THE WPATH FILES

Advocates of gender-affirming care say it’s evidence-based.

But now, newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.

American… pic.twitter.com/mcJ2E7TezW

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 4, 2024

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1764799914918490287

It's also here

https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files

and on Shellenbergers substack

https://public.substack.com/p/the-wpath-files

Moderna's CEO says the same racist non-sense

and the FBI

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origins-lab-china/index.html

and the CIA

https://oversight.house.gov/release/testimony-from-cia-whistleblower-alleges-new-information-on-covid-19-origins

and the US Department of Energy

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html

Mister big brains

• He is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness, related to alleged illicit payments he made to a school athletics coach, as well as stalking, prosecutors said

The principal

The audio of the recording is here

https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1747708846942851493

In summary

The voice refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can't test their way out of a paper bag” and questions how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. The speaker uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired, and that he should get rid of another person “one way or another.”

“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I'm going to join the other side,” the voice said.

Darien was being investigated as of December in a theft investigation that had been initiated by Eiswert. Police say Darien had authorized a $1,916 payment to the school's junior varsity basketball coach, who was also his roommate, under the pretense that he was an assistant girls soccer coach. He was not, school officials said. Eiswert determined that Darien had submitted the payment to the school payroll system, bypassing proper procedures. Darien had been notified of the investigation, police said.

A Bay Area school struggling to boost low test scores and student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to disrupt racism and remove those barriers to learning. Its test scores fell even further. https://t.co/TumgU7EaR3

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) February 3, 2024

Daily Mail writeup thats a little more dramatic

Title Article Archive Link

Title Article Link

In order to show those evil chuds how backwards they are, Governor Pritzker signed legislation introducing an Immigrant Bill of Rights in Illinois, a move that was praised by Chicago legislators.

https://www.illinois.gov/news/press-release.23653.html

"Wait, I didn't think you'd actually send immigrants here! They're supposed to stay down there!," say those legislators as Chicago recently bans unannounced migrant drop offs.

Cowards. These people never learn.

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/yf8bv7/elon_musk_now_in_charge_of_twitter_ceo_and_cfo/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/yf8jpq/elon_musk_now_in_charge_of_twitter_ceo_and_cfo/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/yf8r2o/elon_musk_now_in_charge_of_twitter_ceo_and_cfo/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/yf9ijx/it_appears_elon_musk_has_officially_purchased/?sort=controversial

More in search https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=Elon+twitter&include_over_18=on&t=day&sort=comments

https://twitter.com/search?q=elon takeover&src=typed_query&f=top

Sean Spicey https://twitter.com/seanspicer/status/1585809826818322432

🚨#BREAKING: Mass Casualty has been Declared after a Large Container Ship Collides with Key Bridge Causing it completely Collapse⁰
📌#Baltimore | #Maryland

Currently, numerous agencies, including the Coast Guard and fire department have just declared a mass casualty incident as… pic.twitter.com/wvOTOVbvHE

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) March 26, 2024

wild vid

Archive link

Summary:

The 34-year-old was shocked to discover that the Premier League had compiled a dossier detailing where she lives, works and where she walked her dog. The 11-page “target profile”, marked confidential, included data on “associated aliases” and “vulnerabilities”.

She was interviewed under caution by police after the dossier was handed to officers by Newcastle United. Officers took just two hours to inform her that she had not committed any crime, but the club, which had spent four months looking into her background, revoked her membership and banned her from games until 2026.

Newcastle United began prying into the personal life of Ms Smith, who lives in Newcastle and runs a tea shop with her mother, after receiving a complaint from a fan who said they supported LGBTQ+ organisations and accused her of discrimination against trans people.

The complainant included screenshots of tweets Ms Smith had posted in which she suggested the trans lobby was homophobic because it wanted to “trans the gay away”, and that some transgender people were suffering from mental illness.

The complainant said: “If I were trans, I would feel extremely unsafe… had I had to share a space with someone so openly transphobic… Many of her tweets revolve around the ‘LGB' movement, a trans-exclusionary and discriminatory movement for members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual community to deliberately exclude and aim to discourage/discriminate/target the transgender community.”

