Month: October 2023

By Andrea Widburg

One of the things the transgender lobby insists upon is that encouraging gender-confused people to have surgeries and take hormones saves lives. Denying them these opportunities, we’re told, is tantamount to murder. More evidence, though, is piling up that the opposite is true. So-called “gender affirming” care is terrible for people’s health. The latest evidence is a European study about the soaring rates of heart disease that result when people take hormones that occur naturally in the opposite sex.

Parents whose children come home from school (or college) announcing that they are, in fact, “transgender” often consult “experts” to learn more about this announcement. The experts will tell them that, if they don’t acknowledge, encourage, and embrace their child’s new identity, that’s the equivalent of a death sentence for their child. Why? Because the child will commit suicide if not allowed to swallow or shoot up powerful hormones and then chop off and remake body parts.

However, we’re slowly learning that the contrary is true: The only real “gender affirming” care is to guide a confused child back to the gender of his or her chromosomes, which reflect the only two genders there are. (Alternatively, one might give gender-confused men testosterone and gender-confused women estrogen. That’s an idea that hasn’t been tried.) Everything else really is a death sentence.

A Heritage Foundation study revealed that, in states allowing minors to bypass their parents to get so-called “gender affirming” care, the suicide rates were 14% higher.

Contrary to claims by advocates, puberty blockers are not harmless. Instead, they damage bone development and, because hormones affect all organs, not just the sexual organs, they may interfere with the brain’s development, too. As for the brain-body connection, children on puberty blockers may not only end up being sterile, but they’ll also never be able to experience sexual pleasure. The drugs are proving to be so dangerous that Britain’s National Health Service will no longer prescribe them to children.

The cosmetic surgery that makes people a weird simulacrum of the opposite sex is devastating for the body. I won’t go into detail here but, if you look it up, you’ll find that the post-surgical recovery is grueling and often never complete, and that the people who experience it, especially the men, never recover full, or even any, sexual function.

But wait, as the old Ginzu knife commercials used to say, there’s more! Even if people don’t have surgery or puberty blockers, the hormone treatments they must take as adults damage their hearts. In one of Nature’s great ironies, a Danish study that looked at 2,671 so-called “transgender people” shows that the same estrogen that protects women from heart attacks before menopause proves to be severely damaging to men who take it:

Trans women [i.e., men] taking [female] hormones are up to 95 per cent more likely to suffer heart disease, a new study has found.

Researchers found that trans women [i.e., men] – people born male who identify as women – taking gender-affirming hormones are almost twice as likely to suffer from any cardiovascular disease as men.

In other words, men—any men, no matter whether they think they’re women or butterflies—are going to destroy their hearts if they take estrogen. It’s not just men, though, who suffer. Women who take male sex hormones lose the benefit of the natural estrogen their bodies produce:

The study revealed that all transgender people regardless of the sex they were born or the gender they were transitioning to, were at “significantly increased risk” from deadly conditions like heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure and high blood fat and cholesterol levels.

[snip]

People who were “assigned male at birth” and taking oestrogen as a trans woman, were 93 per cent more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease than men and 73 per cent more likely than women. [Emphasis added.]

The men also increased dramatically their risk of getting Type II diabetes, along with all the consequent health effects.

Back in the 1970s, Chiffon Margarine had an ad campaign claiming its margarine was so close to butter in flavor that even Mother Nature would be fooled. The tagline was “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Since then, of course, we’ve learned that margarine is not a healthy alternative to butter—quite the opposite, so it really was a bad idea to fool Mother Nature. And now we’re learning very quickly that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature about chromosomal sex, either.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/socalled_transgenderism_will_quite_literally_break_your_heart.html

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issues statement in wake of events. “The enemy will pay an unprecedented price”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this morning (Saturday, 7 October 2023), from the Kirya¬ in Tel Aviv [translated from Hebrew]:

“Citizens of Israel,

We are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens. We have been in this since the early morning hours.

I convened the heads of the security establishment and ordered – first of all – to clear out the communities that have been infiltrated by terrorists. This currently is being carried out.

At the same time, I have ordered an extensive mobilization of reserves and that we return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.

In the meantime, I call on the citizens of Israel to strictly adhere to the directives of the IDF and Home Front Command. We are at war and we will win it.”

Netanyahu: We are at war (israelnationalnews.com)

Concern is mounting in the French capital over the latest wave of illegal immigrants to head from the Italian island of Lampedusa to northern Europe, with Parisian residents worrying about their own security.

