(I guess I’m confused as to why he’s suing, and not charging this doctor. Is it a hunt for evidence to use in charges? This is not normally how that is done, but TX is TX. -A)
The suit is the first by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a restriction on gender-affirming care for minors.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a Dallas doctor Thursday accusing her of providing transition-related care to nearly two dozen minors in violation of state law.
Paxton alleged that Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors between October 2023 and August for the purpose of transitioning genders. In 2023, Texas enacted a law,Senate Bill 14, banning hormone replacement therapy and other forms of gender-affirming care for minors.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement Thursday. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The statement issued by Paxton’s office alleged that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” in order to mask “unlawful prescriptions.”
Neither Lau nor her employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, immediately returned requests for comment.
If found to be in violation of the law, Lau could have her medical license revoked and face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Paxton’s suit is the first in the nation by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a restriction on transition-related care for minors.
Texas’ law includes a provision that allows physicians to continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormone therapy to patients who began treatment prior to June 1, 2023, in order to wean them off of the medications “over a period of time and in a manner that is safe and medically appropriate and that minimizes the risk of complications,” according to Paxton’s suit. Minors are required to have attended at least 12 mental health counseling or psychotherapy sessions for at least six months prior to starting treatment. It’s unclear whether Lau’s treatment of the minors could fall under that provision.
Former president often mocks Kamala Harris for using a teleprompter
Video at link above.
After mocking Vice President Kamala Harris over her teleprompter, Donald Trump’s rally in Reno, Nevada, ground to a halt as he was was forced to fix his on-stage after a campaign sign fell on it.
“Thank god I don’t use teleprompters too much,” Trump told rally goers after the sign fell on the teleprompter, causing the script to stop being projected. “I look at the teleprompter, it’s totally gone. I say ‘What the hell happened.’ The sign fell on top of it.”
Former president Donald Trump removed signage that fell on top of his teleprompter at a rally in Reno, Nevada (AP)
The irony of the incident comes to light when reflecting on the number of times the former president has accused Harris of relying on a teleprompter and mocking her for it.
Trump told supporters on Friday he would “level” with them, and admitted to his teleprompter usage, yet still asserted Harris uses one more.
“Isn’t it nice to have a guy that doesn’t need a teleprompter, a president, a potential president that doesn’t need a teleprompter?” Trump asked supporters moments after fixing his teleprompter.
He went on to, again, falsely accuse Harris of using one during her town hall with Univision on Thursday.
Both the Harris campaign and Univision have confirmed to CNN that the vice president did not use a teleprompter during her town hall. A teleprompter that was seen in a photo from the event was in Spanish and meant for the moderator, not Harris.
Trump and his allies have previously accused Harris of using a teleprompter in interviews when she did not. In instances where the vice president has used a teleprompter, they have mocked her and insinuated she needs one because she is not intelligent.
Similarly, Trump told supporters on Friday night that “there’s something wrong with [Harris]” for using teleprompters.
He added: “I don’t use them that much. The concept I use but I don’t like it.”
He then embarked on a hard-to-follow rant about making speeches.
“When you can’t get up and make a speech, like, normally, like – when all the work we do, you’d think you could for 40 minutes – well she makes very short speeches too. Have you ever noticed they’re like 10 minutes,” he told the crowd at Reno.
If you think crossing time zones and navigating Daylight Savings Time can be confusing, imagine losing or gaining multiple days just by crossing a border.
That was life for Europeans in the late 16th century after 10 days were eliminated from the Gregorian calendar. In 1582, if you lived in a Catholic country, the calendar went from October 4 to October 15—the dates in between just didn’t exist. As a result, you could find yourself going back or forward in time simply by entering or exiting a non-Catholic country.
What happened to the missing 10 days in October of 1582?
The mystery of the missing days isn’t so much a mystery as a miscalculation. For nearly 1,600 years, the Julian calendar had been used by people across Europe, and on the surface it wasn’t a whole lot different than the Gregorian calendar we use today—365 days in a year with a leap year every 4 years and the spring equinox being placed on March 21.
That may not seem like much, but after over 1,000 years, it added up. Placing a leap year every four years without exception meant that the equinox was slowly pushed back on the calendar. By the mid-1500s, the equinox fell on March 11 instead of March 21. As a result, the calculations for Easter were thrown off.
How the Gregorian calendar recalibrated the spring equinox
After years of consultations among church leaders about how to fix the problem, Pope Gregory XIII signed an edict implementing a new calendar system—the Gregorian calendar we use today—in February of 1582. As part of the implementation, 10 days were removed from October during weeks that wouldn’t affect any of the Christian holidays to get the equinox back to March 21.
