By Any Other Name

Hanne Gaby Odiele attends the 2015 CFDA Fashion Awards at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on June 1, 2015, in New York. (Photo: Larry Busacca, Getty Images)

​
California on Tuesday became the first state in the nation to condemn "unnecessary" surgeries on intersex children. 

The Legislature passed a resolution demanding the medical community halt nonconsensual medical procedures that try to cosmetically "normalize" variations in intersex children's sex characteristics.
The resolution, which calls the practice a human rights violation, is a landmark moment for the intersex community, advocates say. 
"It means for the very first time a U.S. legislative body has affirmatively recognized that intersex children deserve dignity and the right to make decisions about their own bodies – just like everyone else," Kimberly Zieselman, executive director of interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth, told USA TODAY. 

Which is to say the State of California is now making diagnoses and therapeutic norms.

This is a fascinating problem and, despite its complexity and the obvious close-mindedness and prejudice in this law and its presentation, Zieselman should be listened to.

First, Zieselman. She is a woman with what was called "testicular feminization syndrome" but has a new and apparently more palatable name: "Androgen insensitivity syndrome." This fascinating  complex is one in which the child is genetically male with normal male hormones but whose cells can not be stimulated by the male hormones. It is rare, 1 in 13,000 births. As the body's cells are insensitive to androgens, the child has abdominal sex organs but the germ cell producers are testis, and the other organs regress leaving the child with a rudimentary uterus and a short vagina. (Internal testis have a very high rate of malignant degeneration.) Mrs. Zieselman was diagnosed in her early teens when she was brought to a fertility specialist because she had not started to menstruate. She was diagnosed and her parents were advised to have her testis removed to prevent cancer development and she was started on female hormones. She is now opposed to such preemptive acts and feels the child should have more input to her care. Importantly, none of these children have any male hormone contribution to their development--a contribution that is still poorly understood but most of these kids who are "assigned" femininity are pretty comfortable with it. And the decision to do this was historically done because  it was the direction--and the hormonal nature if not the histologic nature--of the child anyway and the creation of maleness in such a child was and is technically difficult.

So this condition, which is well adapted to, has become a cause. And, like so many of these causes, a number of problems have crept in. And it seems at its base is the complexity of identity. What is the nature of a fifteen year old girl who is genetically male but with absolutely no expression of it?  Is she any different from the fifteen year old girl who believes she is Italian and finds on 23andMe that she actually is of Serbian ancestry? And how much of this investigation and excitement is to the benefit of others? Does the 15 year old girl really benefit by knowing her genetic complexity? With the uncertainties of this kind of diagnosis, is a 15-year old  girl in a good position to make a decision about her phenotypic direction?

One interesting insight comes from the United Nations which gives statistics that  the instance of Intersex--where the sexual appearance differs from the histological one--is 1.7%, as is frequently quoted, "a figure roughly equivalent to the number of redheads."  Now the commonest cause of intersex is the adrenogenital syndrome, where steroids are not completed in their developmental pathway and continue to be stimulated which causes an inadvertent rise in male hormones. This affliction--the affliction the Russians left untreated in the Press sisters whose male hormone levels gave them an athletic advantage in women's track and field, where they passed the genetic test as female--has an incidence of 1 in 13,000 births. How is it possible that the U.N. incidence of all of these rare abnormalities is 1.7%? Simple. You increase the definition of "intersex" and make it more common, more everyday.

Such a change in perception certainly benefits somebody.

Truth-seeking at the CIA

Elder had a funny response to the intel community's outrage over Trump's taking Brennan's security clearance away. It isn't quite on point but it is close:

"The next day, 60 former lower-level CIA officials signed an open letter condemning the act. Their letter read, in part: "All of us believe it is critical to protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure. But we believe equally strongly that former government officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so." About a hundred other former officials have since added their names to this letter.

Where were all these officials, so concerned about "critical national security issues," when much of the country — then and now — believed President George W. Bush misled the nation about the Iraq war and the assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Ron Fournier, then the Associated Press Washington, D.C. bureau chief, publicly said, "George W. Bush lied us into war in Iraq." To this day, a majority of Democrats, according to several polls, still believe that the entry into the Iraq war was based upon a lie.

Where was the intelligence community's joint letter reminding the country that Bush relied on the unanimous opinion of all 16 of our intelligence agencies? Why didn't the intelligence community publish a joint letter defending the integrity of the intelligence community and remind the nation that Bush retained the same CIA director, George Tenet, who served under President Bill Clinton, and said that the assumption that Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMD was a "slam dunk"? But President Trump yanks the security clearance of an ex-CIA director who calls Trump "treasonous'' — ie. eligible for the death penalty — and much of the intelligence community throws a hissy fit."

(from a Larry Elders article)

Reverie

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.--deTocqueville

FICA money taken from your paycheck was not saved for you in a "trust fund." Politicians spent every penny the moment it came in. They assumed that FICA payments from young workers would cover the cost of sending checks to older people. This year, the program went into the red for the first time.

Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. At that point, benefits will automatically be cut. Social Security runs out of money in 15 years.

