kiev share in becoming co-responsible for the Ukrainian atrocities. Since it is proven that Western-trained Ukrainian soldiers use Western weapons against civilians in Donbass, then the West itself is a participant in these crimes and should be sanctioned for doing so.

Lucas Leiroz is aresearcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

August 15, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Keira Bell: My Story

After a landmark court ruling in December, the name “Keira Bell” was cited worldwide, admiringly by some, with hostility by others. (Photo: Paul Cooper/​Shutterstock)
By Keira Bell | April 7, 2021

From the earliest days, my home life was unhappy. My parents—a white Englishwoman and a black American who got together while he was in Britain with the U.S. Air Force—divorced when I was about 5. My mother, who was on welfare, descended into alcoholism and mental illness. Although my father remained in England, he was emotionally distant to me and my younger sister.

I was a classic tomboy, which was one of the healthier parts of my early life in Letchworth, a town of about 30,000 people, an hour outside London. Early in childhood, I was accepted by the boys—I dressed in typically boy clothing and was athletic. I never had an issue with my gender; it wasn’t on my mind.

(Courtesy: Keira Bell)

Then puberty hit, and everything changed for the worse. A lot of teenagers, especially girls, have a hard time with puberty, but I didn’t know this. I thought I was the only one who hated how my hips and breasts were growing. Then my periods started, and they were disabling. I was often in pain and drained of energy.

Also, I could no longer pass as “one of the boys,” so lost my community of male friends. But I didn’t feel I really belonged with the girls either. My mother’s alcoholism had gotten so bad that I didn’t want to bring friends home. Eventually, I had no friends to invite. I became more alienated and solitary. I had been moving a lot too, and I had to start over at different schools, which compounded my problems.

By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet.

Something else was happening: I became attracted to girls. I had never had a positive association with the term “lesbian” or the idea that two girls could be in a relationship. This made me wonder if there was something inherently wrong with me. Around this time, out of the blue, my mother asked if I wanted to be a boy, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I then found some websites about females transitioning to male. Shortly after, I moved in with my father and his then-partner. She asked me the same question my mother had. I told her that I thought I was a boy and that I wanted to become one.

As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.

I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, or NHS. When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity.

By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.

After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy. By then, I appeared to have a more masculine build, as well as a man’s voice, a man’s beard, and a man’s name: Quincy, after Quincy Jones.

(Courtesy: Keira Bell)

But the further my transition went, the more I realized that I wasn’t a man, and never would be. We are told these days that when someone presents with gender dysphoria, this reflects a person’s “real” or “true” self, that the desire to change genders is set. But this was not the case for me. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.

Five years after beginning my medical transition to becoming male, I began the process of detransitioning. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testosterone in your body, and this affected me too: I couldn’t release my emotions. One of the first signs that I was becoming Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.

The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.

Last year, I became a claimant against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in a judicial-review case, which allows petitioners in Britain to bring action against a public body they deem to have violated its legal duties. Few judicial reviews get anywhere; only a fraction obtain a full hearing. But ours did, with a panel of three High Court judges considering whether youths under treatment at the clinic could meaningfully consent to such medical interventions.

Bell in January 2020, after she brought legal action against the clinic. (Photo: Sam Tobin/PA Wire)

My team argued that the Tavistock had failed to protect young patients who sought its services, and that—instead of careful, individualized treatment—the clinic had conducted what amounted to uncontrolled experiments on us. Last December, we won a unanimous verdict. The judges expressed serious doubts that the clinic’s youngest patients could understand the implications of what amounted to experimental treatment with life-altering outcomes.

In their ruling, the judges repeatedly expressed surprise at what had been going on at the Tavistock, particularly its failure to gather basic data on its patients. They noted the lack of evidence for putting children as young as 10 years old on drugs to block puberty, a treatment that is almost universally followed by cross-sex hormones, which must be taken for life to maintain the transition. They also had concerns about the lack of follow-up data, given “the experimental nature of the treatment and the profound impact that it has.”

Notably, a growing wave of girls has been seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. In 2009-10, 77 children were referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, 52% of whom were boys. That ratio started to reverse a few years later as the overall number of referrals soared. In England in 2018-19, 624 boys were referred and 1,740 girls, or 74% of the total. Over half of referrals were for those aged 14 or under; some were as young as 3 years old. The court noted the practitioners at the Tavistock did not put forward “any clinical explanation” for the dramatic rise in girls, and expressed surprise at its failure to collate data on the age of patients when they began puberty blockers.

The ruling does not completely prevent a minor from beginning a medical transition. But the judges recommended that doctors consider getting court permission before starting such treatment for those 16 to 17; they concluded it was “very doubtful” that patients aged 14 and 15 could have sufficient understanding of the consequences of the treatment to give consent; and that it was “highly unlikely” for those aged 13 and under.

In response, the NHS said that the Tavistock had “immediately suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under-16s, which in future will only be permitted where a court specifically authorizes it.” The Tavistock appealed the ruling, and the court will hear its appeal in June.

The puberty blockers that I received at 16 were designed to stop my sexual maturation: The idea was that this would give me a “pause” to think about whether I wanted to continue to a further gender transition. This so-called “pause” put me into what felt like menopause, with hot flushes, night sweats, and brain fog. All this made it more difficult to think clearly about what I should do.

By the end of a year of this treatment, when I was presented with the option of moving on to testosterone, I jumped at it—I wanted to feel like a young man, not an old woman. I was eager for the shots to start, and the changes this would bring. At first, the testosterone gave me a big boost in confidence. One of the earliest effects was that my voice dropped, which made me feel more commanding.

Over the next couple of years, my voice deepened further, my beard came in, and my fat redistributed. I continued to wear my breast binder every day, especially now that I was completely passing as male, but it was painful and obstructed my breathing. By the time I was 20, I was being treated at the adult clinic. The testosterone and the binder affected the appearance of my breasts, and I hated them even more. I also wanted to align my face and my body, so got a referral for a double mastectomy.

My relationship with my parents continued to be difficult. I was no longer speaking to my mother. My father had kicked me out of his apartment shortly after I turned 17, and I went to live in a youth hostel. He and I were still in touch, though he was adamantly opposed to my transition. Reluctantly, he took me for the surgery. I was a legal adult when it took place, and I don’t relieve myself of responsibility. But I had been put on a pathway—puberty blockers to testosterone to surgery—when I was a troubled teen. As a result of the surgery, there’s nerve damage to my chest, and I don’t have sensation the way I used to. If I am able to have children, I will never breastfeed them.