Several local residents discussed the issue of immigration with the French broadcaster CNews, expressing their fear that Paris could see an influx of new arrivals, with tens of thousands of migrants landing on Italian shores in recent weeks.

“We don’t feel safe,” one resident of the 18th arrondissement near the Jardins d’Éole told the channel, explaining that a number of newcomers to the neighborhood had participated in civil disorder and organized crime including drug trafficking.

“They fight and cause problems,” added another resident who admitted she felt scared and intimidated by groups of adult males loitering in her neighborhood.

It isn’t just local residents who are expressing concern. Local politicians have also voiced their displeasure at the degradation witnessed on Parisian streets in recent times, with many new arrivals to the French capital resorting to sleeping rough and establishing ghettos due to a saturation of social services.

“You regularly have clashes, cases of alcoholism and drug addiction on the public roads of these neighborhoods, and unfortunately, networks of crack traffickers who take advantage of the presence of these people,” said Pierre Liscia, regional councilor for Île-de-France.

Other elected officials have called for strong measures to be put in place to relocate newcomers from the streets to more secure accommodations in an attempt to clean up affected neighborhoods.

“I am calling for a major emergency plan for the northeast of Paris, to get migrants out of the street is the dignity that we owe them, and thus resolve the problem of local residents who are on the frontline of nuisances and inconveniences,” said Parisian councilor Pierre-Yves Bournazel.

The European Union is currently discussing asylum reforms in a bid to prevent migrants from entering the bloc and traveling at will to desired, more prosperous nations. The EU migration pact will see countries obligated to receive their fair share of newcomers and face financial penalties should they fail to comply.

The plans have been vociferously opposed by both Hungary and Poland, which claim the pact infringes on their national sovereignty. Initial proposals were recently passed in Brussels by qualified majority voting, despite resistance from Budapest and Warsaw.

Lampedusa has been inundated with scores of illegal migrants arriving in small boats from the African mainland, many of whom continue to migrate to the north of Italy and cross into France and Germany.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stressed ahead of an informal summit of EU leaders in Granada, Spain, this week that his government will never agree to the EU’s asylum proposals, adding that Poles “do not want another Lampedusa in Poland.”

Ahead of the Polish election next weekend, Morawiecki reiterated his government’s commitment to border security and took aim at Poland’s liberal opposition who would waive Brussels’ plan through.

“We are at a turning point in how Polish sovereignty and borders will be treated. For (the opposition) PO and the European Commission, borders are obsolete,” Morawiecki said.

https://rmx.news/migrant-crisis/we-no-longer-feel-safe-paris-residents-fear-next-wave-of-migrants-arriving-from-lampedusa/

A 45-year-old Malaysian man petitioned the Kuala Lumpur High Court in Malaysia to renounce Islam and return to Christianity, his original faith, after divorcing his Muslim wife. On Wednesday (October 4), the top court, however, rejected his appeal, stating that the civil courts do not have the authority to review a Sharia court’s decision, a Malaysian local media outlet reported.

According to the report, the man converted to Islam to marry a Muslim woman in 2010, however, he got divorced in 2015. After the divorce, in 2016, he filed an application in the Sharia court to renounce Islam, however, the Sharia court mandated him to attend ‘counselling sessions’.

Later, the Sharia court rejected his renunciation application and asked him to attend further counselling sessions.

The young man then went to the civil court to challenge the Sharia court’s ruling. He argued in the civil court that he should be granted the right to return to and practice his original religion of Christianity.

Sharia court has more power than the civil court

Civil Court Judge Justice Wan Ahmed Farid Van Saleh, however, cited a judgment passed by it earlier this year and observed that civil courts do not have the power to review decisions made by Sharia courts.

Justice Van Saleh further said that I am bound by the court’s decision. The decision of the Sharia court cannot be reviewed.

https://www.opindia.com/2023/10/malaysia-high-court-denies-permission-muslim-convert-renounce-islam-and-revert-to-christianity/

Premier Giorgia Meloni said Friday that she could understand Poland and Hungary, whose opposition to the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum led to there being no chapter on migration in the final declaration of the informal EU summit in Granada.
Under the pact, EU countries will be obliged to take a share of the migrants that arrive in ‘frontline’ States like Italy or Greece or pay for each migrant they refuse to receive.
Meloni has repeatedly said it is more important to stop migrants arriving in the EU in the first place rather than focusing on how to redistribute those that do arrive.
“We voted for the pact because the new rules are better than the previous ones,” Meloni said.
“But I did not make this a priority.
“It is the debate based on an old perception (of the migration issue).
“Our position is different from that of Poland and Hungary because of geographical issues.
“They understand the Italian position, I understand their position perfectly and it does not compromise how we work together”.

