Category Archives: Transhuman News

Please dont make the Olympics into the Oscars, Bill Maher pleaded in his show-ending New Rules monologue in tonights return of Real Time to HBO after a months break.

Last April, as he reminded the audience, he said the theme of this years Oscar show was, We dare you to be entertained. Its producers, he griped, seemed determined not to let the audience forget for a moment the injustices and deficiencies of the human condition.

The Tokyo Summer Games, in Mahers view, have outdone Hollywood. He reeled off a series of instances where officials and creative staffers faced consequences over decades-old behavior. In one case, the opening ceremonys musical director was ousted over a 1994 interview in which he admitted to bullying fellow students when he was a child in school. Remember when your teacher used to try to scare you, theyd say, You know, this is going to go down on your permanent record,' he said. No longer an empty threat now.

He also ridiculed media coverage of surfing becoming an Olympic sport in Tokyo. The Associated Press not exactly some lefty activist outlet wrote that having surfing in the Games exacerbates cultural appropriation and racial indignities. Thats because non-Hawaiians have popularized and mainstreamed a sport with deep spiritual and communal meaning for its original participants. The articles headline described the competition as a whitewashed event.

While jokes still flowed and the early moments of the segment seemed fluid enough, Mahers tone was pointed and his points more urgently made than in most weeks. (It could have been the hosts new glasses, which he broke out at the opening minutes of the show, calling them a permanent new accessory. In something of a teaser for the New Rules segment, he quipped, They have progressive lenses. When I put them on, all I see is white privilege.)

This is called a purge, Maher said of the climate in the U.S. and increasingly elsewhere. Its a mentality that belongs in Stalins Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before people who say cancel culture is overblown have to admit that it is, in fact, an insanity that is swallowing up the world.

As to charges that his stance means he has moved farther to the political right (a place on the spectrum given to reflexively denouncing cancel culture), Maher said, My politics have not changed, but I am reacting to politics that have.

The news coming out of the Olympics, he continued, yet another example of how the woke invert the very thing that used to make liberals liberals. Snitches and bitches: Thats not being liberal.

Maher admitted that most of human history is a horror story, but said the notion of keeping cultures and communities in silos interferes with one of the main positives in life. The good parts are groups coming together and sharing. Its sort of the whole point of the Olympics, he jabbed.

Even the Olympic Games concept itself, he pointed out, was adapted from the Greeks. He rattled off sports and their places of origin, including badminton in India, tennis in France taekwondo in Korea. What is this new rule that the first to do something are the only ones who get to have it?! he wondered.

He closed with a condemnation of the hypervigilance about cultural appropriation, though he said there are legitimate cases of it. Stealing natural resources from indigenous people yes, of course, thats exploitation, he said.

At the same time, he insisted, Not everything is about oppression.

Cultural exchange can work in other directions, too, he maintained. K-pop bands like BTS became popular in the U.S. by making pop music that is catchy to Western ears, not by playing traditional Korean songs in the style of their ancestors.

We live in a world where straight actors are told they cant play gay roles and a white novelists arent allowed to imagine what its like to be a Mexican immigrant, Maher said. Even though trying to inhabit the life of someone else is almost the definition of empathy, the bedrock of liberalism.

View post:
Bill Maher Says Tokyo Olympics Are Out-Woke-Ing The Oscars, Proving Cancel Culture Is An Insanity That Is Swallowing Up The World - Deadline

SAN ANGELO One after one, Republican legislators, industry leaders,and other elected and appointed officialsexpressed their opinions on policy matters affecting the Lone Star State duringthe17th annual West Texas Legislative Summit.

The summit is hosted by the San Angelo Chamber of Commerce, along with honorary co-hosts Congressman August Pfluger, Texas Senator Charles Perryand Texas Representative Drew Darby.

A full day of topic-driven panel discussions took place for roughly eight hours Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021, at Angelo State Universitys Houston Harte University Center.

About 400 people were in attendance to listen as several Republican leaders spokeabout policy and politics from West Texas to Washington D.C.

This year's focus was titled "Beyond COVID-19" with panel topics that touched on education, infrastructure, agriculture, energy andtransportation, as well as borders and ports.

The summit featured a who's who in Texas politics with speakers that included former United States Navy Seal and current U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a member of the Energy & Commerce Committee; Congressman Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee; Commissioner Mike Morath with the Texas Education Agency; Commissioner Emily Lindley with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality;John Osborne, Chairman of the Ports-to-Plains Alliance;and Commissioner Christi Craddick, Chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas.

Moderators throughout the day asked a barrage of questions to speakers on how COVID-19 had impacted life in Texas.

Congressman Chip Roy, a member of the Judiciary and Veterans Affairs Committee, opined how the coronavirus may have negatively affected children during a panel titled "Reimagining Education By Reshaping for the Future."

"We did a disservice to our children across this nation, running in fear and cowering in the cornerand masking them up," Roy said. "We're going to be watching what happens from a mental health perspective for years to come, and I think we ought to keep that perspective as people call for more shutdowns."

In the same panel, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said there was "an unprecedented infusion of federal resources into public education" as the virus raged across the country.

Morath said it led to school districts across Texas spending large sums of money to find ways ofeducating children during the pandemic.

"We spent a billion dollars in the past15 months ensuring every kid in Texas had a laptop, iPador Chromebook," Morath said.

SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: No more textbooks? San Angelo ISD students to receive iPads; here's who gets them first

Additional investments Morath cited that Texas school districts made included support for better internet access, rapid COVID tests, and new ventilation systems.

Like Roy, Morath said the response to the pandemic could have long-lasting effects onTexas children.

"We saw the largest academic decline in terms of student outcomes," Morath said. "Depending on how you look at it, it wiped out somewhere between 10 and 25 years worth of academic gains in the state of Texas."

Morath said Texas school districts would likely experiment with longer school years and specialized tutoring programs to accelerate learning and bring those gains back.

Throughout the day, many Republican and Conservative-leaning panelists lambasted Democrats andthe Biden Administration, as well as left-wing policies like the Green New Deal and critical race theory both of which have become political lightning rods.

"I'm going to be 'politically incorrect' for a moment," said Congressman Randy Weber, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, during a panel on energy management. "No CRT," and paused a moment for the applause to die down.

"Let's teach our kids that America is worth fighting for. It is the greatest country in the world for a reason," Weber said.

In May, Weber co-sponsored a bill (H.R.3046) that was introduced to prohibit federal funds from providing training and education based on critical race theory at United States military academies.

In the same energy panel, Congressman Dan Crenshaw criticized alternative energy sources, stating that Democrat plans to invest in wind and solar energy were too unrealistic at the present time.

Both he and fellow panelist Congressman Kevin Bradyadvocated for Texas petroleum, stating that solutions to climate change would likely come from the oil and gas industries.

Keynote speaker Congressman August Pfluger took several direct shots at the Biden Administration during a lunchtime address, saying the President "didn't understand rural America," nor appreciate what rural America had to offer.

"The Biden Administration not appreciating rural America is personally offensive to me," Pfluger said.

Pfluger championed conservative ideas being expressed by other panelists. During his closing remarks at the end of the summit, Pfluger stated it would be Texas thatwould "lead the country out of the mess" left by the Biden Administration.