Around the end of that first year post-surgery, something started happening: My brain was maturing. I thought about how I’d gotten where I was, and gave myself questions to contemplate. A big one was: “What makes me a man?”

I started realizing how many flaws there had been in my thought process, and how they had interacted with claims about gender that are increasingly found in the larger culture and that have been adopted at the Tavistock. I remembered my idea as a 14-year-old, that hormones and surgery would turn me into someone who appeared to be a man. Now, I was that person. But I recognized that I was very physically different from men. Living as a trans man helped me acknowledge that I was still a woman.

I also started to see what I was living out was based on stereotypes, that I was trying to assume the narrow identity of “masculine guy.” It was all making less and less sense. I was also concerned about the effect my transition would have on my ability to find a sexual partner.

Then there was the fact that no one really knew the long-term effects of the treatment. For instance, the puberty blockers and testosterone caused me to have to deal with vaginal atrophy, a thinning and fragility of the vaginal walls that normally occurs after menopause. I started feeling really bad about myself again.

I decided to stop, cold turkey. When I was due for my next testosterone shot, I canceled the appointment.

After I came to this decision, I found a subreddit for detransitioners. The number of people on it started rising, as if all these young women had come to a collective realization of the medical scandal we had been a part of. It was a place we could talk about our experiences and support each other. I felt liberated.

What happened to me is happening across the Western world. Little of my case was a surprise to those paying attention to the Tavistock whistle-blowers who in recent years have spoken out in alarm to the media, sometimes anonymously. Some have left the service because of these concerns. But the transgender issue is now highly political and wrapped up in questions of identity politics. It can be perilous to raise questions or doubts about young people’s medical gender transitions. Some who have done so have been vilified and had their careers threatened.

At the Tavistock, practitioners provide “gender affirmative care”—in practice, this means that when children and teens declare a desire to transition, their assertions are typically accepted as conclusive. Affirmative care is being adopted as a model in many places. In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement on the treatment of young people who identify as transgender and gender diverse that advocated for “gender-affirmative care.”

But former Tavistock practitioners have cited varied problems suffered by the kids who sought help, such as sexual abuse, trauma, parental abandonment, homophobia in the family or at school, depression, anxiety, being on the autism spectrum, having ADHD. These profound issues, and how they might be tied up with feelings of dysphoria, have often been ignored in favor of making transition the all-purpose solution.

As the High Court found, much of the clinic’s treatment is not even based on solid evidence. At the time our case was accepted, the NHS was asserting that the effects of puberty blockers are “fully reversible.” But recently, the NHS reversed itself, acknowledging “that ‘little is known about the long-term side-effects’ on a teenager’s body or brain.” That didn’t stop them from prescribing these drugs to people like me.

Dr. Christopher Gillberg, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Gothenburg University in Sweden and a specialist in autism, was an expert witness for our case. Gillberg said in his court statement that over his 45 years of treating children with autism, it was rare to have patients with gender dysphoria—but their numbers started exploding in 2013, and most were biological girls. Gillberg told the court that what was happening at the Tavistock was a “live experiment” on children and adolescents.

Parents who are reluctant or even alarmed about starting their children on a medical transition may be warned, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” (Or vice versa.) I had suicidal thoughts as a teen. Suicidal thoughts indicate serious mental health problems that need assessment and proper care. When I told them at the Tavistock about these thoughts, that became another reason to put me on hormones quickly to improve my well-being. But after the court ruling, the Tavistock released an internal study of a group of 44 patients who had started taking puberty blockers at ages 12 to 15. It said that this treatment had failed to improve the mental state of patients, having “no significant effect on their psychological function, thoughts of self-harm, or body image.” Additionally, of those 44 patients, 43 went on to cross-sex hormones. This suggests blocking puberty isn’t providing a pause. It is giving a push.

Before beginning on testosterone, I was asked if I wanted children, or if I wanted to consider freezing my eggs because of the possibility that transition would make me infertile. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine having kids, and the procedure wouldn’t have been covered by the NHS. I said I was fine if I couldn’t, and I didn’t need to freeze my eggs. But now as a young adult, I see that I didn’t truly understand back then the implications of infertility. Having children is a basic right, and I don’t know if that has been taken from me.

As part of its defense, the Tavistock put forth statements from a few young trans people who are happy with their care. One is S, a 13-year-old trans boy who got puberty blockers from a private provider because the waiting list at the Gender Identity Development Service was so long. S told the court that he had “no idea what me in the future is going to think” about being able to have children and that since he has never been in “a romantic relationship,” the idea of one is not “on my radar at the moment.”

Lots of teenagers, when contemplating future sexual relationships, feel baffled and even disturbed at the thought.  Those same people, when adults, often feel very differently. I know, because this happened to me. I’d never been in a sexual relationship at the time of my transition, so I didn’t truly understand what the transition would mean sexually.

S’s statement demonstrates how difficult it is for minors to give consent for procedures they can’t yet understand. As the judges wrote, “There is no age-appropriate way to explain to many of these children what losing their fertility or full sexual function may mean to them in later years.”

Bell speaking to the media after the court ruling last December. (Photo: Sam Tobin/PA Wire)

Today, at 24, I’m in my first serious relationship. My partner is very supportive of everything I do, and I am the same for her. She has a large group of female friends who accept me; it’s been very healing. For now, I don’t speak to either of my parents or have a relationship with them.

I still get taken for male sometimes. I expect that, and I’m not angry about it. I know that I will live with that for the rest of my life. What I am angry about is how my body was changed at such a young age. People want to know if I’m going to have reconstructive surgery of my breasts or do other things to make me look more female. But I haven’t fully processed the surgery I had to remove my breasts. For now, I want to avoid more such surgical procedures.

When I joined the case, I didn’t realize how big it would become. What has happened since the ruling has been a rollercoaster. Many people have thanked me. I have also been attacked online. If you’re someone who regrets transitioning and decides to speak out about your experiences, you’re considered a bigot. You may be told that you’re trying to take away trans rights, that children know what’s best for themselves and their bodies, and that you’re ruining kids’ lives.