The complainant said Ms Smith's tweets “make a mockery of the trans movement” and told the club that she had been “engaging in conversation with a prominent ‘Terf': a trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

https://twitter.com/RightNUFC

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, 58, is a Finnish-born and trained adolescent psychiatrist, the chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Finland's Tampere University Hospital. She treats patients, teaches medical students, and conducts research in her field---publishing more than 230 scientific articles.

In 2011, Dr. Kaltiala was assigned a new responsibility. She was to oversee the establishment of a gender identity service for minors, making her among the first physicians in the world to head a clinic devoted to the treatment of gender-distressed young people. Since then, she has personally participated in the assessments of more than 500 such adolescents.

Earlier this year, The Free Press ran a whistleblower account by Jamie Reed, a former case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital. She recounted her growing alarm at the effects of treatments that sought to transition minors to the opposite s*x, and her escalating conviction that patients were being harmed by their treatment.

Although a recent New York Times investigation largely corroborated Reed's account, many activists and members of the media continue to dismiss Reed's claims because she is not a physician.

Dr. Kaltiala is. And her concerns are likely to get more attention in the U.S. now that a young woman who medically transitioned as a teenager has just sued the doctors who supervised her treatment, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics. According to the suit, the AAP, in advocating for youth transition, has made "outright fraudulent statements" about evidence for "the radical new treatment model, and the known dangers and potential side effects of the medical interventions it advocates."

Here, Dr. Kaltiala tells her own story, describing her increasing worries about the treatment she approved for vulnerable patients, and her decision to speak out.

Early in my medical studies, I knew I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided to specialize in treating adolescents because I was fascinated by the process of young people actively exploring who they are and seeking their role in the world. My patients' adult lives are still ahead of them, so it can make a huge difference to someone's future to help a young person who is on a destructive track to find a more favorable course. And there are great rewards in doing individual therapeutic work.

Over the past dozen or so years there has been a dramatic development in my field. A new protocol was announced that called for the social and medical gender transition of children and teenagers who experienced gender dysphoria---that is, a groomercordance between one's biological s*x and an internal feeling of being a different gender.

This condition has been described for decades, and the 1950s is seen as the beginning of the modern era of transgender medicine. During the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, small numbers of mostly adult men with lifelong gender distress have been treated with estrogen and surgery to help them live as women. Then in recent years came new research on whether medical transition---primarily hormonal---could be done successfully on minors.

One motivation of the medical professionals overseeing these treatments was to prevent young people from facing the difficulties adult men had experienced in trying to convincingly appear as women. The most prominent advocates of youth transition were a group of Dutch clinicians. They published a breakthrough paper in 2011 establishing that if young people with gender dysphoria were able to avoid their natural puberty by blocking it with pharmaceuticals, followed by receiving opposite-s*x hormones, they could start living their transgender lives earlier and more credibly.

It became known as the "Dutch protocol." The patient population the Dutch doctors described was a small number of young people---almost all male---who, from their earliest years, insisted they were girls. The carefully selected patients, apart from their gender distress, were mentally healthy and high-functioning. The Dutch clinicians reported that following early intervention, these young people thrived as members of the opposite s*x. The protocol was quickly adopted internationally as the gold standard treatment in this new field of pediatric gender medicine.

Concurrently, there arose an activist movement that declared gender transition was not just a medical procedure, but a human right. This movement became increasingly high profile, and the activists' agenda dominated the media coverage of this field. Advocates for transition also understood the power of the emerging technology of social media. In response to all this, in Finland the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health wanted to create a national pediatric gender program. The task was given to the two hospitals that already housed gender identity services for adults. In 2011, my department was tasked with opening this new service, and I as the chief psychiatrist became the head of it.

Even so, I had some serious questions about all this. We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person's shifting feelings about gender. Adolescence is a complex period in which young people are consolidating their personalities, exploring sexual feelings, and becoming independent of their parents. Identity achievement is the outcome of successful adolescent development, not its starting point.