Migrants: I understand Hungary, Poland – Meloni – English – ANSA.it

Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini’s League party on Friday called for the resignation of Iolanda Apostolico, the Catania judge at the centre of a political storm for overturning a detention order against four Tunisian nationals being held at a Sicilian pre-removal facility amid claims of bias.
On Thursday video footage from 2018 was published showing her at a demonstration against the closed-port policies of the government of the day implemented by then-interior minister Salvini.
“She liked insults against Matteo Salvini posted by a comrade, and never denied it, and, embarrassingly, she was present at a far-left demonstration in a crowd insulting the police,” the League said in a statement.
“We now await her immediate resignation out of respect for all Italian people and the institutions”.
Sources in the court of Catania, on the other hand, said Apostolico would not be moved to another position after her controversial decision not to upheld a request for four Tunisians to be held at a pre-removal centre on the grounds that government legislation was illegitimate. On Thursday morning Salvini posted the video showing Apostolico and her partner at a protest organised at Catania port on August 25, 2018 to call for the immediate disembarkation of dozens of rescued refugees and migrants who had been kept aboard the coast guard ship Diciotti for over a week under his orders.
Apostolico reportedly later told colleagues she had positioned herself between police and the demonstrators to try to prevent contact after earlier clashes.
On Friday Salvini said the case was “a source of serious embarrassment for the institutions”.

League calls for resignation of migrant-ruling judge – English – ANSA.it

Punaise! is an old-fashioned slangy French exclamation — its meaning not unadjacent to WTF? in English — but it’s also the name of the common or garden bed bug, and also of a drawing pin (probably in reference to the experience of stepping on one).

Punaises are all over the French and foreign media these days: there’s currently an infestation of them in Paris. They disturbed Fashion Week aplenty, with some pictures interrupting the flow of fashion models and top reporters’ Instagram feeds, and giving everyone the creepy-crawlies.

La punaise de lit is now not only threatening the 2024 Olympics, but also the reputation of France, and so, like so many things in our top-down centralised country, it has become political.

Not that the outbreak is new. Bed bugs have been in the news for several years. But they only happened to others: in poor and not terribly hygienic places, as indeed they always did in the past.

Alas, since the end of Covid and the resumption of international travel, they are now proliferating. Bed bugs (and their eggs!) travel fast, and news of them even faster.

Social media started crawling with truly disgusting videos of small (about the size of an apple pip) critters on train seats, in the Metro, at cinemas — and, in a truly egalitarian push, all over the city and beyond, including first class TGV cars and five star hotels.

The papers are full of what to do to avoid them. (Look out: in an hotel, hang your clothes rather than laying them down on upholstery; never leave your suitcase on the ground, use the folding luggage racks; if you fear you’ve stayed in a place that had them, unpack in the open because the punaises hate fresh air; wash your clothes at 60C then tumble dry them on a warm setting; or put them in plastic bags in your deep freeze for two days at least).

If you see even one in your home, call a specialist who can handle the required insecticides: there’s nothing you can do to fix it. It will set you back at least €1,000.

No wonder that the story has as many legs as a centipede. Things, however, developed into a pile-on for one of France’s most popular talk show hosts, Pascal Praud, when he asked a couple of unfashionable questions.

Praud is a star on the French equivalent of GB News. He was a well-known football commenter on TF1 — France’s historic First Channel, privatised in the 80s — for 20 years, then had several radio talk shows comparable to Jeremy Vine’s, first on RTL radio then on Europe1. He become “controversial” when he veered into politics, with the successful political talk show he started three or four years ago.

The pile-on against him is mostly a pile-on against his channel, CNEWS, which several ministers have already said should be closed down, as well as its entertainment sister channel C8. Both are owned by the billionaire industrialist Vincent Bolloré, a conservative Catholic, disliked on the Left.

On bed bugs, Praud picked up on well-documented news about the prevalence of bed bugs at Charles de Gaulle Airport in holding pens for illegal immigrants, as well as in migrant camps in Paris and Calais.