But I am focused on what is best for distressed young people. A lot of girls are transitioning because they’re in pain, whether it’s from mental-health disorders, or life trauma, or other reasons. I know what it’s like to get caught up in dreaming that transitioning will fix all of this.

Although sharing my story has been cathartic, I still struggle, and have yet to receive appropriate therapy. As I go on with my life, I plan to continue to be an activist on behalf of this cause. I want the message of cases like mine to help protect other kids from taking a mistaken path. This year, I helped create the first Detrans Awareness Day, on March 12.  I hope that, in years to come, this day can be a beacon to empower others.

I do not believe in rigid gender expression. People should be comfortable and feel accepted if they explore different ways of presenting themselves. As I said in my statement after the ruling, this means stopping the homophobia, the misogyny, and the bullying of those who are different.

I also call on professionals and clinicians to create better mental health services and models to help those dealing with gender dysphoria. I do not want any other young person who is distressed, confused, and lonely as I was to be driven to conclude transition is the only possible answer.

I was an unhappy girl who needed help. Instead, I was treated like an experiment.

August 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Did the BBC unwittingly reveal the true proportion of unvaccinated as at least 20%

Norman Fenton | August 12, 2022

In the BBC2 documentary “Unvaccinated” it was claimed that only 8% of the UK adult population is unvaccinated.

This is the ONS figure and we challenged this: https://www.normanfenton.com/post/bbc…

But for the programme itself the BBC commissoned a large survey which, we show, revealed that 26% were unvacinated.

To understand why it is so critical to get an accurate estimate of the proportion of unvaccinated see this 2 minute accompanying video: https://youtu.be/8It4qI9yhzQ

August 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Met Office Must Answer Growing Doubts About Rising U.K. and Global Temperature Claims

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 9, 2022

Further legitimate doubts are being raised about the scale of global warming claimed by the U.K. Met Office, following publication of a damning report into U.S. weather stations. The report found that 96% of the weather stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation. The U.S. has one of the largest temperature measuring systems in the world, and information from the stations forms an important part of the Met Office HadCRUT5 database.

Since 2013, the Met Office has boosted recent global warming by 30%, depressed past measurements and abolished the temperature pause from 1998 to 2012 – this pause is still discernible in the accurate satellite and meteorological balloon record. Using the HadCRUT5 database means the Met Office can claim continuing warming and further heat records. Anthony Watts, the author of the report, titled Corrupted Climate Stations, noted that data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement, “show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations”. With a 96% warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, “it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.”, added Watts. The same can, of course, be argued to apply to all global sets that use the corrupted U.S. data.

The corruption is caused by close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. “Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States,” it says.

Of course the Met Office’s own U.K. temperature measuring is subject to considerable urban heat distortions. During the recent brief heatwave (“feels like an apocalypse,” Piers Morgan), three of the four highest temperatures were recorded at airports including Heathrow, one of the least suitable sites it is possible to imagine. Interestingly, the average temperature for the U.K. last month was 16.6°C, the same as the year before and nearly identical to the 16.5°C of 1976. Given that 11 million more people live in the U.K. and urbanisation has rapidly expanded since then, last month was almost certainly cooler than the same glorious period in 1976. In addition, these averages were not far off the temperature of 16°C recorded in 1911.

Frequent upwards adjustments to HadCRUT, and an increasing disconnect with satellite and balloon records, do pose legitimate questions that the state-funded Met Office is actually recording increasing urban heat, and not much warming of the global atmosphere. And further questions can be posed along the lines – is it just a coincidence that the data is beneficial to those arguing the climate is breaking down, and a command-and-control Net Zero solution must be imposed in less than 30 years?

As we reported recently in the Daily Sceptic, Watts also publicised a rarely referenced dataset that NOAA started in 2015, designed to remove all urban heat distortions. Called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), it collected data from 114 U.S. stations and was aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”. Over the last 17 years it found very little evidence to indicate a warming trend. In fact it showed that May 2022 was cooler than May 2005. Watts comments that the data the network produces are never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.

Much of the Watts report supplies details of the field trips made to NOAA stations. He supplies copious notes and photos of what was found.

The above photo was taken at Fort Pierce in Florida and shows a digital measuring devise (MMTS) sited next to a large building and five air conditioning units pumping out hot air. Watts, a meteorologist by profession, notes that digital devices are often placed next to buildings since installing a cable to a reading devise is more difficult when roads and paths have to be crossed.

Several examples of stations where the siting could be described as “absurd” were noted in the survey. Watts gives further details:

These include a GHCN station at Lava Hot Springs, Idaho – a tourist site at which the MMTS sensor was placed into a natural hole in the ground where hot water for bathing and swimming emanates from the ground: … a station in Virginia City, Nevada – at which the MMTS was not only missing its protective cap, but also placed near asphalt, generators, and air conditioning units exhausts. Perhaps the most absurd was a UNHCN station in Colfax, California, which was recently moved due to a modernisation upgrade at the California fire station where it is located. The new station has been placed directly above a 20-foot rock wall that absorbs a massive amount of solar energy during the day, and releases it as LWIR [Long Wave Infrared] at night, with heated air rising to the sensor.

In conclusion the report found a “slight warming trend” when examining temperatures from “unperturbed” stations and this was similar to the satellite record compiled by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). “This warming trend, however, is approximately half the claimed rate of increase promoted by many in the climate science community,” it was noted. The UAH monthly record is frequently published by the Daily Sceptic as providing the best guide to global temperature. Not only does it show clearly that temperatures paused from 1998-2012 but a current pause is underway, and this has lasted nearly eight years. The inconvenient data are not to everyone’s taste. Earlier this year, Google Adsense ‘demonitised’ the page providing the monthly results on the grounds of “unreliable and harmful claims”.

“The rate of warming as measured by unperturbed surface stations, USCRN and UAH does not represent a climate crisis,” says Watts. Meanwhile it is almost certain that as temperatures rise in the U.K. this week, the Met Office will be reporting from Heathrow. But its addiction to such data, shown to be “corrupted” by the Watts report, is leading to serious doubts about its ability to provide an accurate indication of U.K. and global temperatures.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

August 12, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

How Tavistock Came Tumbling Down

By Sue Evans | Common Sense | August 4, 2022

I joined the Tavistock Clinic in North London as a clinical nurse therapist in 2003. Back then, Tavistock was prestigious—known all over the world for its professional seminars and specialized psychological treatments for mental-health patients. Before I ever worked there, I would attend lectures and training workshops to hear from renowned psychoanalysts, who were considered some of the best in the field.