But losing those days wasn’t seamless. For one, since the change came from the pope, non-Catholic countries weren’t too keen on taking up the new calendar. Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and the Catholic states of Germany switched to the Gregorian calendar, but Protestant and Orthodox countries of Europe resisted. They all came around eventually, but it took more than 100 years for the British Empire to jump on board, and some countries, including Russia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Lithuania, and Estonia, didn’t make the switch until the 20th century.
In the meantime, the removal of October 5 to 14 meant that dates were different in different countries—and in some cases even within the same country. Germany was split by Catholic and Protestant regions, so the two different calendars made travel between those regions really weird date-wise. (Imagine trying to navigate that kind of chaos in today’s global neighborhood. Good thing they didn’t have airplanes then.)
Leap year calculations in the Gregorian calendar are a little more complicated
Now, one might ask, “If the Julian calendar had a leap year every four years, didn’t that account for the length of time in a solar year? How is that different than the leap years we have in the Gregorian calendar?”
The answer is that the way leap years work in the Gregorian calendar is a bit more complex than many of us realize. Most of us were taught that we have a leap year every four years, which is generally true, but with some regularly scheduled exceptions. We don’t hear about these exceptions because they happen so infrequently and won’t happen within our lifetime, but they make all the difference mathematically.
In the Gregorian calendar, we add a day to the calendar (February 29th) every four years except on years that can be divided by 100, which are not leap years, unless the year can also be divided by 400, in which case it is a leap year. That might sound confusing, but essentially, 1700, 1800, 1900 were not leap years, but 2000 was. The years 2100, 2200 and 2300 will not be leap years, but 2400 will be.
Removing those leap years every 100 years but not every 400 years accounts for the miscalculation in the Julian calendar, just as removing the 10 days from October of 1582 fixed the drift that had occured over millennia because of it. There are still different calendars used in different places for different purposes, but the Gregorian calendar has gradually become the international standard for dates and times.
Time may be a construct, but humans have managed to construct quite a detailed system of measuring it, even with some quirky bumps along the way.
(It can’t hurt to put bits like this out into the universe. Somebody’s working on this, and more people ought to. So a nice little discussion of what’s working is appropriate. -A)
October 11, 2024 ARC Laureate Fellows
This Cosmos series on Australian Research Council Laureate Fellows 2024 reflects excellence from world class researchers in Australia.
Chris Gibson is a Senior Professor in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong. For his ARC Fellowship, he is investigating how decarbonisation impacts Australian regions.
Professor Chris Gibson: finding a truce in the climate wars.
Decarbonisation and energy transition are at the sharp edge of a hot political battle. There is a lot of dispute over new technologies like offshore wind, and exactly what mix of energy we need. It’s like a second iteration of the climate wars. But after a decade of stalled policy on climate, we have to embrace the decarbonised future, whether we like it or not. It’s an issue that needs to transcend the political divide.
But we’re faced with a dilemma: we need urgent change, but urgent change rarely occurs, if ever, in a way that is fair. The burdens and benefits of change are not distributed equally across society. And the quicker the change, the more risks there are. Regions can be all too easily left behind.
Geographers think about how substantial change, like this energy transition, affects communities. We think of ourselves as an integrative discipline. We bring together expertise from across environmental science, economics, social geography, legal geography, and from experts who are good on governing transitions. By stitching together insights from all directions, we try to see the bigger picture.
My ARC project is aiming to put together a systematic understanding of what’s happening in decarbonisation, both from the top down, with a nationwide view, and from the ground up, about how people in different regions are responding to change.
We’re putting together a team to look at how decarbonisation hits the ground in different regions, and how it affects different workers, different industries, what kinds of opportunities come out of that, what kinds of changes are needed, how communities and households are responding to the decarbonisation challenge, and how a First Nations’ perspective can lead the way.
Community responses have to be taken seriously. It’s too easy and too convenient to cast aside sceptics as “nimbies” (Not In My Backyard) or selfish or ignorant. If you take the time to hear the diversity of opinions that come from communities, you’ll often find that people are worried about real issues, with valid concerns. Local communities are very knowledgeable about their patch, and have a capacity to understand what kinds of changes are needed. If we can forge a more inclusive process that brings regional perspectives, skills and experience to the forefront, we reduce the risk that regions are left behind. And governments might actually see regional communities as an opportunity rather than a hindrance to change.
A good example is here in the Illawarra, (Coastal New South Wales) where offshore wind has been very controversial in the last year. One of the lessons to be had is to not underestimate the community’s ability to understand what an energy transition means, and not to underestimate the degree of attachment people have to their local places.
