"If I had sneezed." The night before his assassination, MLK delivered his most suspenseful, surprising, and inspiring speech. MLK tells the mostly forgotten story of his near-death experience — an attempt on his life, several years earlier.
https://rumble.com/embed/vq3vhb/?pub=4
Licensed Funeral Director Victor Sweeney directly and frankly answers lots of question. How does a mortician prepare a body for a funeral? This is fascinating information.Thank you, Victor Sweeney!
Matt Taibbi points out that we are too busy arguing with each other about masks and vaccinations to notice major league corporate theft. His Substack article at TK is titled "Vaccine Aristocrats Strike Again: As yokel-bashing reaches impressive new heights, reports of yet another year of record profits and a widening wealth gap go unnoticed." Here's an excerpt:
[W]ithout constant drumbeats about the treacherous stupidity of anti-vaxxers and “domestic terrorists,” at whom would the bulk of Americans’ anger be directed now?A good guess would be people like the Fed-fattened private equity takeover artists who were just reported to have swallowed a trillion dollars in companies last year. These are people who force conquered companies to issue reams of new debt to pay them bonuses (taking advantage of a massive public bond-buying program intended as emergency aid) while doing things like cutting shifts for E.R. doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic. Even grandfatherly billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Special Metals is currently asking 450 striking steelworkers to accept pay cuts and take on $725 more a month in health premiums, while Buffett himself just floated on our increasingly phony stock market to increase his personal wealth by $1.6 billion in a single day.
. . . “Banks so far have been using profits to invest in technology, pay bonuses and buy back their own stock,” the FT wrote. Meaning, the bulk of this new wealth — most fueled by roughly $5 trillion in Fed spending since the beginning of the pandemic — is being converted into compensation for a handful of executives. Buybacks have also been rampant in defense, pharmaceuticals, and oil & gas, all of which also just finished their second straight year of record, skyrocketing profits. We’re now up to about 745 billionaires in the U.S., who’ve collectively seen their net worth grow about $2.1 trillion to $5 trillion since March 2020, with almost all that wealth increase tied to the Fed’s ballooning balance sheet.
In addition to all the scary things going on in the world, there are a lot of amazing and beautiful things going on in each of our lives, if only we stop to appreciate them. In honor of those many awesome things I offer this "hymn" to celebrate the end of this day, "Dream of the Return," by the Pat Metheny Group.
Andrew Sullivan points out that the NYT has finally decided to have a mature reasoned discussion about transgender medical treatments. Hopefully, reasoned discussion involving pro's and con's and real evidence will be the new narrative on this topic, now that Abigail Shrier has been treated like a piñata for two years for the crime of doing what the NYT is finally now doing.
An excerpt from this NYT article:
The new standards state that clinicians should facilitate an “open exploration” of gender with adolescents and their families, without pushing them in one direction or another. But the guidelines recommend restricting the use of medications and surgeries, partly because of their medical risks.
Puberty blockers, for example, can impede bone development, though evidence so far suggests it resumes once puberty is initiated. And if taken in the early phase of puberty, blockers and hormones lead to fertility loss. Patients and their families should be counseled about these risks, the standards say, and if preserving fertility is a priority, drugs should be delayed until a more advanced stage of puberty.
[Added Jan 14]
"Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.The NYT piece also concedes another key fact: that puberty blockers are neither harmless nor totally reversible . . .
I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?"