A lot can change in a decade.

Last week, the National Health Service ordered that the gender youth clinic at Tavistock to shut its doors by next spring. And I am part of the reason why.

The story of what happened at Tavistock is the story of how a small group of whistleblowers—doctors, nurses, parents and patients, together with the help of journalists and reporters—were able to relentlessly expose activist-driven medicine that they knew was irresponsible. It’s also an object lesson for others who are deeply concerned about a one-size-fit-all approach to transgender healthcare and wonder what they should do about it.

I was delighted when I started working at Tavistock back in the early 2000s. My role as senior clinical lecturer was to devise and deliver training courses for mental-health staff. Shortly after I joined, I took on another part-time role working with children and adolescents in what was called the Gender Identity Development Service.

There were, as I recall, seven of us on the team back then. We would have clinical meetings each week in which we would discuss our referrals and caseloads. Back then we had fewer than 100 referrals per year in the entire country and they were mostly biological boys.

Sometime during my first few weeks we were discussing a newly referred patient, a 16-year-old boy with a complex history, who felt he had been born in the wrong body. My colleague took on the case. Four months later, the boy’s name came up again in the meeting, and my colleague announced that she was recommending him for puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists), which are used to suppress the further development of secondary-sex characteristics like breast tissue in females or facial hair in males. Puberty blockers are almost always followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen).

Usually, when new patients arrived at the service, they would come in for an hour or so once a month for the first few months. So I was surprised to hear that my coworker was recommending drugs when, in my view, no meaningful understanding of his internal world could have been reached. I knew from my experience in working with adolescents that any diagnostic assessment arrived at after such a short time span would have been superficial.

It’s worth pointing out that Tavistock specialized in therapy—talking through problems with patients—and that we did not generally prescribe drugs. For that reason, I had expected the same approach when it came to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. But it seemed that, even back then, certain staff didn’t hesitate to recommend puberty blockers—even for vulnerable kids contending with anxiety, autism, internalized homophobia or other challenges.

I had also noticed that senior clinicians in the service would regularly meet with Mermaids, a transgender patient-advocacy group. At the time, various patient-advocacy groups were springing up alongside mental-health services so that patients would have a voice in the examination room. At first, I viewed all of this as an overdue development. But as time progressed, it seemed clear that groups like Mermaids were exerting influence over doctors and clinicians in the service—sometimes dictating the expectations of care for our patients.

One small anecdote: I was once instructed by a superior to rewrite a letter I’d written to a male patient’s referring doctor—making sure to use the patient’s chosen, female name and new pronouns. I understood the sensitivities around this subject, but I pointed out that using a female name and female pronouns might be confusing to the clinical team, since we had been talking about a male child with gender dysphoria..

I was informed that failure to use the right name and pronouns might result in problems or even litigation for me and the gender clinic at Tavistock.

The external influence of the advocacy groups increased. Instead of being a clinical, research-focused service where we were learning and developing ideas, it felt like it was a fait accompli that we had to go along with what Mermaids and patients wanted—even if we, the mental-health-care professionals, had legitimate questions about the appropriateness of the treatments that patients and patient advocates were demanding.

For example, a weird paradox arose at a conference on transgender health care hosted by Tavistock around 2005: the opening speaker declared that we were no longer supposed to think of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. But we were a mental-health team working at a mental-health facility. What were we supposed to be doing if not treating patients with psychological conditions?

Remember, this was all before the internet took hold of an entire generation of teenagers. There were no online groups dedicated to gender affirmation and coaching kids on what to say to their providers to secure cross-sex hormones. We mostly saw younger boys who believed themselves to be girls from an early age and a few teenagers who felt like they were trapped in the wrong bodies. So, although I felt aware of the gathering force of thinking around the area of gender dysphoria and transgender identity, it was hard to foresee the slow-motion avalanche that would hit over the next two decades.

Yet even what I saw in those years worried me deeply and working on the Gender Identity Development Service started to affect my personal well-being. I would come home with a headache on the days that I worked in the unit, and my heart would beat quickly when I went in the next morning. It felt like every time I raised a concern about us rushing prematurely to prescribe drugs that would have permanent effects on our patients, I’d be met with an eye roll and the unstated “Oh, here she goes again,” or “Can’t she just fit in?”

There were a few colleagues who shared my views. One colleague, Dr. Az Hakeem, would also speak up at team meetings. But for the most part I felt alone, and I felt very anxious about some of the children who had been referred for body-altering medications. I began to feel as though I might be part of something unethical. I tried to take on only children who were legally too young to commence the blockers, which would allow me more time to do long-term therapeutic work while avoiding the dilemma of the fact I worked in a so-called “gateway service” to medicalization.

I spoke a lot to my husband, Marcus, who is a psychoanalyst and who was by now a senior member of staff in the Adult Department of Tavistock. He suggested I go to the clinical director at theTavistock, which I did. She listened and took my concerns seriously. I later learned that she reached out to Dr. David Taylor, the Medical Director of the Trust, who was asked to launch an investigation into the work of the gender clinic. That was issued in 2006.

I do not remember being shown the report then, and don’t recall any in depth discussion about the contents of it or how the recommendations would be implemented. The only change that I remember was that a senior staff member from the more general Adolescent Department began overseeing our work. That oversight petered out when this staff member retired.

It was only in 2019 that I saw the full report when Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, obtained it via a Freedom of Information request. It confirmed all the disturbing things I had reported: Our data was poor; it wasn’t being stored properly; and there were not sufficient follow-ups with patients once they left the service—meaning we didn’t know how our patients were faring unless they voluntarily wrote to us.

As we have now learned from more recent whistleblowers, the recommendations in the report were buried, and when any criticism or difficult questions arose in the press, the Tavistock management would repeat the same mantra about how they were “a world-class service.” It’s important to acknowledge that there might have been some staff still struggling to deliver thoughtful, measured care, but the noise around our standards was growing louder.

I had tried hard to help the Gender Identity Development Service from the inside, but it felt like I was swimming against a stronger and stronger tide. I didn’t want to be part of something that felt wrong, and I knew that each time I spoke up I was being cast in a darker shadow of suspicion by my colleagues.