The community here is highly knowledgeable about energy. The Illawarra has a workforce with a long history in heavy industry – the number of electricians per capita in the Illawarra must be as high as anywhere in Australia. And people have opinions – it’s not a passive region that knows nothing about the change that’s coming. The task is not purely to convince local people that this is a good thing, but to have a mature conversation with them about the pros and cons.
Who benefits in the energy transition?
There are all kinds of philosophical questions about who benefits, how those benefits are shared, what it means to turn our oceans into a space for energy generation. Some members of the community are asking for a proper conversation, because they don’t feel like they’ve been part of the story so far.
People react unpredictably to change that they see is imposed upon them. Let’s say it’s closing down a coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, or proposing a green hydrogen hub in South Australia – people don’t necessarily assess these as singular proposals that exist outside of everything else in their region or in their lives. People make sense of change in relation to their place, their community, their household, their family.
My work is about putting those people and their households first, and looking at it from their point of view. How does structural change look when we take into account the pressures of cost of living, on housing, on employment? People are grappling with these issues in their everyday lives.
There’s also a real risk in introducing changes that are presented to communities as if they have arrived from elsewhere, as a fait accompli. The direction of the flow of ideas and proposals, how they hit the ground, are a very important part of the process. If a proposal seems to arrive in their backyard from the top down – from a government or a corporation provider – you can get a community offside from the outset.
My work is about setting up different kinds of approaches that recognise that these communities have their own capacities and their own perspectives to offer. What we hope to do in the five years of the ARC Laureate program is develop an evidence base so that we can craft better models of how to manage this change. We’re looking at some of the implementations that have already occurred, tracing where those decarbonisation initiatives are hitting the ground, and looking at different kinds of community reactions – what sorts of processes work better than others in terms of building that relationship with community, as well as what happens when things end up in a more antagonistic situation.
Geography is the study of the relationship between humans and our environment. It has always occupied a slightly slippery position in universities and in public life, because we’re both a science and a social science, because we do this work of integrating perspectives from different areas of knowledge. In fact, we call ourselves all sorts of different things: we’re also environmental managers and coastal managers, policy officers and sustainability experts. It’s a discipline that connects, that fills the gaps. We often find solutions to problems by putting knowledge together from those different perspectives. It’s making these connections that can make a big difference.
Today’s posts got interrupted by a friend needing my help with an emotional crisis which I was very happy to give, and then my wonderful husband who puts up and supports me through my own crises / helps me through them needing to work in my Pink Palace to get my Pride Flag backdrop done and start moving my shelving around to make things better for me. Hubby is wonderful and truly understands and wants my Pink Palace to be not only a good space for me but a safe space for all my needs. To anyone who has a complaint about my naming my office space my Pink Palace … nicely said get over yourself. This is 2024 and I get to call my spaces what I want … the not nicely way to put it came to mind but instead of voicing it I will say that I left being embarrassed or upset over my being who I am sexually and emotionally behind me over 40 years ago. Hugs. Scottie.
I want to thank Ten Bears for this video. I really enjoy history and how it still affects us today. I almost lost the link of his to reblog it as I switch videos to the secondary computer and keep reading and responding on the primary as I watch. I am glad I found the original post as it saved me a lot of work. All I can say is if you are interested in history, electric cars, and why we went to using gas when it was much cheaper and not totally profit driven, please watch this video. Hugs. Scottie.
I love Ethel’s videos and I have learned a lot about trans people from her. She often does videos with herself in them but also sometimes does them with the drawn figures. She has been very open with her transitioning journey, and I have followed her since she was a teen before she transitioned. Her videos are remarkable for the detail and receipts she brings to them. She does a lot of research, especially on trans women in sports issues. She documents everything for the viewers to check in the about section and encourages fact checking her.
In this video she sets up the fact that the anti-trans activist that falsely made claims about the WPATH files has a history of lying to try to push their issues. I love watching her videos and if you are interested in trans issues and ways to debunk what the trans haters say, she is worth looking at her back work. Her take down of the entire WPATH Cass report was wonderful and showed how totally false and misleading the report was. The Cass report has now been totally debunked now in part to Ethel’s work. Hugs. Scottie
Today’s video returns to the #WPATHFiles which alleged malpractice by medical institutions who support the scientific legitimacy of gender affirming care, exposing the Files’ fatal flaws and its publisher’s sordid history of forging evidence. Hi, welcome to Essence of Thought with me, Ethel Thurston, as your host.
Scottie's Playtime 