At our hospital, we had a big round of discussions with bioethicists. I expressed my concern that gender transition would interrupt and disrupt this crucial psychological and physical developmental stage. Finally, we obtained a statement from a national board on health ethics cautiously suggesting we undertake this new intervention.

We are a country of 5.5 million with a nationalized healthcare system, and because we required a second opinion to change identity documents and proceed to gender surgery, I have personally met and evaluated the majority of young patients at both clinics considering transition: to date, more than 500 young people. Approval for transition was not automatic. In early years, our psychiatric department agreed to transition for about half of those referred. In recent years, this has dropped to about twenty percent.

As the service got underway starting in 2011, there were many surprises. Not only did the patients come, they came in droves. Around the Western world the numbers of gender-dysphoric children were skyrocketing.

But the ones who came were nothing like what was described by the Dutch. We expected a small number of boys who had persistently declared they were girls. Instead, 90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.

Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation. Many had academic troubles. It was common for them to have been bullied---but generally not regarding their gender presentation. In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes. Many---many---were on the autism spectrum.

Remarkably, few had expressed any gender dysphoria until their sudden announcement of it in adolescence. Now they were coming to us because their parents, usually just mothers, had been told by someone in an LGBT organization that gender identity was their child's real problem, or the child had seen something online about the benefits of transition.

Even during the first few years of the clinic, gender medicine was becoming rapidly politicized. Few were raising questions about what the activists---who included medical professionals---were saying. And they were saying remarkable things. They asserted that not only would the feelings of gender distress immediately disappear if young people start to medically transition, but also that *all *their mental health problems would be alleviated by these interventions. Of course, there is no mechanism by which high doses of hormones resolve autism or any other underlying mental health condition.

Because what the Dutch had described differed so dramatically from what I was seeing in our clinic, I thought maybe there was something unusual about our patient population. So I started talking about our observations with a network of professionals in Europe. I found out that everybody was dealing with a similar caseload of girls with multiple psychiatric problems. Colleagues from different countries were confused by this, too. Many said it was a relief to hear their experience was not unique.

But no one was saying anything publicly. There was a feeling of pressure to provide what was supposed to be a wonderful new treatment. I felt in myself, and saw in others, a crisis of confidence. People stopped trusting their own observations about what was happening. We were having doubts about our education, clinical experience, and ability to read and produce scientific evidence.

Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening. What we were seeing was just the opposite.

The young people we were treating were not thriving. Instead, their lives were deteriorating. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn't a hint in studies that this could happen. Sometimes the young people insisted their lives had improved and they were happier. But as a medical doctor, I could see that they were doing worse. They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school. We continued to network with colleagues in different countries who said they were seeing the same things.

I became so concerned that I embarked on a study with my Finnish colleagues to describe our patients. We methodically went through the records of those who had been treated at the clinic its first two years, and we characterized how troubled they were---one of them was mute---and how much they differed from the Dutch patients. For example, more than a quarter of our patients were on the autism spectrum. Our study was published in 2015, and I believe it was the first journal publication from a gender clinician raising serious questions about this new treatment.

I knew others were making the same observations at their clinics, and I hoped my paper would spark discussion about their concerns---that's how medicine corrects itself. But our field, instead of acknowledging the problems we described, became more committed to expanding these treatments.

In the U.S., your first pediatric gender clinic opened in Boston in 2007. Fifteen years later there were more than 100 such clinics. As the U.S. protocols developed, fewer limitations were put on transition. A Reuters investigation found that some U.S. clinics approved hormone treatments at a minor's first visit. The U.S. pioneered a new treatment standard, called "gender-affirming care," which urged clinicians simply to accept a child's assertion of a trans identity, and to stop being "gatekeepers" who raised concerns about transition.

Around 2015, in addition to the very psychiatrically ill patients, a new set of patients started arriving at our clinic. We began to see groups of teenage girls, also usually from 15 to 17 years of age from the same small towns, or even the same schools, telling the same life stories and the same anecdotes about their childhoods, including their sudden realization that they were transgender---despite no prior history of dysphoria. We realized they were networking and exchanging information about how to talk to us. And so, we got our first experience of social contagion--linked gender dysphoria. This, too, was happening in pediatric gender clinics around the world, and again health providers were failing to speak up.