So in 2007, I quit.

After I left the gender clinic, I continued to work in other departments at Tavistock. I continued my clinical lecturing and practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Life was satisfying and busy, and I tried to put the experience out of my mind.

But it became increasingly impossible to ignore.

In the past decade, there has been an explosion in referral numbers to the gender clinic at the Tavistock—over 3,000 in 2019—and the service came under mounting pressure to get through the long waiting lists. This resulted in even more children getting fast-tracked and put on blockers if they expressed a wish for them.

The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria. Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them.

Between then and now, there were more whistleblowers, like Dr. David Bell, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Tavistock, who issued yet another report on the service in 2018 that raised a lot of the same concerns that I had raised back in 2005.  Sonia Appleby, whose job title was Safeguarding Children Lead, spoke out in November 2019, claiming that she was being blocked from doing her job by management. By then, the political pressure, the institutional capture, and the influence of social media had become much more intense, and about 40 people were working on the youth gender care team. Shortly after Dave’s report came out, my husband Marcus resigned from the Tavistock Board.

His resignation gained national publicity, and Marcus was invited to present at a 2019 House of Lords meeting, which I attended with him. A representative of the Tavistock Trust who was also at the meeting read a statement claiming that no one was being rushed through treatment, that Tavistock was a best-in-class facility. This was my second Damascene moment. I raised my hand to speak. “Look, that is not correct,” I said. “I worked there. And I saw that children were being pushed to transition very quickly.”

After that meeting, a group of us met, and we learned that a mother of a girl with autism and gender dysphoria was seeking support as a claimant in a judicial review of Tavistock’s practice of giving puberty blockers to minors. (Adults who transition are also prescribed blockers prior to starting on cross-sex hormones.) She had contacted a lawyer and he arranged a meeting with several of us who had attended the House of Lords meeting. The mother was worried about her daughter’s referral to the Gender Identity Development Service, as she did not feel that her daughter would be able to fully understand the ramifications of the treatment and give informed consent to it. She needed to remain anonymous and, therefore, needed a co-claimant who could afford to go public. Dave was still at Tavistock and was being threatened by the administration there. My husband had his hands full with his own patients. I did not relish the idea of sticking my neck out, but I knew I had to get back into the ring. By now, the whistleblowers’ reports felt grave. I signed onto the suit.

Almost no one in the U.K. wanted to get involved, so I set about finding expert witnesses in the United States, Australia and Scandinavia. Gradually, we put together statements and evidence to support our claim that children could not give fully informed consent to an experimental treatment with lifelong, as yet unknown consequences. I found, among many others, Kiera Bell through a journalist, and I was immediately taken by her story.

Keira is a young woman who went on puberty blockers at 16, testosterone at 17, and then had a double mastectomy—only to realize, at 21, that she wasn’t, in fact, a man trapped in a woman’s body. She argued that, as a minor, she hadn’t been able to consent in any meaningful way to the treatment. Eventually, she became a co-claimant in the case against Tavistock.

In December 2020, we won. The court ruled that minors under 16 could not give informed consent to having their puberty blocked. The ruling came as a great relief. I thought, Finally, people will have to pay attention and examine the evidence base for treatment of childhood gender dysphoria.

It’s hard to deal with the feeling of being hated. I’m aware how contentious this area is, and while I was only ever trying to do my best for our young patients, there was a loud group of people who would only hear my concerns as transphobia or bigotry or that I was a proponent of conversion therapy. The win felt like such a victory—not just legally, but culturally. It felt like an honest conversation was finally beginning to happen.

But then, in September 2021, we lost on appeal. It was awful—deflating.

The only thing that softened the blow was the fact that the government commissioned yet another report into Tavistock. And the results were devastating. It vindicated everything we had been saying for years.

But this time, the NHS decided they were going to do something about it. On July 28, the NHS announced that Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service would be closed and that, from now on, regional clinics would handle cases of transgender kids. I was blown away. I still can hardly believe it. The aim is that the new services should be more holistic, taking into consideration the whole child, and adopt better clinical standards according to the new report’s findings.

I didn’t seek any of this. It has been a pretty stressful few years. When I get a letter from patients or parents from around the world, and they tell me, “Well done, thank you for speaking up, you didn’t give up,” I sometimes get a lump in my throat. It’s been hard to be suspected of being prejudiced when all I wanted was safer clinical practice, more scrutiny and evidence collecting, and improved data storage.

Because what I am is a nurse. And my job as a nurse is to treat all my patients with respect and an open mind. I try to think about who they are as people, and to relate to their experience and empathize with them. I also believe we need to keep an open and curious clinical mind when something is occurring in society that seems novel or not yet fully understood. It should never be that doctors and nurses are unable to question diagnoses and prescriptions.

If my actions all those years ago have made a contribution, then I am proud. I made the right decision to raise my hand to ask another unwanted question.

Sue and Marcus Evans run a private psychotherapy practice in London. They are the authors of “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults,” which you can buy here. 

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Hampshire UK police end re-education classes as a punishment for tweets

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 8, 2022

The police in the UK continue to struggle with (re)defining their role in society, specifically as to whether or not it includes figuratively, but also at times literally, policing online free speech.

And that includes making sure people are investigated, and even prosecuted and fined for including such “crimes” as sharing memes on social networks.

In at least one instance, in Hampshire Constabulary, the “verdict” now seems to be a “no” – as in, that’s just not right. At least that’s the impression now as a “hate crime awareness reeducation” program has been dropped by the local Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), amid what looks like major controversy.

This constabulary was among three that incorporated the course, designed to “teach” officers how to become aware and then deal with racism, sexism, misogyny, and transphobia.

But it all went very much south in Hampshire when the scheme – that looks as flimsy and ill-thought-through as those deployed elsewhere – caught in its net a 51-year-old army veteran, who was told his choices were to either get “reeducated” – and pay a fine for this “course” – or face legal prosecution.

The vet, Darren Brady, was eventually handcuffed and arrested in his home and after learning about his suspected “crime” was tapping the “share” icon on a meme he saw online. The meme did not seem supportive at all of the “Gay Pride” imagery.

In fact, it was the opposite of the accepted narratives – like memes mostly do. In this case, it showed the “Progress Pride” flags arranged into the shape of a swastika.

The report Brady received by the police contained the accusation of “causing anxiety.”

