The Four Principles of Why Sex is Binary

In order to deal with any controversy, including biology, it's important to get the facts right first. Only after we understand the basic facts can we discuss the ramifications of those facts, including the politics and morality. At the Paradox Institute, Zach Elliot has created memes and videos setting forth the fundamental principles of the biology of sex, a topic that was completely uncontroversial until three years ago, when ideologists reverse-engineered the "facts" based on political preferences.

Zach Elliot of the Paradox Institute has created this easy to understand chart:

For the full collection of short information videos regarding the biology of sex, visit Paradox Institute. For instance, see this video on "The Biology of Sex."

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“No One is Safe”: The Many Stages of the COVID Messaging Campaign.

Matt Orfalea offers a new collection of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.”

Matt Taibbi follows up with this article: "Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign: As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, Apologies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy." An excerpt:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

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About “Book Banning” and Young Children.

Deciding what is age-appropriate is not "book banning." This is not a difficult distinction except for those who seek headlines based on half-truths.

I've seen images of many of the pages of many of the books that have purportedly been "banned" from grade school students. As a parent, I would have been aghast had my young children had access to most of these books without my specific knowledge or consent. BTW, I know "Elizabeth Bennett" personally and I have no doubt that what she has written is true.

The following is an excerpt from the Court's Aug 5, 2022 Order in the case of C.K.-W v Wentzville R-IV School District Order Denying Preliminary Injunction, US District Court, Eastern District of Missouri Case No. 4:22-cv-00191. We are facing some real problems with conservatives going crazy banning valuable and age-appropriate books in school libraries. Before you fall prey to the claim that ALL of "book banning" cases are the same, however, consider the court's description of the books being "banned" in this case:

'Fun Home,' for example, has entire illustrated pages showing characters engaging in oral sex along with accompanying ribald language. Doc. [2] at 214; see also id. at 80–81 (showing various detailed illustrations of two undressed individuals in bed together with the narrator explaining that she “spent very little of the remaining semester outside her bed”). 'All Boys Aren’t Blue' vividly describes multiple sexual encounters of the author. See Doc. [3]. “He reached his hand down and pulled out my dick. He quickly went to giving me head. . . . [W]e dry humped and grinded. . . . I put some lube on and got him up on his knees, and I began to slide into him from behind. . . . I eased in, slowly, until I heard him moan. . . . I finally came and let out a loud moan—to the point where he asked me to quiet down for the neighbors. I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated. Then, he also came.” Id. at 266–268. All Boys Aren’t Blue details another encounter. “[H]e told me to lie down on the bed. He asked me to ‘turn over’ while he slipped a condom on himself. . . . [T]his was my ass, and I was struggling to imagine someone inside me. And he was . . . large. But I was gonna try.” Id. at 270–71 (second ellipsis in original).

In keeping with the pattern, 'Heavy: An American Memoir' likewise has detailed accounts of sexual encounters. The book does not attempt to hide its contents. As the back cover explains, the book discusses the author’s “complex relationship with his family, weight, sex, gambling and writing.” Doc. [4]. The author writes that “Renata pulled up her shirt, unhooked her bra, and filled my mouth with her left breast. . . . Choking on Renata’s breasts made me feel lighter than I’d ever felt. After a few minutes, Renata grabbed my penis and kept saying, ‘Keep it straight, Kie. Can you keep it straight?’” Id. at 22–23. And elsewhere, “I got close enough to the door to see Delaney was standing in the middle of the room with his soggy maroon swim trunks around his calves. Dougie was on his knees in front of Delaney with his hands behind his back. His tongue was out, licking the tip of Delaney’s penis.” Id. at 40.

Could a librarian or, ultimately, a school board official conclude that these books were age suitable for some older students and that the books merited inclusion based on their content overall? Sure. But can this Court conclude that the librarian’s determination that these books were not age appropriate was a pretense, absent some actual evidence, and that the real decisive reason for the removal was to deny access to students of certain ideas? Not at all. But Plaintiffs make the sweeping and, frankly, disconcerting request to have this Court require that the District “restore access” to these three books and “any books that were removed from school libraries during this school year and for which access has not been restored.” Doc. [19] at 17 (emphasis added). Meaning Plaintiffs would have this Court force the District to provide access to these, or any other books, that the District’s librarians concluded were appropriate for removal no matter the reason. Even if one of these books, or another that was even more sexually explicit, had been available to a library that served third graders, either inadvertently or because the librarian was unaware of the content, Plaintiffs would have this Court order the District to return the book for the third graders to read.

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How the Gay Rights Agenda was Commandeered by Transgender Ideology

Andrew Sullivan points out that consequential decisions were made with regard to gay rights without his advice or consent.

When you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

These activists, marinated in critical gender and queer theory, have picked several unnecessary fights and, especially since the convulsions of 2020, have pushed and pushed a woke revolution until a dangerous backlash was inevitable.

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.)

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

Then they quietly changed the meaning of the word “gay” so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word “men” to include people with vaginas and uteruses, and the word “women” to include people with dicks and balls. Checkmate for the gays! We are all now just bigots with “genital preferences,” just like the Christianist right used to claim. Just to add to the confusion, hundreds of new “genders” were adopted — because some teens on Tumblr once invented them and queer theorists loved them.

Go to The Weekly Dish to read Sullivan's full article.

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The Durham Report Should Destroy all Remaining Beliefs that Trump Colluded with Russia–But it Won’t

The Confirmation Bias is strong. Almost none of the millions of people who spent years convincing themselves that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is willing to read the 12-page Executive Summary of the Durham Report, which methodically dismantles their cherished world view. They would much rather ingest the soft-pedaled versions of the report offered by corporate media outlets that lavished themselves with awards for for engaging in journalism malpractice. I don't actually know all these millions of people, of course, but based on several conversations I've recently had with "True-Blue" people, they want to continue believing what they believe.

Those of us who have been following independent media (e.g., Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) are not surprised by the conclusions of the 316-page Durham Report.

One more thing . . . at Racket News, Susan Schmidt summarizes the main points of the Durham Report. Here article is titled: "Eight Takeaways From the Durham Report" Perhaps the overall headline could have been "U.S. Intelligence Agencies Attempt to Tip the Election in Favor of Hillary Clinton, Whose Campaign Paid for and Received False Intelligence to Lead the Way." Something like that. Here are Schmidt's eight takeaways:

1. There was no valid predicate for the investigation, and the FBI knew it.

2. “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”

3. “It’s thin”; “There’s nothing to this.”

4. The Trump campaign investigation was premised on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence,” and U.S. intel agencies possessed no “actual evidence of collusion” when the probe began

5. Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.

6. FBI Director James Comey pushed heavily for an investigation of Carter Page, starting in April 2016 when Page was a government witness in an espionage investigation of Russian diplomats in New York.

7. At the direction of the FBI, confidential human source Stefan Halper recorded lengthy conversations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in which each denied the campaign had any involvement with Russian officials.

8. Durham was highly critical of the FBI’s “startling and inexplicable failure” to investigate the so-called “Clinton Intelligence Plan.”

[More . . . ]

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