I understood this silence. Anyone, including physicians, researchers, academics, and writers, who raised concerns about the growing power of gender activists, and about the effects of medically transitioning young people, were subjected to organized campaigns of vilification and threats to their careers.

In 2016, because of several years of growing concern about the harms of transition on vulnerable young patients, Finland's two pediatric gender services changed their protocols. Now, if young people had other, more urgent problems than gender dysphoria that needed to be addressed, we promptly referred those patients for more appropriate treatment, such as psychiatric counseling, rather than continuing their gender identity assessment.

There was a lot of pressure against this approach from activists, politicians, and the media. The Finnish press published stories of young people dissatisfied with our decision, portraying them as victims of gender clinics that were forcing them to put their lives on hold. A Finnish medical journal ran a piece that took the perspective of dissatisfied activists titled, "Why do trans adolescents not get their blockers?"

But I was trained that medical treatment has to be based on medical evidence, and that medicine has to constantly correct itself. When you are a physician who sees something is not working, it is your duty to organize, research, inform your colleagues, inform a big audience, and stop doing that treatment.

Finland's national healthcare system gives us the ability to investigate current medical practices and set new guidelines. In 2015 I personally asked a national body, called the Council for Choices in Health Care (COHERE), to create national guidelines for treatment of gender dysphoria in minors. In 2018 I renewed this request with colleagues, and it was accepted. COHERE commissioned a systematic evidence review to assess the reliability of the current medical literature on youth transition.

Around this same time, eight years into the opening of the pediatric gender clinic, some previous patients started coming back to tell us they now regretted their transition. Some---called "detransitioners"---wished to return to their birth s*x. These were another kind of patient who wasn't supposed to exist. The authors of the Dutch protocol asserted that rates of regret were miniscule.

But the foundation on which the Dutch protocol was based is crumbling. Researchers have shown that their data had some serious problems, and that in their follow-up, they failed to include many of the very people who may have regretted transition or changed their minds. One of the patients had died due to complications from genital transition surgery.

There is an oft-repeated statistic in the world of pediatric gender medicine that only one percent or less of young people who transition subsequently detransition. The studies asserting this, too, rest on biased questions, inadequate samples, and short timelines. I believe regret is far more widespread. For example, one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years.

Usually, it takes several years for the full impact of transition to settle in. This is when young people who have entered adulthood confront what it means to possibly be sterile, to have damaged sexual function, to have great difficulty in finding romantic partners.

It is devastating to speak to patients who say they were naive and misguided about what transition would mean for them, and who now feel it was a terrible mistake. Mainly these patients tell me they were so convinced they needed to transition that they concealed information or lied in the assessment process.

I continued to research the issue and in 2018, with colleagues, I published another paper, one that investigated the origin of the surging numbers of gender-dysphoric young people. But we didn't find answers as to why this was happening, or what to do about it. We noted in our study a point that is generally ignored by gender activists. That is, for the overwhelming majority of gender dysphoric children---around 80 percent---their dysphoria resolves itself if they are left to go through natural puberty. Often these children come to realize they are gay.

In June of 2020 a major event happened in my field. Finland's national medical body, COHERE, released its findings and recommendations regarding youth gender transition. It concluded that the studies touting the success of the "gender-affirming" model were biased and unreliable---systematically so in some cases.

The authors wrote: "In light of available evidence, gender reassignment of minors is an experimental practice." The report stated that young patients seeking gender transition should be instructed about "the reality of a lifelong commitment to medical therapy, the permanence of the effects, and the possible physical and mental adverse effects of the treatments." The report warned that young people, whose brains were still maturing, lacked the ability to properly "assess the consequences" of making decisions they would have to live with for the "rest of their lives."

COHERE also recognized the dangers of giving hormone treatments to young people with serious mental illness. The authors concluded that for all these reasons, gender transition should be postponed "until adulthood."