If the army veteran meant to express that the “thought police” of the “classic” Nazi era were as bad in treating any topic they didn’t like, as those coming after a particular free speech opinion on anything these days – the Hampshire police’s reaction highly likely assured him he was right.

But Darren Brady wasn’t having any of it, though, and maintained that his choice to retweet the meme was legal, and legitimate.

“I am concerned about both the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident,” Hampshire PCC Donna Jones eventually announced. “When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong,” Jones said.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

UK waged ‘dirty’ propaganda operation in Africa

Secretive British ‘dirty tricks’ unit smeared Kenya’s leftist vice president during the Cold War

Samizdat | August 7, 2022

A covert unit within the British Foreign Office targeted Kenya’s first vice president, Oginga Odinga, in the 1960s as part of a “black propaganda” campaign, The Guardian reported on Saturday, citing newly declassified documents. After Kenyan independence from the UK in 1963, London perceived the left-wing politician as a threat to its interests, according to the papers.

Odinga is said to have been subjected to a three-year campaign by the Information Research Department (IRD), a clandestine unit initially established by the post-WWII Labour government to spread anti-Communist views. The effort was led by the Special Editorial Unit (SEU), a highly secretive “dirty tricks section” of the IRD, the report says.

After Kenya broke free from British rule in 1963, London apparently viewed President Jomo Kenyatta as the preferred leader of the country. However, the UK seemed to have been worried that the vice president, Odinga, a left-wing figure who was open to relations with the Soviet-led bloc and communist China, could somehow replace Kenyatta in the future. These apprehensions led the British ‘black ops’ units to scramble to undermine Odinga, despite British diplomats recognizing that he was not actually a communist, the report says.

The declassified files detail four campaigns to smear Odinga, according to The Guardian. In September 1965, the Daily Telegraph reported on a pamphlet issued by a fictitious organization called the ‘People’s Front of East Africa’ that branded Kenyatta’s government as “reactionary, fascist and dishonest” while touting Odinga as “a great revolutionary leader” who would ascend to power with the help of a new socialist party, the outlet says.

However, this was, apparently, a sophisticated propaganda ploy meant to arouse suspicion that Odinga was in league with communist China. The IRD is said to have distributed the pamphlet among “leading personalities and the press.” The story gained significant traction in Kenya and successfully convinced many of the country’s ministers that the pamphlet was genuine.

According to historian Dr. Poppy Cullen of Loughborough University, as quoted by The Guardian, all of this “clearly shows that Odinga was considered the main threat to British interests.” It also demonstrates the lengths to which the British were prepared to go to undermine him, he added.

However, the Kenyan vice president smelt trouble, the report says. In 1964, he accused the British press of a “spate of vilification and facile criticism,” decrying the allegations in their reports that he was plotting against Kenyatta.

In another instance, the SEU reportedly created a leaflet from what was called the ‘Loyal African Brothers’ that castigated Odinga as “a tool of the Chinese” communists.

Although this organization never really existed and was merely the creation of British propagandists, over nearly ten years the fictitious group produced 37 leaflets claiming to want “to free Africa of all forms of foreign interference.”

In April 1964, Kenyatta voiced suspicions that Odinga might attempt to overthrow him, which, The Guardian says, prompted plans for British military intervention should a coup take place. In the aftermath of these propaganda efforts, the homes of Odinga and his supporters were raided, but no evidence that a coup was being prepared was found, and the vice president kept his post, at least for the time being.

In 1966, Odinga resigned and established his own leftist party, the Kenya People’s Union. In 1969, the party was banned, and Odinga was placed under detention and later jailed by Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi. Nonetheless, Odinga’s son, Raila Odinga, is set to take part in Kenya’s upcoming presidential election.

“The story of British propaganda operations in Kenya is a reminder that the days of a declining empire were not as much pomp and circumstance as deception, disinformation and dirty tricks,” Professor Scott Lucas, a specialist in British foreign policy at the University of Birmingham, told The Guardian.

In May, The Guardian revealed how, from the 1950s to the 1970s, London sought to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing, the Arab world, and Africa through disinformation in an attempt to undermine their global influence.

Documents declassified back in 2021 and seen by the newspaper also showed that the British propaganda campaign had played a role in the mass slaughter of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s. Although the propaganda unit was officially disbanded in 1977, similar efforts allegedly continued for nearly another decade, according to the outlet.

August 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Eight-Day Strike Over Below-Inflation Pay Offer Looms at UK’s Biggest Container Port

By James Tweedie – Samizdat – 05.08.2022

The bank of England warned on Thursday that the British economy was headed for a recession in the fourth quarter of the year, while think-tank the Resolution Foundation predicted inflation could hit 15 percent by the start of 2023.

Dockworkers at the UK’s biggest consumer goods port are set to strike later this month over pay — as inflation soars amid sanctions on Russia.
More than 1,900 members of Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, will walk out at Felixtowe port on the North Sea in Suffolk for eight days from Sunday August 21 to Monday August 29.

That was after employer Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, refused to increase its pay offer of seven per cent. Dockworkers accepted a rise of 1.4 percent in 2021.

“Strike action will cause huge disruption and will generate massive shockwaves throughout the UK’s supply chain,” said Unite national officer for docks Bobby Morton, but insisted that “this dispute is entirely of the company’s own making.”

“It has had every opportunity make our members a fair offer but has chosen not to do so,” Morton said. “Felixstowe needs to stop prevaricating and make a pay offer which meets our members’ expectations.”

Further talks between the union and management are scheduled for Monday.

The bank of England warned on Thursday that the British economy was headed for a recession in the fourth quarter of the year, while think-tank the Resolution Foundation predicted inflation could hit 15 percent by the start of 2023.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said the firm and its parent company were “massively profitable and incredibly wealthy,” and “fully able to pay the workforce a fair day’s pay”.

“The company has prioritised delivering multi-million pound dividends rather than paying its workers a decent wage,” Graham charged. “Unite is entirely focused on enhancing its members’ jobs, pay and conditions and it will be giving the workers at Felixstowe its complete support until this dispute is resolved and a decent pay increase is secured.”

Workers in other sectors are threatening or have already taken industrial action over pay as the cost of living has soared — driven by a combination of massive government relief payments during the COVID-19 lockdown and the embargo on energy imports from Russia as retaliation for its special military operation in the Ukraine.