For this, he has been tagged not just a racist but a Nazi, with many a liberal columnist or politician referring to Collaborationist propaganda, in which Jews were likened to rats. From Left-wing and Green MPs to Equalities minister Bérangère Couillard, who demanded sanctions from the supposedly independent media watchdog Arcom, everyone vented on Praud. He shot back “let them sue”, as he was looking forward to defending himself in court.

You might think it’s not the job of ministers to close down news companies or of journalists to encourage it. There’s a strong body of anti-racist laws in France; far more stringent than, say, in the UK. (The former right-wing presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, who used to have a talk show on CNEWS, was successfully sued for things he said on television and in political rallies.)

As for the French State and other public bodies, they certainly are responsible for keeping trains disinfected, and regulating public places from restaurants to theatres. The astringent public health expert, Dr Guy-André Pelouze suggests, in a refreshing return to the principles of classic conservatism, that it’s also the responsibility of the individuals to keep their homes clean and well-aired, all conditions bed bugs hate.

But then the minute you step outside in Paris, the climbdown in cleanliness from the years where one Jacques Chirac was Mayor leads to despair. The Paris Métro and buses, once efficient and modern, are now dilapidated and none too fresh. Under Mayor Anne Hidalgo and her Red-Green coalition, the entire city, even when the dustmen are not on strike and no-one is rioting, has become uglier and dirtier.

I remember longingly, more than two decades ago, when, every morning at dawn, the pavements were swept and the streets washed with water from a special water network separate from the drinking water one. (Today, the Hidalgo administration, which is €10Bn in the red, finds this “too expensive”: they are in the process of destroying this remarkable infrastructure built in the mid-19C under Napoleon III.)

Long before the bedbugs, such neglect increased the rat population of Paris to an estimated 6 million, making our capital one of the five most rat-infested cities in the world. City Hall’s answer to this has been to appoint a committee to help Parisians “learn to cohabit with the rats”. How long before we are told to cohabit with the punaises?

https://brusselssignal.eu/2023/10/cohabiting-with-bed-bugs-and-rats-what-pariss-current-infestation-says-about-france-and-the-state-of-its-politics/

A trans-identified male has appeared in court on charges of the brutal murder of his father and the attempted murder of his mother. Tânia Ferrinho, 43, is accused of stabbing his father seventeen times and stabbing his bedridden mother seven times, in a horrific incident that occurred in October of 2022 in Samora Correia, Portugal.

Ferrinho’s case was heard in the Santarém Court, beginning September 13, with closing arguments presented October 4. The court heard how Ferrinho’s elderly parents, Carlos and Maria, had suffered numerous instances of violence at the hands of their son, and had already taken out a court order banning him from approaching them.

Sources of the conflict between Ferrinho and his parents were said to have centered around his sex change procedures, which they disapproved of. Ferrinho began to identify as transgender in 2020, when he legally changed his name to Tânia.

Another significant source of tension related to finances, as Ferrinho reportedly had never worked or held down a stable job and was living at home dependent on his aging parent’s resources. Ana Gomes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office told the court that the relationship was strained due to the “inertia of the defendant” in finding a job while using his parent’s income for “online shopping.”

According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office Indictment Order, the brutal assault occurred after Ferrinho was named in a new domestic violence case by his parents, who were attempting to have him expelled from their apartment.

On September 26, 2022, just weeks before the crime took place, Ferrinho posted a video to his Facebook account wherein he claimed to be a victim of stalking, and made a vague comment seeming to suggest that his parents could “accuse me of prostitution as a way of keeping the house.”

On the day of the crime, October 10, Ferrinho is said to have engaged in an argument with his parents related to money. He demanded an allowance, which his parents refused to provide. Shortly after, the National Republican Guard (GNR) visited the family’s home to inform Ferrinho that another case was being filed against him for abuse at the Benavente Court. Ferrinho was already on probation for a 2021 double conviction of aggravated physical assault against his elderly parents, reported Rede Regional.

Just after law enforcement left the premises, Ferrinho began slashing his 77 year-old father repeatedly with a knife, who fled into the apartment building’s hallway before falling to the ground. He succumbed to his injuries in December while being treated at the Vila Franca de Xira Hospital.

After stabbing his father seventeen times, Ferrinho then turned on his mother, who was bedridden and in poor health, and began assaulting her with the knife. A neighbor who had heard shouting from their apartment intervened and prevented Ferrinho from murdering his mother. The neighbor later stated that Ferrinho had initially attempted to frame his father for the assault on his mother. While she was not fatally wounded by the stabbing, she would later die of illness shortly after her husband.