It had taken quite a while, but I felt vindicated.

Fortunately, Finland is not alone. After similar reviews, the UK and Sweden have come to similar conclusions. And many other countries with national healthcare systems are re-evaluating their "gender-affirming" stance.

I felt an increasing obligation to patients, to medicine, and to the truth, to speak outside of Finland against the widespread transitioning of gender-distressed minors. I have been particularly concerned about American medical societies, who as a group continue to assert that children know their "authentic" selves, and a child who declares a transgender identity should be affirmed and started on treatment. (In recent years, the "trans" identity has evolved to include more young people who say they are "nonbinary"---that is, they feel they don't belong to either s*x---and other gender variations.)

Medical organizations are supposed to transcend politics in favor of upholding standards that protect patients. However, in the U.S. these groups---including the American Academy of Pediatrics---have been actively hostile to the message my colleagues and I are urging.

I attempted to address the rising international concerns about pediatric gender transition at this year's annual conference of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. But the two proposed panels were rejected by the academy. This is highly disturbing. Science does not progress through silencing. Doctors who refuse to consider evidence presented by critics are putting patient safety at risk.

I am also disturbed by how gender clinicians routinely warn American parents that there is an enormously elevated risk of suicide if they stand in the way of their child's transition. Any young person's death is a tragedy, but careful research shows that suicide is very rare. It is dishonest and extremely unethical to pressure parents into approving gender medicalization by exaggerating the risk of suicide.

This year the Endocrine Society of the U.S. reiterated its endorsement of hormonal gender transition for young people. The president of the society wrote in a letter to The Wall Street Journal that such care was "lifesaving" and "reduces the risk of suicide." I was a co-author of a letter in response, signed by 20 clinicians from nine countries, refuting his assertion. We wrote that, "Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty."

Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm. What is happening to dysphoric children reminds me of the recovered memory craze of the 1980s and '90s. During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members. This abuse, the therapists said, explained everything that was wrong with the lives of their patients. Families were torn apart, and some people were prosecuted based on made-up assertions. It ended when therapists, journ*lists, and lawyers investigated and exposed what was happening.

We need to learn from such scandals. Because, like recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life's pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong.

!transphobes !chuds incoming

Virginia Mother Charged With Murder After 4-Year-Old Son Dies From Eating THC Gummies

A mother in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, faces felony murder and child neglect charges after her 4-year-old son died from eating marijuana-infused gummies earlier this year.

Investigators said Dorothy Annette Clements didn't get help soon enough for her son, Tanner Clements, when he was found unresponsive on May 6 at a home they were both visiting.

Tanner Clements died two days later.

Dorothy Annette Clements told a police detective that her son ate half of a CBD gummy and that she called poison control and was assured that he'd be OK, according to search warrant documents.

But the detective said she found an empty THC gummy jar in the house and toxicology results showed Tanner Clements had extremely high levels of THC in his system, documents say. THC is the active ingredient in marijuana that gets people high.

An autopsy found that THC caused the boy's death.

Investigators said he might have survived had Dorothy Annette Clements gotten help for him sooner.

r/news and r/JoeRogan both have some thoughts on the matter.

Other posts

https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1blrqyd/new_european_union_aml_laws_to_ban_all_anonymous/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/1blv51x/eu_enacts_ban_on_anonymous_crypto_transactions/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1blqh7t/eu_committees_approve_cash_limits_and_ban_on/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/1blqga1/anonymous_crypto_wallets_now_illegal_in_the_eu/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1bl8q3b/eu_parliament_committee_approves_cash_cap_and_ban/?sort=controversial

EU enacts ban on anonymous crypto transactions via self-custody wallets

The recent Anti-Money Laundering legislation specifically outlaws certain limits for cash transactions and anonymous cryptocurrency payments.

In a recent regulatory change, the European Union (EU) has prohibited cryptocurrency transactions of any value made through unidentified self-custody crypto wallets. This update is a component of the region's newly implemented Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.

According to a post by Patrick Breyer, a member of the European Parliament for the Deutsch Piraten Partei, the majority of the EU Parliament's lead commission endorsed the prohibition on March 19.