Others are reading: Former San Angelo Central receiver Jalen Leifeste to play football for NAIA team

John Tufts covers enterprise and investigative topics in West Texas. Send him a news tip atJTufts@Gannett.com.

Excerpt from:
Conservative policies and ideas discussed at 17th annual West Texas Legislative Summit - Standard-Times

President Joe Biden speaks about the economy and his infrastructure agenda in the State Dining Room of the White House, in Washington, Monday, July 19th, 2021. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters cant seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring politically incorrect speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.

Now, the Biden administration seems to be giving the colleges and universities some serious competition. Like many Democrats during the Trump presidency, they have come to see suppression of fake news as the ordinary course of business and indeed a prime responsibility of social media platforms.

For decades, print and broadcast media have been dominated by liberals, but Facebook, Google and Twitter have developed a stranglehold over the delivery of news which exceeds anything that the three major broadcast networks and a few national newspapers every enjoyed. If they suppress a story or a line of argument, it largely disappears from public view. And to the extent that it lingers, it can be stigmatized by these multibillion-dollar companies as misinformation or fake news.

Speech suppression was exactly what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had in mind last week when she called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.

Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and thats too long. The information spreads too quickly.

And she wasnt aiming her demand at just Facebook. You shouldnt be banned from one platform and not others, she added a day later. The message was surely not lost on these companies, whose fabulously successful business models are vulnerable to government disruption.

Like most speech suppressors, Psaki protested her good intentions. As did her boss, President Joe Biden, who, when asked about Facebook on Friday, said simply, Theyre killing people. The implication is that any advice contrary to the current recommendations of public health officials contrary to the science is bound to increase the death toll.

This is more in line with Cardinal Bellarmines view of science than Galileos. As Galileo knew, science is not acceptance of holy writ but learning from observation and experiment. Today, in dealing with a novel and deadly virus, current science is a body of hypotheses only partly tested and subject to revision based on emerging evidence.

Theres a long list of things once believed to be misinformation about COVID that are now widely accepted. One prime example: the possibility that the coronavirus was accidentally released from the Wuhan lab. For more than a year, this was widely treated as a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory. Facebook slapped warnings on it and boasted that it reduced readership i.e., suppressed speech.

Then, in May, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, in an article that Facebook let slip through, argued a lab leak was likelier than animal-to-human transmission, and a group of 18 bioscientists called for a deeper investigation. The Biden administration, to its credit, soon reversed itself and opened its own investigation and, reportedly, multiple officials now believe the lab leak theory is likely correct. Some misinformation!

That example provides powerful support for Galileos view that debate over scientific matters takes place best out in the open. But of course the urge to suppress speech is not limited to science. As conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote, Removing information on vaccines will translate right over to anything they think is misinformation on gun violence, or climate, or healthcare or what defines a man or woman. Which is why they are doing this.

If you think thats extravagant, consider that, as Townhalls Guy Benson argued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been stretching its ambit to studying gun violence and climate change even while letting its core mission of advancing public health atrophy, as shown by its inability to produce a COVID test.

Its easy to imagine this administration pressuring Facebook and other social media to suppress information on other issues. For example, as the New York Posts Michael Goodwin noted, his papers negative stories about Hunter Bidens shady business dealings, which were largely blocked from public view in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Speech suppression is evidently habit-forming. Which is why a constitutional amendment was passed back in the 1790s guaranteeing freedom of speech, and of the press. Or is that obsolete in these modern times?

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

Read more:
BARONE: Speech suppression is habit-forming The North State Journal - North State Journal

So it breaks these regions in the US down, and then goes through their entire history of the characteristics and struggles of their people. I think that there are some people who have said that it's a simplistic explanation of some of these stereotypes of people, but it's a very good jumping-off point to understand how hundreds of years and thousands of years of history can come and create different cultures within a single nation.

LG: American Nations. All right. Those are great recommendations. Thank you.

MC: Yeah, and now I know why crab cakes and lobster rolls are so popular in San Francisco.

ED: There you go.

LG: Mike, what's your recommendation?

MC: So this one is a little bit on-topic because I'm going to send you to Reddit, the birthplace and proving ground of many memes out there in the world. So there's this fun little Easter egg inside Reddit, and it's called r/random. If you go to reddit.com/r/random, it redirects you automatically to a random subreddit. So it's not actually a subreddit. It's a redirection engine. You go from r/random to anywhere on Reddit, and it really just shows all kinds of stuff. So Lauren just typed it in, and she landed on the AirPods Pro subreddit. I just clicked on it because I have it set as a bookmark on my browser, and I landed on the r/Poland Reddit, subreddit.

So this is what I would recommend that you do. I recommend that you make it a bookmark on your browser bar, because when you're just bored and you need five minutes of distraction, and you just want something to look at that's not the infinite squirrel of doom known as social media, you can just go to r/random, and it will drop you into a section of Reddit that maybe hasn't seen any action in six months, or maybe has millions of subscribers and it's really interesting, maybe is a section of culture that you've never experienced before and never would have experienced like Blade and Soul, which looks like a game. Lauren, what is that you just

LG: Yeah, I just entered it again. It's a Korean fantasy martial arts massively multiplayer online role playing game, otherwise known as MMORPG, developed by NCSoft's team Bloodlust. If I sound like I know what I'm talking about, it's because I just read that out loud from the website.

MC: You read that on the description. See? There you go. Something that you never knew about that you now found because of this randomness machine. So that's my recommendation. Check it out. Make a bookmark for r/random.

LG: That's pretty good.

MC: Thanks.

ED: I love that. It reminds me of the Wikipedia option to go to any random Wikipedia page.

MC: Absolutely. So, Lauren, your turn. You're the host. What's your recommendation?

LG: I admit,when I came up with this recommendation and I jotted it down in our weekly podcast script, Mike, I wondered if I was perhaps stealing it from you, because I recommend White Lotus on HBO Max.

MC: Yes.

LG: Yeah. Mike and I are both fans of the show. Emily, have you had the chance to check this one out yet?

ED: No. I saw people talking about it on Twitter and was like, "OK. Good. Apparently there's a new show I can watch," but I know nothing about it.

LG: Yeah. When you take some time off after you're all done with this, the book project, you should definitely check out this show. As I say often, if anyone needs an HBO login, let me know. I give it out freely. I think that's why HBO didn't send me the press kit this year that they normally send people, because I saw people tweeting about that, and I was like, "Where is my kit?" But anyway, yeah, it's a fantastic show about a group of extremely privileged people who descend upon a Hawaiian luxury resort. These people don't all know each other necessarily, but they traveled in the same boat together, and then they are at the same resort together. So they keep running into each other at the pool, and on the beach, and whatnot. They're interacting with the staff at the resort, who are more diverse and presumably don't have Their incomes are not as high as the people who are vacationing at the resort.

Read this article:
How Memes Became Weapons in the Culture Wars - WIRED

In 2020 I served as school captain at one of Sydneys all-boys catholic schools. This position took me to the forefront of resisting the lefts seemingly endless march through our educational institutions. Some of what I saw on the journey alarmed me, however, my success also gives me great hope for the future.

I was elected by fellow students, who were told to vote again because the woke teachers resented their pick I won the second vote by even further. Ill explain why I believe I won later, but first, I want to explain what I campaigned on and what I did in the role.