Rail Unions RMT and ASLEF held strikes in June and July, with more on the cards as talks with employers remain deadlocked.

Even doctors have threatened to walk out over their demand for a 30 percent rise this year.

August 5, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | | Leave a comment

UK policy on Ukraine must change before the public suffer any more

By Anthony Webber | TCW Defending Freedom | August 5, 2022

It is increasingly evident that the UK government under Boris Johnson got its policy over the Russia-Ukraine war wrong from the start. What good it did for world security and stability for our government to be involved in stirring up tensions in Ukraine is open to serious questions.

With hindsight it seems that Nato miscalculated: we should have left well alone and not interfered in this area of the world beyond encouraging talks with Russia.

Our failure to do that has brought calamity for Ukraine, and energy and food consequences which dramatically affect Europe and much of the rest of the world. It has allowed a US-led Nato to be influenced by globalist vested interests whose stated aim has been to bring down Russia, arguably to control the vast natural resources of both Russia and Ukraine.

Looking at the facts, Ukraine has 5 per cent of the world’s natural and mineral resources. Its reserves of lithium are amongst the largest in Europe. In terms of extraction, it is second globally in gallium, fifth in germanium, sixth in titanium, seventh in iron and eighth in manganese.

Ukraine has the second biggest gas reserves in Europe, apart from Russia-Asia (much of it not exploited). Europe is dependent on 40 per cent of its supplies from Russia, which Russia also supplies about 13 per cent of the world’s crude oil.

Ukraine produces 50 per cent of the world trade in sunflower oil, 14 per cent of rapeseed, 12 per cent of the maize and 9 per cent of barley. It produces 9 per cent of the world’s wheat. Russia itself is the world’s third largest producer of wheat.

Ukraine supplies 0.8 per cent of the world’s fertilisers, while Russia supplies 15 per cent.

This brief glance shows the importance of these commodities to the rest of the world. It is clear that a shortage in any of these areas will send up prices. So it should have also been clear that any sanctions against such a major supplier as Russia would only rebound on the sanctioning countries, harming them far more.

The damage done to Ukraine’s economy is inestimable. The dire effects on the economies of major European countries are reported daily. Spain is controlling the use of air conditioning. The lights have gone out in Berlin. Germany’s entire manufacturing industry is threatened. This winter will see serious energy rationing as well as unprecedented price rises and inflation

Much of this could have been avoided had not Europe committed itself to suicidal net zero policies. But there is no doubt that Britain and the EU’s intransigent position and refusal to countenance a diplomatic solution has acted as a catalyst of this crisis.

The deep irony is that it looks as if Zelensky’s Ukrainian government will have no choice but to open talks with Russia and have unnecessarily put their country through destruction, turmoil and loss of territory. At the same time the ‘Western’ countries, especially the UK, are putting their citizens through an entirely avoidable nightmare.

Johnson’s involvement with the Zelensky cause in Ukraine was always suspect. He needed a convenient distraction from the ‘partygate’ scandal. The man who never visited Afghanistan when he went along with Nato’s sell out ‘deal’ with the Taliban, letting down millions of Afghans and of course all the veterans who were sacrificed there, was ready to go to Ukraine for freedom fighting photo opportunities. There were no British interests involved in Ukraine and no defence obligations.

As this foreign proxy war progressed into a disastrous mess the media encouraged continued involvement, telling the public that Russia was hopeless and Ukraine were winning though the truth is they had been losing since day one, at a cost to the UK of more than £4.5billion, most in military aid.

The best thing the UK government under a new PM can do now is to carry out an urgent damage-limitation exercise. This means adopting a neutral position in the Ukraine conflict, stopping sanctions against Russia, and encouraging a peaceful resolution. The UK must look after its economic interests, which are not served by taking sides in this region. This is essential to halt the escalating energy, fuel and food crisis.

About a week ago the two Conservative leadership contenders had the opportunity to change their Ukraine policy when the issue came up at a debate. They both failed miserably and instead had the gall to say that they expected the public to contend with more suffering to support their Ukraine policy.

The public does not have to stand by silently. A Parliamentary petition has been started that makes the simple point that the policy on Ukraine has no electoral mandate. It states that it is the British public who must be given the right by referendum to decide on this issue if the government will not change the policy themselves.

Please click this link, sign, share and promote this: it involves the future of our country.

August 5, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Young woman shares horrific side effects of ‘transitioning’: ‘Wasn’t prepared to have a hysterectomy’

LifeSiteNews | August 4, 2022

What does it take to get medical professionals to sign off on sex change surgeries for those suffering with gender dysphoria? According to one young woman, a mere two and a half hours of counseling.

Sam is a 26-year-old woman from the Midlands in central England who began to wonder if she might be male at the age of 21, after many identity struggles throughout her teen years. When she discovered the online transgender collective, she wondered if she might also be transgender. Their testimonies of transition bringing happiness appealed to her. She sought medical help, but was told that a backlog meant that getting an appointment with the National Health Service (NHS) would be at least two and a half years. She began to explore private options instead.

She procured an appointment, told the doctor that she identified as a “transgender man” (after a bit of Googling), and after only two appointments, found herself cleared to take hormones and have her breasts removed. Armed with a prescription for cross-sex hormones, she began taking them in December of 2017, and procured a double mastectomy a mere five months later, despite the rules stating that patients must have identified as male for a minimum of a year prior to this (permanent) surgery.

The effects were almost immediate. As Sam tells it:

I was able to have the surgery just a year and nine months after I first discovered trans people. I was so happy after the surgery because I had been binding my breasts for years. It felt like a huge relief. The hormones worked really quickly and within a few months, my voice had dropped, I grew body and facial hair and even developed a micro penis.

My hairline also began to recede a little, and I noticed a huge change in my emotions. Whereas I’d once been a very emotional person, it felt as though the testosterone had numbed the heights of my emotions. Nothing made me feel incredibly happy, and nothing made me incredibly sad any more. I had moved from working in childcare to working in a very male-dominated job working with trains, and when I first met people, nobody knew I had transitioned from female.

Only two years after her surgery, Sam began to suffer more serious side effects. By mid-2020, vaginal atrophy set in. Those entering transition are almost always unaware of the fact that sex change surgeries can turn them into lifelong patients, with many aspects of their existence abruptly medicalized. Vaginal atrophy is when the female sex organ tissue begins to die due to the absence of the female hormones which keep the vagina healthy. Vaginal atrophy contributes to risk of cancer. In Sam’s case, it led to awful pain. She began to have second thoughts.