Notably, Dr. Breyer is one of the two leaders who opposed this approval. Gunnar Beck was the other Parliament member who voted against it, representing the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The ban on cryptocurrency payments applies specifically to unregistered wallets offered by service providers (hosted wallets), covering self-custody wallets provided via mobile, desktop, or browser applications.

The recent Anti-Money Laundering legislation specifically outlaws certain limits for cash transactions and anonymous cryptocurrency payments. Under these regulations, cash transactions exceeding €10,000 and anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be deemed illegal.

The approved laws are expected to be fully operational within three years from their entry into force. However, Dillon Eustace, an Ireland law firm expects these laws to become fully operational before the usual enforcement timeline.

Fundamentally, many cryptocurrency networks function within permissionless environments, allowing anyone to create a cryptographic private key and granting unrestricted entry into the system.

This characteristic lies at the heart of cryptocurrencies' fundamental principles, offering a more inclusive, liberated, and equitable financial system that does not discriminate against its users in any form.

Experts and freedom advocates consider this recent approval a hit against financial freedom and fundamental human rights. German MEP Patrick Breyer opposes the bill, claiming it compromises economic independence and financial privacy. He considers the ability to transact anonymously to be a fundamental right.

The crypto sector, known for its emphasis on privacy and decentralization, has responded critically to the EU's regulatory measures. These new regulations have created mixed reactions, whereby some believe the new AML laws are necessary, while others fear they may infringe on privacy and hinder economic activity.

Daniel “Loddi” Tröster, the Sound Money Bitcoin Podcast host, underscored the practical hurdles and consequences of the recent legislation, elaborating on the impact on donations and the broader implications for cryptocurrency use within the EU. He articulated concerns over the stifling effect these rules might have. Notably, self-custody to self-custody transactions are not affected by the new law.

An Albuquerque sophomore was seriously and permanently injured in 2022 after a former Volcano Vista High School teacher brought two swords to class and encouraged students to fight with them, a lawsuit alleges.

Identified only as a 16-year-old sophomore at the time, the student injured in the incident still suffers from physical and mental scars, said plaintiff's attorney Jessica Hernandez.

“Parents, when they send their kids to school, they think, ‘The school going to take care of my kid during the day until my child comes back to me,'” she said. “And the last thing you expect as a parent for the teacher to be the one that puts this deadly weapon directly into a child's hands.”

The suit filed in 2nd Judicial District Court on Friday alleges teacher Loviata Mitchell — and Albuquerque Public Schools — violated the sophomore's constitutional rights.

It also alleges negligence by them, as well as by Volcano Vista assistant principal Manuel Alzaga for a report he wrote after the incident. The suit seeks undetermined damages and attorney fees.

APS spokeswoman Monica Armenta said Mitchell was terminated in July 2022, though she still appears to have her teaching license, according to an online state Public Education Department database.

In response to questions about the incident, Armenta said the district does not comment on pending litigation. An attorney representing the district could not immediately be reached for comment.

Roxie De Santiago, an attorney for Mitchell, also said her client could not comment on the suit because it was pending, but wrote in an email that “generally, we believe in the justice system and trust (that) the truth of this situation will be revealed through that process.”

Alzaga still listed as working at the school on its website. He also could not immediately be reached for comment.

‘I'm in trouble'

During a morning chemistry class in May 2022, Mitchell announced she had a “surprise” for her students, according to the suit.

She pulled out two swords — one a katana, and the other a rapier-style sword — that the suit said she'd snuck into the West Side Albuquerque school. She told her students they were props, and had them rearrange their desks into a ring to fight in.

Students pulled out their phones and recorded as a pair of their classmates dueled with the swords, the metal clinking as they parried and jabbed at each other in the makeshift sparring ring while a timer on a TV monitor ticked down.

But the next duel turned bloody, according to the suit. After being chosen by Mitchell to fight another student, the suit said, the sophomore's opponent cut her with the katana, opening a deep gash across her right hand, wrist and forearm. She started bleeding profusely.