I promised that I would bring back the national anthem to assemblies (it had been abolished a couple of years prior) and that prayer would come before the Acknowledgement of Country at all school gatherings because in a Catholic school God must come first. Of course, all politics is local and there were a few school-specific promises as well. Having seen the popular swell of support behind me, the teachers quickly caved and sure enough, every assembly began with a prayer, then the anthem, then an Acknowledgement of Country. Regrettably, I am reliably informed this order has been discontinued this year after my graduation with the anthem once again absent, and the acknowledgement preceding prayer a timely reminder that our resistance to the left must never cease because as soon as there is no resistance they gain ground eroding our culture.

If I thought my early-term success had defeated the woke teaching establishment, I was sorely mistaken. One day, I noticed on the calendar a scheduled upcoming visit for Year 9 students from an independent drug education company. Immediately I was suspicious. I did some basic research and noticed this company had been to a few other schools with like-minded school captains (I was far from the only conservative student elected across Sydney last year). I had them ask their students about the talks from this company. What they discovered was worse than Id ever feared.

The talk was heavily favourable on drug-taking. Its highlights included:

I naively thought the school had made a genuine mistake, so I went to the executive excited for some praise for my detective work, for saving the school (which already complained about its vaping problem) from this lunacy. I was swiftly told they knew what was being taught, and would continue with the scheduled visit. My protests fell on deaf ears.

Unfortunately for them, I dont accept defeat that easily. As Captain, every month I spoke at a parents and friends function, so I thought Id use my monthly speech to tell these parents what their 14-year-old sons were going to be taught. As I laid it all out to these parents, the outrage was palpable and the parents made their views clear immediately. The very next day the company was uninvited.

Legally, teachers dont seem to be able to suggest illegal activity like this is acceptable. However, these independent groups can seemingly come in and do what they like. Its a slick trick the industrial left uses to sidestep what flimsy measures that governments are taking to stop the lefts march through the educational institutions.

I want to give a key message to all parents: If your children attend school anywhere from kindergarten to year 12, talk to them about what they are learning every single day. You have the greatest power to prevent them from consuming and believing this indoctrination. Im certain there are many other companies out there, on a range of topics, teaching similarly harmful things.

Now, dont worry, Its not all doom and gloom.

Generation Z is fighting back. Why was I, and many other like-minded captains across Sydney, elected last year? Well, its not that students were passionately behind messages like God comes first at a Christian school. Instead, they just wanted to stick one up the woke teachers.

This exact phenomenon is described by internet commentator Paul Joseph Watson, who says Conservatism is the new punk. Its a reaction to the woke lefts takeover of the orthodoxy in education, media and art. When an orthodoxy establishes control and silences dissent, the naturally rebellious nature of young people will immediately seek to resist and dissent from that orthodoxy. Just as punk rock rebelled against the stale religious conservative orthodoxy in the 1970s, modern conservatism is rebelling against the woke political correctness of our modern world. In short, being politically incorrect has become cool.

My election and actions as school captain is an early example of the political results and leadership you can expect from my generation. However, dont just take my anecdotes for evidence, there are statistics to back this up. A British study recently found that on a range of issues including gay marriage, marijuana legalization, transgender rights and tattoos, 59% of Gen Z had self-described conservative or moderate views.

Whats more exciting is that, as any reputable political scientist would tell you, generations become more conservative as they age. This is logical. socialism sounds nice in a textbook, however, once you start working for a living and raising a family, suddenly high taxes arent so appealing. This gradual slide towards conservatism will only be accelerated if the left continues to advocate for policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on todays youth, including endless lockdowns and mountains of public debt.

The challenge for todays centre-right leaders is to harness these favourable conditions by showing sufficient difference from the left on these critical issues. Boris Johnson and Ron Desantis have done this with their exits from lockdown once it became safe. If they both hold firm on their current stance, I make one prediction: they will both win national elections in 2024, with 60%+ of the vote from 18 to 24-year-olds.

The ball is in your court, Scott. I may be one of the few, but I still believe in you. Dont let me down. Dont let my generation down.

See the original post:
Generation Z is fighting back against the left establishment - The Spectator Australia

Until recently, Kris Wu was one of Chinas most adored pop singers, swamped by screaming fans wherever he went. The Chinese-born Canadian hip-hop artist starred in hit reality shows and commanded a following of 50 million on social media. Luxury brands including Louis Vuitton and Porsche paid him millions of dollars to be an ambassador.

But in less than a month, Wu effectively became an enemy of the state. Within 48 hours after Beijing police announced on Saturday his detention on suspicion of rape, he lost all social media accounts. His entire catalog of songs and music videosfrom more than 20 albumswas removed from streaming platforms. Influencers who defended the star had their own accounts shut down, and people were fired just for joking about him. And this all happened before Wu, who has denied all wrongdoing, was even charged with a single crime or set foot in a court of law.

Wus dramatic downfall is widely seen as a major victory in Chinas feminist circles, who have tirelessly backed the accusers and amplified their allegations against Wu on the Chinese internet. A rising awareness of womens rights in the country has empowered women to speak up about gender discrimination and sexual abuse. Many women were relieved to see a star as prominent as Wu brought into custody. It was an example of how grassroots pressure led to some sort of accountability.

But this story of bottom-up change is not what youll read about in Chinas official news outlets.

Going beyond the normal scope of criminal justice, the Chinese government has started a massive information campaign to steer the conversation away from how women organized themselves to challenge the powerful.

Instead, it has sought to turn Wus detention into a case about the moral decadence of pop stars. And by portraying itself as a government acting in the public interest, it is also trying to legitimize its arbitrary and opaque use of state power. This attempt to rewrite the narrative, critics say, could derail efforts to address a pervasive rape culture in the country.

Star erased

Wu, who rose to stardom in 2012 as a member of K-pop group EXO (he quit in 2014), is the most famous man to face rape allegations in China to date. In July, an 18-year-old college student said Wus manager brought her to a casting interview at the pop stars home, where Wu allegedly plied her with alcohol and had sex with her after she passed out from drinking. Wu said he met the woman once, but denied he raped her.

Facing an outpouring of anger from Chinese women, authorities initially blamed the scandal on an elaborate scam and criticized the accuser for hyping the allegations for fame. But on Saturday, Beijing police said they had detained Wu on suspicion of rape. The accusers supporters rejoiced.

Although police did not release details of Wus alleged wrongdoings and he has yet to be charged, the detention is seen as an official denouncement, and it set off a campaign to erase an A-list star from the Chinese internet.

Not only were Wus own social accounts banned, but those who have defended him against alleged sexual misconduct were silenced, too. Microblogging site Weibo suspended the accounts of at least four influencers who had argued it was fine for Wu to sleep with his female fans. A total of 990 accounts that commented on Wus case were shut down for picking quarrels and provoking trouble, attacking the government, malicious marketinga reason often used to silence critics of the authorities.

Wus songs were removed from all major streaming platforms in the country, including the Chinese version of Apple Music. His fan groups on different platforms were also closed. On Douban, a major film review site, Wus name was scrapped from cast lists. Searching Wus name turned up the message, The search result cannot be displayed according to relevant laws and regulations.

Although the government has banned stars who have used drugs or visited sex workers from appearing on TV and in movies, this kind of total erasure, sometimes done to dissidents, is unheard of for a pop star who has steered clear of Chinese politics.

Parent companies of the platforms, including Apple, Tencent, and ByteDance, did not respond to requests for comment.

On Tuesday, Chinese carmaker Honzo Auto issued an apology on Weibo after leaked screenshots from its internal chat group showed several employees joking about hiring Wu as a brand ambassador. They were soon fired by the company for remarks that seriously challenged social valuescode for moral misconduct.

The Communist Party under President Xi Jinping has been tightening its control over Chinese society in the past few years, putting pressure on businesses to carefully toe the official line and distance themselves from personalities deemed politically incorrect by Beijing. Those who fail to do so can face dire consequences. The NBA, for example, was banned in China for one year after a team official tweeted in support of Hong Kongs anti-government protests.

Now, to many Chinese womens delight, the state is turning this vast machinery against a wealthy, famous man facing sexual abuse allegations.

The government is taking a populist approach to show it is using its power to respond to peoples demands, said Fang Kecheng, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kris Wu is merely an entertainment star with no political identities. To the government, he can be easily discarded.

The crackdown on Wu contrasts with how other prominent sexual abuse allegations were handled. A woman who accused a famous state media host of sexual harassment got her Weibo account suspended this year, after she shared details about a continuing civil suit against the man. Richard Liu, the founder of e-commerce giant JD.com, suffered no major public backlash in China after he was accused of raping a student in the United States in 2018.

In general, sexual assault on women in China rarely leads to legal penalties. According to a 2011 United Nations survey, 75 percent of male respondents who admitted to committing rape experienced no legal consequences. While not unique to China, this degree of impunity has contributed to the prevalence of sexual violence, UN researchers wrote.

Feminist activists say the popular campaign against Wu shows that more Chinese women are resisting the exploitation. The government, however, wants to tell a different story.

After Wus detention, authorities accused the entertainment industry and the obsessive fans of harboring criminal activities and promised a tougher crackdownnot on the permissive culture for sex abuse, but on the excesses of showbiz.

Following the lead of mouthpieces like the Peoples Daily, state media and entertainment industrial groups have in the past few days published a slew of articles attacking the countrys poorly-behaved pop stars, as well as the social media companies that profited from their popularity.

No one can enjoy impunity. The stardom offers no protection. Fans offer no protection. Foreign passports offer no protection, either, the state broadcaster CCTV wrote in an editorial on Sunday. Kris Wus case should give a wake-up call to the fans carried away by their obsession.

A weakened #MeToo moment

Activists say the emphasis on Wus identity as a celebrityand a Canadian one at thatis an attempt to downplay what should be a #MeToo event about womens rights.

The first accuser, Du Meizhu, never mentioned #MeToothe hashtag is intermittently censored in China, and many people are reluctant to identify with a campaign that originated abroad for fear of being accused of foreign collusion at a time of geopolitical tensions. Nevertheless, the womens solidarity campaign sparked by Dus accusations resembled the global campaign against sexual abuse.

Female internet users openly supported Du. Several young women shared their own experiences with Wu and alleged a pattern of predatory behaviors. Online posts discussing the importance of sexual consent and protection of survivors went viral. Under public pressure, brands including Bulgari and Louis Vuitton cut ties with the star.

None of this could have happened without the growing feminist voices in China, activists say. The young generation of Chinese women have become more united and vocal in pushing back against patriarchal norms, from womens traditional role in marriage and childrearing, to the harassment and abuse they often suffer from in intimate relationships.

Zheng Xi, a Chinese activist who has campaigned against sexual harassment, said the #MeToo movement has given women, including Wus accuser, a powerful language to tell stories of sexual violence.

But when authorities shift the focus to the entertainment industry, Zheng said, they are making it harder for victims to build connections with each other, and reducing public discussions on similar sexual abuse incidents in the wider society.

Fang, the professor, said although the government has gone hard on Wu, it is discouraging such activism by casting the story as the state fixing problems in the entertainment industry, instead of it being forced to act by a womens campaign.

If the focus is placed on women helping themselves, it would be acknowledging and encouraging the resisting forces in the society, he said. This time, they target Kris Wu. Who knows whom they will target next time? The state would not want to encourage this.

On social media, news of Wus detention sparked euphoria. Female influencers launched lucky draws to give away cosmetics, snacks and bubble tea. But as the crackdown intensified, women became divided over who should be credited for his downfall.

You can always believe in socialism, believe in the justice system, said a widely shared post praising the Chinese law enforcement for holding Wu accountable. Many people compared the swift detention of Wu with the long time a rape trial often takes in countries like South Korea, arguing Beijings so-called iron fist is more friendly to women.

But the governments critics cautioned that the crackdown on Wu was less about womens rights than about demonstrating the states control, which is showing dwindling tolerance for dissent. Some listed Wu alongside the companies and industries that have come under regulatory crackdown recently, arguing they were all victims of Chinas arbitrary law enforcement.

At first I thought Wus custody was a women's victory, but now I realized it was the iron fist trying to regulate fan circles, a Weibo user wrote. A tank is coming, and it happened to hit a bad guy on the way.

L Pin, a Chinese feminist activist based in New York, said women should be credited for bringing down Wu. Although the case did not reflect a general improvement in law enforcement, L told VICE World News, it was indeed a victory that womens collective voices put a famous man behind bars.

We dont have a reliable legal system. Everyone knows this is an exception, a surprise, L said. But without feminists, even this exception would not have happened. We should let women celebrate this.

See the rest here:
#MeToo Hits One of Chinas Biggest Celebrities. The State Is Taking Credit. - VICE

Grimeborn, the annual opera festival, has moved round North London's Latte Belt from Dalston to Hackney and pitches up at the grand old Empire with the second part of Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle, Die Walkrie. It's a change of location that brings problems and opportunities, with an echo or two of those given to Brnnhilde in the work itself.

Sensing his doubts, she disobeys her father, Wotan, and spares Siegmund death as her heart is touched by his confessions of love for his sister, Sieglinde, whom he has recently found after years of separation. Wotan, as gods are wont to be if defied by women who think they know better, takes badly to this turn of events and does Brnnhilde's job for her, ensuring that Siegmund dies in his fight with Hunding, with whom he has been feuding. Things don't end well for Hunding either - it never pays to get too close to an angry Norse god.

Brnnhilde spirits Sieglinde away, telling her that her unborn child will be the greatest hero of them all (The Ring Cycle is a boxed set, remember) and seeks sanctuary with her fellow Valkyrie sisters, who, taking time off from selecting the dead warriors fit to enter Valhalla, rally to her side, but quail in the presence of Wotan, still dialling the bad temper to 11.

As punishment, Brnnhilde is made mortal and exiled to a mountain top (German Romanticism's ethos could hardly accept less) but, Wotan, remembering his love for his favourite, allows her request for a ring of fire to encircle her, Brnnhilde having calculated that the only prince who could traverse it and wake the sleeping beauty she will become is Siegfried, the hero yet to be born.

So, mash up Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings, and out pops this testosterone-fuelled epic, albeit one with strong female characters. As Grimeborn operas intend, this stripped back version by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick, is certainly accessible, but I'd suggest that it's worth reading the synopsis in the programme or on Wikipedia before taking your seat.