When her originally scheduled NHS appointment finally arrived, Sam told the doctors that she wanted to de-transition. She was stunned when they told her that her only option was a hysterectomy, which she did not want.

“I wasn’t prepared to have a hysterectomy at the age of 24,” she said. “I felt distressed as didn’t feel properly informed about the side effects that came with taking testosterone.”

I was experiencing imposter syndrome. I didn’t feel like the other men I was around, and I felt like I was constantly pretending. So I started questioning why I wanted to identify as a man. I didn’t want to regret my decisions but I was no longer comfortable living as a male. I researched more and I discovered a group of detransitioners, so I explored the femininity that I had suppressed for all of these years and I came to accept that I was female. Against the advice of my doctors, I stopped taking my hormone medication.

Sam now speaks about her experience to warn others of the dangers of rushing into transition. “Although I still love having a flat chest, I won’t be able to breastfeed if I ever have children and it has taken away the opportunity to learn to love my womanhood,” she explained.

I don’t want to put my body through breast reconstruction but I know that I would’ve learnt to love my body in its entirety. I have also started to menstruate again, which took around a year to come back to after I stopped taking testosterone, although I have been left with excess body hair and a deeper voice.

“I am talking about my experience,” she said, “because it is important to discuss these topics because, using their hindsight, detransitioners can help spot red flags and help others when it comes to making these important decisions.”

My family have always been supportive of me, but I have found that quite a lot of friends have drifted away since I have detransitioned. There seems to be a huge emphasis in society in supporting trans people, almost to the point that it is seen as what I did as being anti-trans. When I told people I was transitioning to male, I was met with overwhelming excitement and support from my friends. But when I revealed I would be reversing the process, I was met with questioning and distance from so many people I considered to be friends. The people who matter to me are here for me and I am in a much better place now and looking forward to the future.”

The entire culture encourages gender transition, and frowns on de-transition as an experience that threatens the basic tenets of transgender ideology and biases people against rapid transition. Most de-transitioner voices are shouted down. It is for precisely that reason that Sam is speaking out.

There are thousands just like her, and we are finally starting to hear their tragic stories.

August 5, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Stand up. Speak out. Resist. Create ripples.

By Alison Harvey | TCW Defending Freedom | July 31, 2022

‘Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’ ― Robert F Kennedy

The last two years have taught us many things – to question everything we thought we knew; to do our own research and listen to many voices; to switch off the narrative and think for ourselves; to reflect on our own personal morals/values, our lines in the sand. In extremis, what we would go to prison for, what we would die for?

For many of us it has brought a spiritual reawakening, a peaceful calmness that helps us rise above the fray and find the courage to speak our truth to those around us.

Many of us have discovered we have little in common with those we once considered close, while finding new friends who seem to be on the same wavelength as us. Whether healers or gardeners, artisans or unemployed, technology folk or lawyers, my new friends share a desire to focus our energies on creating a better world than the one currently being destroyed or that envisaged by the Great Reset.

Because of a medical condition I cannot wear a mask so July 24, 2020, was one of my red lines.  I started listening to doctors, scientists and lawyers, realising that those putting career, reputation, wealth in jeopardy spoke more sense than those profiting from the Covid response.

I silently thank those who raised awareness of our inalienable rights to bodily autonomy, freedom of speech, assembly and association; of our individual sovereignty as a living man or woman; of the hierarchy of laws and the difference between the law of this land and that of the sea; who helped us understand the scientific arguments against masks, PCR tests, social distancing, lockdowns, use of midazolam, remdesivir and experimental gene therapies; and reminded us of the importance of boosting our immune systems, natural immunity and cheap, effective early treatments.

This year I complained to my GP about the practice’s behaviour towards us maskless ones. Despite being polite, I was subjected to hostility and rudeness when I went for routine blood tests or to pick up my medical record. I was treated like a bio-hazard by the nurse, even as she drew blood, and told never to return. I pointed out the evidence that masks do not stop a virus but can cause physical, mental and psychological harms, the unlawfulness of denying my right to bodily autonomy, the illegality of denying my right to informed consent, and the NHS guidance which highlights that there are many reasons people cannot wear a mask and that these should be respected.

The practice subsequently de-registered me, having neither denied the behaviours nor apologised for them. I was offered no advice about my existing medical condition or what I should do without access to medication. How many others now avoid GPs altogether, regardless of the health implications? How many of the rising deaths at home are due to people avoiding the totalitarian dictatorship their practice has become?

The caring profession? Not any more.

We all choose how we react – that is a power they cannot take from us. I could have chosen to be bullied into compliance, to get angry, to join a different Covid-obsessed practice. Instead I found natural remedies and weaned myself off the pills. Seven months later I have no symptoms of the illness. I am not suggesting everyone could or should ditch their meds – just that everyone has choices and more power than we realise.

The decision to throw away all previously agreed pandemic preparedness plans in favour of treating the entire population as though sick is surely one of the most dangerous and diabolical experiments ever inflicted on humanity.

A GP recently blogged anonymously about medical ethics as he feared his profession had forsaken them. I find the words powerful and relay some of them below. How many doctors reading this could truthfully say they have honoured their oaths over the past two years?

The health and wellbeing of my patient will be my first consideration;

I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties even under threat.

A physician will:

– Respect a competent patient’s right to accept or refuse treatment.

– Not allow his/her judgment to be influenced by personal profit or unfair discrimination.

– Certify only that which he/she has personally verified.

– Act in the patient’s best interest when providing medical care.

Any (all) preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information.

The Nuremberg Code ….

We could be cowed into submission yet, every day, more question how we allowed ourselves to:

– be muzzled

– accept that non diagnostic test results equal a pandemic

– allow loved ones to die alone

– deny natural immunity

– accept a Covid-only ‘health’ service

–  reject the benefits of early treatment

– become guinea pigs in a dangerous experiment

– allow our economy to be destroyed

– submit to a 24/7 fear based, media led psy-op.

Every time we speak out or write something, we are creating ripples in their narrative. I have given feedback to the Care Quality Commission and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Perhaps those reading such letters will find the courage to speak out and honour the principle to First Do No Harm. One can but hope.

July 30, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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