“I'm in trouble,” Mitchell said right after the sophomore was cut, according to the suit. She then told the students to delete any video recordings they'd taken and to not tell anyone about what happened.

While the sophomore bled, the suit said Mitchell tried to call the school health office, but could not figure out how. The sophomore “began to feel nauseous and weak from blood loss,” prompting another student to run to the health office.

A health assistant came to the classroom and provided the sophomore first aid and called 911. About half an hour elapsed before anyone called first responders, the suit says.

In a student accident report after the incident, according to the suit, Alzaga said Mitchell had “brought a ‘prop' to school to show a lesson on metal and melding,” and that a student accidentally cut the other student with the prop sword.

Alzaga further noted the injury did not violate school rules.

When asked if Mitchell violated either school or district policy, Armenta again replied only that the district does not comment on pending litigation.

Citing APS' employee handbook, the suit says the district flatly prohibits anyone from bringing guns, knives or other weapons to school unless authorized to do so.

Since the incident, the now 17-year-old teen who was injured has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and still faces lingering pain in her hand and wrist, which suffered permanent damage, according to the suit.

She also struggles with basic tasks, including writing, preparing food and buttoning buttons.

“This injury has changed her entire life,” Hernandez said. “... As a 16-year-old, when you get hurt like this, and all of a sudden you can't do the same things that you used to do — it's really discouraging. It's depressing. It's olating.”

Haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but for any of you r-slurs actually r-slurred enough to be considering investing in the shitshow that is called Reddit considered yourself forewarned. Also, this is a great example of how much of a loser Spez and the exec leadership of Reddit are considering Reddit clone sites like The Chive, even Digg and (hopefully) rDrama and WPD can operate at a net profit with far less employees than what Reddit does. A great example is The Chive which was profitable after 2-3 years (estimated $20 million in revenues and approx 6 employees).

In contrast, after 20 years, Reddit is not only not profitable but they continue to post yearly loses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In fact, the article points out, that these loses translate to "....$232,432.87 a day, or nearly $9,685 an hour [in loses]."

So, Reddit finally filed for an IPO. After nearly 20 years, starting on its own, being acquired by Condé Nast Publications in 2006, spun out in 2011.

Having a long gestation as a private company getting investment dollars isn't unusual today. For a number of years now, the trend has been to see increasingly long years of waiting to seek an exit so investors can allow the company to develop. To strengthen. To build a capability of making money.

Which makes Reddit's filing — its S-1 using technical terms — so interesting is that it's taken so long to still be losing money by the truckful. That's $232,432.87 a day, or nearly $9,685 an hour.

Maybe this has something to do why Condé Nast's parent, Advance Publications, waved goodbye to Reddit so many years ago.

The company calls itself an “emerging growth company” by the definition of the JOBS Act, and will continue to be until any one of the three following conditions happens: their revenue at least equals $1.235 billion; they reach the last day of the fiscal year following the fifth anniversary of the IPO offering; they reach the date on which during a previous three-year period in which they issue more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt; or, under the Exchange Act, they're deemed a “large accelerated filer.”

There are 54 pages of risk factors, which, after reading many S-1 filings over the years, seems pretty long. One of the most notable is the sentence, “We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability.”

There are companies that have said that in the past, but they were much younger. AmazonAMZN +1% has a reputation of being unprofitable for a very long time, but in the last quarter of 2001, it had its first profitable quarter. That was about seven years after the company started running out of the garage of Jeff Bezos.

After two decades, Reddit still warns that it's not making money. Losses can eventually be useful for companies when they can carry them forward and finally offset profits, but the profits do have to come. At the end of 2023, the company has $216.7 million in federal and $177.1 million of state net operating losses (NOLs) to carry. The state ones are gone in 2026 if there aren't profits to apply them to. Federal NOLs through 2017 can only be carried for 20 years to fully offset taxable income. After 2017, due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they can be carried indefinitely to offset only 80% of taxable income annually. So, the losses at this point are theoretically helpful, but practically? Who knows?