In the final deliberations of the case, the Public Prosecutor’s Office attempted to rationalize the murder as being the result of “the inner conflict” presented by Ferrinho’s transgender identity. Gomes stated that there is “sensitivity to understanding the inner conflict of someone who, from a young age, does not identify with the gender they were born with.”

However, Gomes further added that “[he] did not show any remorse” for the crime, and asked for a sentence which considered the gravity of the offense.

Lawyer Maria João Alves, defending, argued that the killing occurred following a series of traumatic events, including his “gender change” and the death of his older brother, which allegedly caused him to suffer from “psychotic outbursts and sometimes interruptions of consciousness.” Alves claimed that Ferrinho was in a psychotic state when he stabbed his parents.

“I have the greatest doubts that Tânia had committed this act consciously and I am certain that [he] was never helped,” Alves said. Ferrinho was “unable to control [his] impulses” at the time of the crime, the lawyer said, and requested that the Court’s sentencing take into account his personal circumstances.

The Court will deliver a sentence on October 18.

Ferrinho’s case first became known to the wider public after media reported that female prison guards had refused to conduct strip searches on him during his detention in a women’s prison. Despite retaining a male sexual organ, Ferrinho demanded to be searched by women guards at the Tires Prison Establishment.

The women employed at the prison refused, because “the procedure involved biologically seeing a person of a different sex and seeing a penis,” said the president of the Association of Heads of the Guard Corps Prison, Hermínio Barradas.

After an hour, two female guards ultimately conducted the search “under protest.”

Portugal passed a law allowing sex self-identification in 2018, but Ferrinho’s case is said to be the first known instance of a clash between female prison staff and a violent trans-identified male inmate. Reports of the incident note that the guards “fear the arrival of new transgender inmates.”

Ana Aresta, president of ILGA (Intervenção Lesbica, Gay, Bissexual, Trans e Intersexo) told the media at the time that the sex self-identification legislation was correctly implemented by prison staff. “People don’t have to pass through any kind of process of surgical affirmation to be considered men or women,” she said.

However, Barradas disagreed, and stated that the law does not require female prison guards to strip search male inmates who have not undergone genital surgery. Yet according to reports, an internal document circulated within Portugal’s prison system states that a transgender inmate must be searched “by a member of the surveillance and security service of the same gender with which the transgender person identifies” even if they retain their sexual organ.

https://reduxx.info/portugal-trans-identified-male-with-murder-of-parents-in-psychotic-episode/

“By Allah, I will beat her, smash you” . A 13-year-old middle school student insulted and threatened a teacher on Thursday morning, a police source told Valeurs actuelles. The youth is of Kosovar descent and is not yet known to the law enforcement agency or the territorial intelligence service. He was arrested at the Collège Jean Jaurès in Poissy in the Yvelines department. The schoolboy was taken into police custody and the teacher filed a complaint.

[Info VA] Poissy : “Sur Allah, je vais la fracasser”, un collégien interpellé pour avoir menacé une enseignante – Valeurs actuelles

At around 10:15 a.m. on Thursday October 5, a man entered a Turkish speciality restaurant on Rue des Petites-Écuries in the 10ᵉ arrondissement of Paris and forcibly demanded money from the staff of the establishment, Valeurs actuelles learned from a police source.
When the staff refused and asked him to leave the premises, the suspect suddenly pulled out a knife and threatened them. He then threw a stone at the shop window and shouted “Allah Akbar” several times.
The man again addressed the staff of the restaurant directly and stated that Muslims should help each other before threatening them to return with about 15 people. He then fled in the direction of the underground. The staff immediately informed the police and gave an exact description of the suspect.

This enabled the police to pick up his trail. He was finally arrested around 11 a.m. at the Porte de la Chapelle in the 18ᵉ arrondissement of the capital. He was taken into police custody for glorifying an act of terrorism, damaging private property and premeditated violence. The victims filed a complaint and an officer from the Criminal Investigation Department went to the restaurant to ascertain the damage to the shop window, which has a smash mark. The central police station (SAIP) of the 10ᵉ arrondissement of Paris was called in.

[Info VA] Paris : “Allah Akbar”, un individu armé d’un couteau interpellé pour apologie d’un acte de terrorisme – Valeurs actuelles