Moving from the tight confines of The Arcola, home to Grimeborn and the excellent 2019 production of The Ring Cycle's first part, Das Rheingold, diminishes and enhances the unique pleasures of a boutique opera, the scaling up of the concept not wholly successful.

It's still a privilege to hear singing of this quality outside the big houses with their big prices - Mark Stone expressive as Wotan, Laure Meloy heartbreaking as Brnnhilde and soprano, Natasha Jouhi, sensational as Sieglinde - but it's a big house to fill and you do lose the almost atavistic impact of these voices giving it everything within touching distance, as they are in Dalston. Perhaps the aesthetic dimension is enhanced, as Stone's baritone resonates round the house, but the thrill is diluted.

The vast stage doesn't help matters, with Bettina John's set design looking like a backstage space at The Royal Opera House, with scaffolding poles a "neither here nor there" proxy for swords. The stakes seem less life and death and more "Who's going to fix the broom handle?" It's only when the three Valkyrie sisters (in leather tailoring no less) turn up on swings and accompanied by their impressive and familiar fanfare, that the stage looks filled - owned really - by the gods whose domain it is. Too often, the sparks have too much distance to cross to ignite the fires that roil beneath the surface.

We gain with the music. Peter Selwyn conducts the 18 strong Orpheus Sinfonia with such confidence, all the power and emotions of Wagner's score working its way into our souls. The surtitles may give us the English translation of the German libretto, but they're largely superfluous - the music is telling us everything we need to know. There are one or two occasions when the Donner und Blitzen overwhelms the voices, but not often, that balance (so crucial and so often overlooked) perfect from my seat in the stalls.

There will be more spectacular versions, maybe more intimate versions too, but director, Julia Burbach, gives us a Die Walkrie that has much to offer Wagner superfans (I suspect there might not be any other kind) and plenty too for those dipping a toe into a legendary (in every sense) work that can be intimidating as opera gets. Coming in at not much above three hours with an interval, you can look the unsmiling Saxon composer with the politically incorrect reputation in the eye and say (like Siegmund) "Let's do this." You won't be disappointed.

Die Walkre is at the Hackney Empire until 7 August and the Grimeborn Festival continues at The Arcola Theatre until 11 September.

Photo Alex Brenner.

Read this article:
BWW Review: DIE WALKRE, Hackney Empire The Grimeborn Festival scales up for the second part of - Broadway World

Over the past year, I noticed several books written by giants in our field, people everyone knows, people I am honored to know personally. I was interested in what they wrote, and I thought their books would be of general interest to The Cancer Letter community.

Going beyond merely recommending the books, I set out to write in a book review format, providing critiques that would enable everyone to appreciate more of the details (and want to read the books).

Because of my interest (or because I know the subject matter and, in some cases, am acquainted with the authors), I included reflections on the aspects of the books I found interesting, adding perspective or insight when appropriate.

You will find a lot of interesting history and fascinating tidbits within these volumesincluding the personal human side of science and medicine. Perhaps I got a little carried away with the number of words, but I wanted to do these books justice. I know my colleagues will be eager to read every word. And maybe some will be inspired to do similar thingsmaybe we could start something new here.

Perhaps it was an unusual year for those types of books that I gravitated toward. Rather than sticking with my typical diet of sci-fi, social justice, history, and entertainment, I gravitated toward important and timely social and ethical issues in science and oncology.

I hope the reader gets all the way down to the bottom of the list (especially the book my daughter Julie is reading), and, finally, I wish there were more hours in the day.

The books reviewed here are:

Other books on my reading list are:

And a book my daughter, Julie, is reading:

When a Nobel Laureate like Paul Nurse stops to ask what it means to be alive or what defines life, one can be sure that something interesting and important will be learned.

The basic unit of matter is the atom. The basic unit of life (the first step), the cell varies widely in size, for example 3,000 bacteria add up to a mm, while a single nerve cell from the spine to the big toe can be a meter long. Virchow Omnis cellula e cellula, or all cells come from other cells, is pretty profound.

We all were single embryonic cells; life does not ordinarily arise from inert matter. At the core of cells are the genes, and their history dates back to before it was known what genes were. Gregor Mendel studied inheritance patterns in pea plants and referred to pairs of elements and specific patterns he observed were later understood to apply to all sexually reproducing species. Microscopy was used by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, and later by Matthias Schleiden and Theodore Schwann in the late 1830s to observe cells.

By the 1870s, Walther Flemming observed threads in cells that separated as cells divided, later called chromosomes, physical manifestations of genes, the heritable particles proposed by Mendel. While it became known that chromosomes contained deoxyribonucleic acids, work of Oswald Avery in the early 1940s, most biologists thought that DNA was too simple and boring a molecule to be responsible for such a complex phenomenon as heredity.

Nurse recounts how the structure of DNA was transformational as were its implications for heredity. The gene is the second step in understanding the biology of life. He got to know Watson and Crick and describes how they were and how they complemented each other.

The genetic code was broken in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nurse describes Sydney Brenner as having interviewed him for a job he didnt get, during which he compared his colleagues to the crazed figures in Picassos painting Guernica, which hung on the wall of his office.

Genetically modified bacteria were developed by the late 1970s and instructed to produce insulin, while Fred Sanger worked out methods to sequence DNA, and the human genome was sequenced by 2003. Nurse goes into how the control of mitosis and the cell cycle to ensure faithful replication and cell division is what makes life possible for a cell. He recounts laborious work with yeast mutants that led him to identify the small wee mutants, at least 50 of them, and then the cdc2 mutant that unlocked a fundamental mechanism of cell division.

Nurse recounts a personal story about his own genetics with shocking revelations for him as he was moving to become president of Rockefeller University. Youll have to read his book for that information.

The book turns to evolution, natural selection as an important feature of life (the third step), ideas of Lamarck and (Charles) Darwin (and his grandfather Erasmus who was also a doctor and poet). He mentioned others before them and also described the influence of artificial selection used by humans, such as breeding pigeons or dogs, on directed evolution.

Even the error rate of DNA replication is subject to natural selection. Nurse describes life on our planet as all connected, and recounts an experience on a visit to Africa with a gorilla and then the amazing conservation in cell cycle control between yeast and human cells, at least as far as cdc2.

It is interesting to me, that four decades after its discovery, there has not been a description of a yeast p53 homologue or a cell cycle checkpoint mechanism like p53 activation of the mammalian CDK inhibitor p21(WAF1)/CDKN1A, one of my most favorite genes that mediates growth arrest to allow DNA repair in damaged or stressed cells.

Nurse gets into another (the fourth step) aspect of life through chemistry and chemical reactions. He describes insights by Pasteur that chemical reactions are expressions of the life of the cell. Metabolism is the chemistry of life is something that many cancer researchers in 2021 are focused on.

He points out that enzymes are catalysts that support life. The compartmentalization within cells is viewed as a way that a vast array of chemical and metabolic reactions can occur to sustain life. Life is also powered by ATP made in mitochondria. Finally, Nurse describes a key aspect of life (the fifth step) as information, sensing, responding and adapting, and posits that purposeful behavior is a defining feature of life.

The book discusses much more about the organization and regulation that makes life possible. Nurse includes a chapter about changing the world with new ideas and technologies, and how the world has changed as a result of all the progress that has been made through science. He ends the book with his approach to defining life by providing essential principles that build upon the five steps, recounts ideas of others, and offers some of his own speculation about the origin of life.

I read this book while in medical school, but became interested in it this past year, as I think it brings back a history of medicine and a kind of explorer who has been lost in the modern era.

If bureaucratic heads would roll in Washington, the answer from the FDA would have to be no as far as starting human studies with thymidine as a cancer therapeutic without preclinical evidence of safety.

Thus, Dr. Beppino Giovanella wrote a clinical protocol for himself, and took thymidine orally in increasing doses. He developed diarrhea and couldnt absorb enough to reach high blood levels. So, he injected himself with IV thymidine and went to the FDA with evidence of safety and they reversed their decision to allow clinical testing in patients with terminal cancer. But not all chemotherapy works

Dr. Horace Wells, a dentist and inventor in Hartford, CT, was successful but felt his profession was unpleasant because of the pain his patients had to endure. He observed a demonstration of the effect of laughing gas when a circus performer hurt himself and felt no pain. He set up a demonstration on himself of what would be a painless tooth extraction.

His demonstration in Boston to the Harvard surgeons didnt go smoothly because of his nervousness and their arrogant skepticism. He abandoned dentistry but was urged by his family to patent the nitrous oxide gas.

He wouldnt give his former student Morton, in Boston, the gas, and Morton eventually experimented with ether, also being talked about at the time, on his dog and goldfish. Morton eventually made a demonstration for the surgeons at Harvard and it went well for the removal of a neck tumor painlessly.

The story gets interesting with disputes in 1846 between Wells, Morton, and Jackson each claiming they made the invention. Desperation, anguish, and madness are part of this story and eventually credit for the discovery of anesthesia is settled but not before a human toll is taken. Read about it to find out what happened.

Several other guinea pig doctor stories are included about cholera, yellow fever, tubes inside the bodywhether its the heart or kidneys combined with X-rays, to push back the frontiers of medicine. One story I read in the 1980s is about Dr. William J. Harrington, who was chair of medicine at University of Miami, who was also head of hematology and on the faculty while I was a student there.

I met him at the end of my hematology rotation and remember, to this day, that when examined by a hematologist, one should always have in the back of their mind that the answer might be to do a bone marrow examination.

Dr. Harrington had met a young patient who was bleeding when he was a medical student in Boston. His patient had no platelets and died from surgery to remove her spleen. Later, as a hematology fellow at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, he would inject himself with a pint of blood from a patient with severe ITP who had not improved despite a splenectomy.

Bills own platelet count went down to zero for 5 days and he had bleeding around his ankles and in his stools. He had multiple blood and bone marrow examinations during the days that followed until his platelets recovered. His self-experimentation was the first example of a demonstration of autoimmune disease.

Interestingly, the book recounts that other staff members, secretaries, medical students and physicians in the summer and Fall of 1950 participated in similar experimentation with transfusions under more controlled settings. Dr. Harrington presented his paper at the 43rd annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

It was quite a treat for me to read this book, as I had met Dr. [Suzanne] Koven during medicine house-staff training at Johns Hopkins, and in fact she was my chief resident (the third woman in the departments hundred-year history and the only married woman or woman with a baby to be selected for this honor.) during my senior medical resident year.

Dr. Koven, who was an English major in college, and had wanted to become a journalist, has an incredible talent for writing and flowery language. She recounts her journey with a special kind of humor. The only thing I remember from my introductory chemistry course is that Einstein calculated Avogadros number (6.022 x 1023) using grains of pollen. I never understood what Avogadros number was, but I enjoyed picturing the wild-haired genius with his loupe and tweezers painstakingly dissecting the sex organs of flowers.

The Letter she wrote to a young female physician is about what to expect in a male-dominated medical world, with many challenges from sexism, some infuriating, some merely annoying, serious and damaging discrimination, imposter syndrome and ends with recognition of a mature state of humility, and self-reflection for the benefit of her younger colleagues.

She quotes Sir William Osler: There are three classes of human beings: men, women, and women physicians.

Koven admits her complicity in a system that had so little regard for me, and states perhaps the reason I didnt rebel against the culture of my medical training was that I loved it.

Dr. Koven writes about her father who was an orthopedic surgeon with whom she spent time in the office after school.

What I wanted, I think, during those afternoons when I dipped x-rays into vats of sharp-smelling chemicals and held down limbs as the circular saw screeched through plaster casts, was to be close to my father, about whom I was endlessly curious.

On why she didnt become a psychiatrist, which she considered at one time, she mentioned a joke her father, the surgeon, told her The internist knows everything and does nothing, the surgeon knows nothing and does everything, the psychiatrist knows nothing and does nothing, and the pathologist knows everything and does everything a day too late.

She writes in a chapter entitled Things shameful to be spoken about: Ive always been a talker. Mrs. Sylvia Krensky wrote on my otherwise unblemished first-grade report card: Suzanne must learn to let the other children speak. I never did. To this day Im a chronic interrupter and conversation hog.

In her book, Dr. Koven shares much about her personal life through various transitions and some of what she went through, with wisdom, knowledge and poetry interspersed.

In her own words, she shares her tribulations, the idea that Id misdiagnosed my mother due to my incompetence was too painful for me to dwell on for too long. I quickly moved on to another theory: that my mothers diagnosis had eluded me for the same reason it had eluded her internist in Florida during the many months shed complained to him about fatigue and left-shoulder pain; she was a woman.

Dr. Koven recounts meeting a patient with leukemia during her clinical skills training as a medical student at Johns Hopkins. Her interview at that point captures when the patients illness became apparent, during an afternoon when he was coaching his grandsons baseball team and suddenly became light-headed.

He held on to the chain-link fence to keep from falling and as he looked at his fingers, wrapped tightly through the metal wire, he noticed how pale they were.

Months later, on an inpatient rotation when the patient was much sicker when she reviewed the notes from her earlier encounter I tossed my old note back in the folder with my essays on Black House and Mrs. Dalloway, having concluded that it was, like they were, useless.

Then, she wrote this sentence that resonates a bit in the modern era of sometimes fragmented and impersonal medicine (although probably not the intended takeaway): Then I wrote my new note as if Id never met Mr. Blake before, as if Id never heard his story.

Dr. Koven wrote a chapter about Mnemonics, that every medical student will appreciate. She tells her friend, another English major she had met at Yale: The pancreas! I cried. I dont understand the pancreas!

In a chapter entitled We Have a Body, Dr. Koven describes an experience with a patient with terminal ovarian cancer on a rotation at the old Baltimore City Hospital. Youll have to read the book, but Dr. Kovens compassion and the art of medicine come to mind as she looked into the patients social history (a good thing for any doctor to do to understand more about their patient as a person) and what she did to spend time at the bedside.

Dr. Kovens book has much more, and every medical student and doctor should read it. It recounts a history important for anyone interested in social justice in the medical field as well as addressing sexism in medicine.

She reflects on her first experience with death. It seems preposterous to me now, as a mother and as a doctor, that any responsible adult thought it was a good idea for our AP biology class to take a field trip to the Medical Examiners Office of the City of New York to witness the autopsy of a nursing student from the Bronx whod been stabbed to death the night before by her boyfriend.

She says this, among other things about her experience in anatomy. At the end of the course there was no memorial service, there were no candles, no songs, and no prayers of gratitude, as there often are in medical schools today, to honor the people our bodies had once been.

Dr. Koven also addresses racism drawn from her experiences at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Taussig pointed to the blood bank and stated aloud what everyone knew: that the blood of Black people and the blood of white people were stored separately there. She then asked Henry (one of Dr. Kovens mentors who told her the story): Doesnt this strike you as very wrong?

Pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig invented the blue baby operation known as the Blalock-Taussig, shunt and which should really be called the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt in recognition of Blalocks lab technician, a black man named Vivien Thomas, the grandson of a slave, who played a key role in perfecting the procedure.

Reading further about Dr. Kovens experiences and reflections, I thought she would have made an exceptionally great oncologist incorporating extensive clinical expertise and perhaps her own special impact on the field of palliative care to help patients. Who knows, maybe there would have even been a Kovens syndrome.

In a chapter about Lineage, Dr. Koven says My true lineage, I now think, included Blackwell and Haseltinenot to mention Oprah, and my motherat least as much as Osler. The House of God comes up a few times, along with a novel called Woman Doctor written by Dr. Florence Haseltine with English professor Yvonne Yaw, at around the same time as Samuel Shems bestseller.

Unlike The House of God, though, no ones heard of Woman Doctor. Its out of print. My copy has a tacky 70s cover featuring a grainy photograph of a glamorous, dark-eyed, long-lashed woman in full surgical garb who looks nothing like Dr. Haseltine as she appears in her author photo.

I was able to find a copy of Woman Doctor that I bought on Amazon, $6.55 Hardcover (for some reason, the paperback is listed from $38.50 and Mass Market Paperback $902.81).

Dr. Kovens book has much more, and every medical student and doctor should read it. It recounts a history important for anyone interested in social justice in the medical field as well as addressing sexism in medicine. It is a classic by a masterful author who is a complex individual with very important messages and legacy. Her Letter to a Young Female Physician book is already a best seller.

On a personal note, by 1989, when Dr. Koven was my chief resident, she had encyclopedic knowledge of medicine, the poise and equanimity that the Osler Marines aspire to and never appeared as an imposter per personal observations.

It is hard to know why we remember certain things, but I do recall a scene one morning on our Osler rounds where our team had an admission on Halstead 5, the famous step-down cardiology floor at Johns Hopkins.

As we were outside a patients room discussing the case, the patients heart stopped and they needed immediate resuscitation. Dr. Koven, chief resident and medical attending of record, very calmly picked up the paddles, and then passed them on to another team member to perform the electrical cardioversion. This was when she was fairly late in her pregnancy but functioning very admirably as our leader. As she handed the paddles off she had a smile or more of a smirk that all who know her would recognize, and then she said perhaps someone else should do this.

This was an intense time during residency training in an era without work-hour rules, or balance between learning and service. There were other memories and even conflicts, mostly suppressed but not all forgotten.

My colleague, John Marshall, who leads the Division of Hematology-Oncology, is a leader in our field, articulate, and well-known for his sense of humor. He directs the Otto Ruesch Center for the Cure of GI Cancer along with his wife Liza, who is a survivor of breast cancer. In this book, published in 2021, John and Liza share personal storiesand we can be grateful they shared them.

John begins the first part of the book entitled Hail to the Queen (referring to breast cancer as the queen of all cancers) by giving his perspective early in his career I quickly came to see the ubiquitous pink ribbons as the enemy, a symbol of unfair focus in our field. Breast cancer comes first, and the rest of us get the leftoversI preached my gospel of resentment and jealousy of breast cancer to anyone who would listen.

He would say things in lectures such as what color is the colon cancer ribbon? Come on, you in front? Brown? God, I wish it were a brown ribbon (and the comments went downhill from there, not to be repeated here).

He reminds the readers about how the Department of Defense came to fund breast cancer research, and how politically incorrect it would be to cut it even though it doesnt kill most of those in the military. He felt an injustice towards the high mortality of some of the many patients he saw, including young people, with advanced GI cancers.

He says other funny things, like, hematologists are full of themselves, a bit like peacocks or GI oncologists are the Gryffindors of the cancer world. We are by far the best humans God ever created His resentment was not helped when Georgetown recruited Marc Lippman as Cancer Center Director, and where breast cancer ruled.

Some chapters are written by John, and others by Liza. Liza found out she had breast cancer when a colleague of Johns walked into his office to share results of Lizas breast tissue pathology that showed cancer cells in the lymph system, and Liza was on the phone speaking with him.

This was no joke. Lizas previous experience with a close friend Holly in her mid-40s had shown the aggressiveness and deadliness of breast cancer a few years earlier. For Liza, John intervened to help her get scans quickly and even chipped in by showing up to a school activity so she could get away.

John had a difficult time in his teenage years with his mothers cancer and familys financial downturn. As he excelled in school, he would often hear from his dad, If a boy like you doesnt succeed, who will?

He recounts his spiritual life as a Baptist, and how with singing in the choir and other public speaking opportunities, he discovered his love of an audience and entertaining others. He lost his mom from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma before she was 40, when he was 13.

His father remarried, he went to boarding school and then to Duke University. Without much structure, he faced a low point in his life until he met Liza, then went to med school while she went to law school.

Liza recounts the testing she had with scans and how she and John handled telling their family, especially their children and other friends about the breast cancer diagnosis. Liza had to deal with hearing the diagnosis of triple negative breast cancer, and that while cancer was seen in the lymphatic system in a core needle biopsy, the doctors didnt know where the primary tumor was and couldnt see it on her scans.

Liza would hear about the need for mastectomy surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, prosthetic breast, and the prospects of lymphedema. There were many options that were overwhelming, and some options that werent discussed with Liza that she wished were discussed. The existing friendships made the doctor-patient relationships more complicated. John recounts what he observed, knew, wished he could say but didnt, how he remembers telling Liza, and his transition from physician to caregiver for Liza.

He says other funny things, like, hematologists are full of themselves, a bit like peacocks or GI oncologists are the Gryffindors of the cancer world. We are by far the best humans God ever created

John lectures about cancer and how it develops. He included a lecture from 2010 where he spoke about cancer vaccines as an area of interest, including combining vaccines and how NIH grant reviewers rejected his grant three times suggesting nothing would come of the research. In his lecture he said Our microbiome is part of usit might actually be the location of our souls. Profound statement, and then he suggested in 2010 that if NCI wouldnt fund vaccine research, they certainly wouldnt fund research on poop. He discusses diet and cancer and the why me question in his lecture.

It is interesting to read what John says: Wherever two or more are gathered, I cannot keep my mouth shut. If an idea pops into my head, I express it. I have gotten better at not stepping in when others are talking, but Im not perfect even with significant effort.

Here, he was referring to experiences with Lizas doctors. For those of us who know and work with John in national oncology activities, he is actually a great leader and expert moderator of discussion; one of the best Ive seen (and not mansplaining despite what he says).

He says it is easier for him to make decisions about whats best for him than whats best for someone else. Maybe, although it is easier to be objective when trying to help others. In academia, Ive found it much easier to help others with their grants than to help myself.

For medical decisions, it can be very difficult in the middle of the storm to know whats best, and the input of others can be incredibly helpful. At the time Liza needed to make her decisions in 2006, less was known about triple negative breast cancer, and while a clinical trial of neoadjuvant therapy (chemotherapy before surgery, now standard of care for her case) was available, there was concern about waitingand so she went ahead with surgery because surgery would happen either way. Within the chapters, both John and Liza discuss issues of intimacy and sexuality in the setting of mastectomy and breast cancer.

Liza recounts her surgery, more revelations about her diagnosis, and the experience of being at a teaching hospital, her admiration of George Clooney, more about the post-op period and their life together.

John writes about some of what happens to people in real life as cancer gets diagnosed at inopportune moments. He goes into oncology healthcare delivery, successes as a physician, realities and disappointments in medicine, competitiveness and the business of medicine, among other topics.

John declined the special invitation to attend the breast tumor board when Lizas case was being discussed. He spoke about how he started looking at patients differently when he sees them in the hospital every day, and how the experiences have affected how he does his job.

Liza describes learning about the pathology from her surgery, what others knew it meant, and complicated options in clinical trials for what would happen next. She goes into how and why John, who certainly knew much more, didnt necessarily say much beyond answering all her questions.

John recounts his struggles and reactions to Lizas illness as he became caregiver. For reasons he couldnt explain, he found himself not looking into details of the SWOG trial, the scans and pathology reports, asking a lot of questions, or attending lectures on TNBC even if pizza was served!

John presented a lecture about finding value in cancer care, where he discussed healthcare economics and drug company profits from U.S. taxpayer funded research. He discussed red cell growth factors that he administered to Liza and information from trials that showed adverse outcomes.

He goes into dilemmas of being in the middle of an illness where you want to do everything no matter the cost, and value in healthcare, where ultimately, we as a society all pay the bills. The book goes into issues important for patients with breast cancer and their caregivers. The impact of a cancer diagnosis, especially one with a poor prognosis, and how it affects a family are discussed. Giving a shot of Neulasta even for an experienced physician is complicated if you dont let it warm to room temperature, dont give the shot slowly, and dont read the instructions.

One chapter I particularly appreciated was one John wrote about his perspective on funerals as an oncologist, and how he handles communications with family and caregivers after the death of a patient.

He tells a story at Hollys funeral, where an elderly U.S. senator passed out (how he dealt with it, and how the balance of power in the U.S. Senate was changed for a moment) and recounts his first experience with a cancer funeral at the age of 13 when his mother died.

He speaks about how he personally handles the loss when a patient dies. John writes about how oncologists maintain hope, spin their message, think about quality of life, statistics, and clinical trials. He speaks about his interactions with colleagues after going public. He goes into a cryptic message from Marc Lipmann (who had left Georgetown for the University of Michigan at that time) your wife needs a platinum, Marc, and other discourse with Neil Love.

This is followed by a chapter entitled Platinum, but not the pretty kind. Liza thinks Marc Lippmans message may have saved her life. There is more so take time to read, enjoy, and learn from this book.

I was excited to see this book about the CRISPR revolution written by Kevin Davies. I first heard of Kevin Davies in 1992 during my postdoctoral fellowship, as he was the founding editor of a new journal called Nature Genetics.

I will always be grateful to Kevin and that journal for accepting my first paper from the Vogelstein lab on defining the DNA-binding consensus sequence for the tumor suppressor protein p53. Nature Genetics published it on page 45 of that first issue, after Nature rejected it, and it has stood the test of time.

The book begins by describing Kevins arrival to Hong Kong on Monday November 18, 2018, to attend a conference on CRISPR when news broke on Twitter that babies genetically altered by CRISPR might have already been born#CRISPRbabies was trending, and news of YouTube videos made by 34 year old Chinese Scientist He Jiankiu described what he had done and that two beautiful little Chinese girls, named Lulu and Nana, came crying into this world a few weeks ago.

Kevin had a front row seat to He Jiankius presentation and questioning at the conference that was seen by many around the world. Unlike what someone said on social media that Jiankiu was being inappropriately celebrated, Kevin felt we were watching a dead man walking.

Read the original post:
Books that mattered to me this year - The Cancer Letter

The Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), NMU Chapter, is taking a unique approach to promoting freedom of speech on college campuses.

As part of its effort to engage more students in freely sharing and accepting opinions, the group plans to roll a giant beach ball around campus and students will be able to write anything they want on it. This free speech ball will not be the first of its kind as YAL chapters at Duke University last week and and Lock Haven University in March have conducted similar events on their campuses.

Even though not all forms of speech are favorable to hear by disadvantaged groups or campus administration, student members of YAL believe that by generating more outspokenness, regardless of sensitive language, students will gain more from their college experience, Jeremy Donohue, president of YAL said.

There might be a safe space in school where inflammatory statements or possibly offensive remarks arent tolerated but thats not how the real world is, Donohue said. We think it actually helps the students if they have to face offensive and inflammatory differences in opinion.

The free speech ball event is expected to be held on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 and will start at or near the buildings of Jamrich and the LRC, according to Donohue.

We think that it prepares students better to go into the world having to deal with differences in opinion as opposed to shielding them from differences in opinion, Donohue said.

Amidst the controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election in regards to speech policy on college campuses, organizations like YAL are encouraging fellow students to limitlessly exercise their right to free speech. After incidences like the one at the University of IllinoisChicago where nearly 50,000 people signed a petition that didnt allow Trump to speak on their campus, issues with free speech zones on universities have become more prevalent.

Having a serious notion but also bringing humor to ease the tension, I feel thats kind of a huge thing that people are forgetting about, Mac Phelan, vice president of YAL, said in regards to the material of free speech that is permitted on campuses.

The YAL organization will also host a screening of the movie titled Can We Take a Joke? in correlation with its promotion of free speech. This 2015 documentary explores the very thin line between comedy and outrage and will be held at 7:30 p.m. on April 13 in 1318 Jamrich. The movie also touches on issues of hypersensitivity and political correctness in higher education.

Donohue said the idea for the large beach ball is to collect unpopular opinions and promote the idea of voicing ideas that arent politically correct. He also said the efforts by YAL are a part of a nationwide push going across 200 different college campuses for free speech.

This is just a reaction to the rise of politically correct safe-space culture on college campuses, he said.

Free-speech zones, formerly known as buffer zones, are areas that are designated for public speakers to talk void of protesters and rebuttal. These free speech zones have become even more common than they were prior to the 2016 election.

Donohue also said there are concerns and skepticism about the kinds of speech that will be allowed to go on the ball by many staff and students who already know about the event.

Were hoping its going to go pretty smoothly but were anticipating some backlash, said Donohue. We can definitely see students coming out, being against it, but were mostly fearing the administration stepping in and saying, this is too much.

The YAL organization has more than 600 chapter locations and 204,000 youth activists nationwide. The group first came to NMU in the spring of 2015 and the chapter is now made up of 12-15 members who meet regularly Wednesday nights on the first floor in the Learning Resource Center. Any student is free to stop in on one of the meetings regardless of their political affiliation, Donohue said.

Go here to see the original:
Politically-incorrect beach ball coming to campus The North Wind - North Wind Online