In 2023, the company's revenue was $804.0 million. Research and development, at $438.3 million, was more than half, an awfully big number for a company of this age. Total costs and expenses were $944.2 million. The net loss was $90.8 million, which at least is an improvement over 2022, with its $666.7 million in revenue and $158.6 million in losses.

Reddit favors non-standard accounting metrics like adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). The adjusted part include “stock-based compensation expense and related taxes, other (income) expense, net, and certain other non-recurring or non-cash items impacting net income (loss) that we do not consider indicative of our ongoing business performance.” Which makes it tough to know exactly what's being included or excluded.

The adjusted EBITDA in 2023 was still -$69.3 million.

And they like free cash flow as a “liquidity measure.” Free cash flow in 2023 was -$84.8 million. In 2022, it was -$100.3 million.

On top of that, Reddit is going the dual stock class approach, where Class A is the ordinary stock with one vote per share, Class B getting 10 votes per share, and Class C, no votes. This is the type of structure designed to let a small group continue to control the company no matter what. The public argument is that they will keep doing the right thing for the company. In practice, that has meant lots of losses.

California's new $20 minimum wage rule will exempt restaurants that sell bread, handing a lucrative break on wages to the Panera chain and one of Governor Gavin Newsom’s longtime allies https://t.co/fvC7QCfTla

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) February 28, 2024

!wagies

Face Unblurred

Small Tits out

Herpes Transmission

by the way this litigation has been ongoing and the chemical in contention has been on the shelf being sold to consumers the whole time

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/bayer-loses-third-appeals-case-over-glyphosate-weedkiller-2021-08-10

Do the regulators just not care?

mmt of when Bayer got fined millions for knowingly giving people HIV

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bayer-admits-it-paid-millions-in-hiv-infection-cases-just-not-in-english

also as a company they have quite the problematic herstory

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bayer-accused-of-aiding-nazis

"Look, a cave!"

Started: No Place Like Home

» Clear the homeless camp.

Homeless people in California were found living in dangerously constructed riverside caves — outfitting the trash-filled dwellings with furniture and other supplies before they were cleared out by police and volunteers over the weekend.

The 20-foot-deep underground digs were tucked along the Tuolumne River in Modesto, accessible by makeshift stairs carved into the hillside.

During a sweep of the living quarters, 7,600 pounds of trash — filling up two trucks and a trailer — was removed, police said.

"I am sworn to carry your burdens..."

Photos from inside one of the caves obtained by CBS 13 show a table, crates filled with supplies, and even a couple of shelves with food and condiments. Another has a chair and other belongings in bins.

Tracy Rojas, who lives near the subterranean encampment, told CBS 13 that if the caves were to collapse, it would be “devastating.”

She said some of the caves appeared to be fully furnished with bedding as well as drugs and other contraband.

“You can see the hooks on the wall where they had bottles and stuff hanging down,” Rojas said. “I think there needs to be more emphasis on the homeless. They are at the point where you can see they are desperate.”

Guptill said they cleared out eight caves during the cleanup — but he presumes the residents will return, as he has moved them out before.

Police said they're continuing to work with local services to get the homeless people out of the caves and into proper housing.

!g*mers

The A-level schoolgirl from Birmingham suffered from a rare degenerative disease and was fully conscious and able to communicate, repeatedly telling doctors that she did not want to die. However, last month a Court of Protection judge said that she lacked the capacity to make decisions about her treatment amid reporting restrictions preventing Sudiksha, her family and the NHS Trust and medics treating her, from being identified.

So she says she doesnt want to die, so they declare incompetent so that they can ignore her request not to die, then they are able to her name from the record so that it cannot be discussed.

I hear nothing butt bad news from the UK. I hope to never travel there as the weather seems awful too. George Orwell cpuld have never prwdicted what a world bongland would become.

>"Sanity is not statistical."~George Orwell,

Biden - Nobody warned me it was wrong for my son to take millions from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while I was doling out aid to Ukraine to fight corruption.

Reporter - Many people tried to warn you.

Biden - My son Beau died.pic.twitter.com/hq4JeHbsko

— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 13, 2023