OOOOmmmmmmmmm.

What is...EternalBlue?

A key point about general incorporation laws was that they were egalitarian: you could launch an incorporated venture even if you were obscure, new in town, or out of favor with political influentials. Supporters of plans like [Elizabeth] Warren’s should be asked whether they really want some combination of political actors – very possibly appointees of Donald Trump or another President like him – to gain power to revoke Google’s or Amazon’s or Facebook’s charter to continue doing business unless the management agrees to cut a deal, perhaps involving private understandings with officialdom, to stave off such a penalty. --Olson

She did not think beyond the sound bite.

Molotov Cocktail:  A crude bomb made of a bottle filled with a liquid fuel and fitted with a rag wick that is lighted just before the bottle is hurled. After Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890-1986). Earliest documented use: 1940.

Molotov was born as Vyacheslav Skryabin, but he took the name Molotov (from Russian molot: hammer). During the Winter War between the USSR and Finland (1939-1940), when the Soviets received international criticism for the bombing of Helsinki, Molotov claimed they were delivering humanitarian aid. In response, the Finns sarcastically called those cluster bombs Molotov bread baskets.
If the Soviets were bringing bread to the party, the least the Finns could do was bring drinks. They called their makeshift incendiary devices Molotov cocktail and used them to destroy Soviet tanks.

These revolutionary maniacs all take these funny, gangster-like names.

The seizure of largely white-owned farmland  has begun in South Africa. Government leaders say is necessary to correct decades-old wrongs of apartheid that left deep, systemic wealth inequalities and land ownership disparities along racial lines. Markets reacted negatively. South African economic analysts and U.S. observers say the country risks inviting the kind of devastation that left neighboring Zimbabwe’s economy in ruins after a similar forced expropriation scheme targeting some of the country’s most productive farmland.

It's not that these leaders don't know the truth, they don't care. Only Sean Penn was surprised at the deterioration of Venezuela.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/02/wall.html

Wall steeleydock.blogspot.com On walls, barriers and neighbors: Mending Wall SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,   That sends the frozen-ground-swell u...

A penetration tool known as EternalBlue, created by the US National Security Agency, was leaked in a disastrous breach of the agency’s ultrasecret files earlier in 2017.

EternalBlue, sometimes stylized as ETERNALBLUE, is an exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) according to testimony by former NSA employees. It was leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacker group on April 14, 2017, and was used as part of the worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack on May 12, 2017.

So we are sort of arming our enemies with ultimate weapons.

The University of Chicago has dropped an admission requirement for students to submit either SAT or ACT test scores, becoming the most prestigious university to join the test-optional movement. 

Now that will improve diversity.

A Washington Post analysis says that according to data released by CMS, in 2017, 46.3 million children in the United States were enrolled at one point in either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, “a number that totals more than 60 percent of the more than 74 million children in the United States.”

If you tax something, you get less of it. Seattle recently put a head tax on...jobs!

While I am staying away from national politics--more for my own sanity than good taste--I just can not resist telling you this: Trump speaking to Voice of America’s Greta Van Susteren on Kim: “He’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that.”

That's the President of the United States talking about a Fourth World Dictator. And, unlike Idi Amin, he doesn't eat people.

Nobody goes there anymore - it's too crowded.

~Yogi Berra

From the increasingly angry Charen:  As a matter of substance, the Singapore summit achieved less than nothing. It was a profound defeat for U.S. world influence and for democratic decency, arguably the worst summit outcome since Yalta. Kim promised to consider "denuclearization," exactly as his father and grandfather had done repeatedly over the past several decades — breaking their promises each and every time. For this puff of cotton candy, Trump agreed to halt "U.S. war games" (using the North Korean term for joint military exercises with South Korea), which Trump himself called provocative! He invited Kim to the White House. He also issued the risible tweet announcing, ahem, peace in our time: "There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea."

A report on the FBI’s handling of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server found missteps by then-Director James Comey but no evidence of bias affecting the conclusions. (wsj)

Many of the largest US-based multinational corporations have close to (or more than) two-thirds of their total sales outside the US, e.g., Intel (80%), Mondelez (76%), Coca-Cola (70%), ExxonMobil (65.4%), Apple (63.2%), and GE (62.1%). Other large American MNCs generate more than 50% of their sales overseas, e.g. Procter and Gamble (58%), Chevron (57%), Oracle (53%), Alphabet (52.7%), IBM (52%) and Pfizer (50.5%).

From a sports article on the Steelers: "Okorafor is listed at 6-foot-6, 320 pounds. That's a little smaller than the two starting tackles."

Smaller.

In 2014, 47 of the nation's 73 inspectors general signed a letter alleging that Obama had stonewalled their "ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner."

Huh.

A total of 4,262 applicants entered the urology match between 2006 and 2016. The number of applicants increased by 19.1% yearly and the number of positions increased by 25.1% yearly during the study period. Of the applicants 2,934 (68.8%) successfully matched, with an annual match rate ranging from 60.9% to 79.1%.

AAAaaaaannnnnndddddd.......a pie chart: