Infant Esoterica:

CONSENSUAL BIRTH PLAN: We did homebirths for both. No meds, no interventions. They went great, wouldn't have changed a thing. Hospital ten minutes away in case we needed it. The important factor is that we CHOSE how we'd give birth. It was fully consensual.

@73inlancs @janethooton_ @ErinInTheMorn @fifi_EY 1/ The 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 government decided pediatric gender care in England would be a monopoly contract (a Labour minister, in 2008), despite all other NHS patients officially being entitled to a choice of providers, & second opinions on diagnoses & treatment, & gave it to GIDS, which has…

@janethooton_ @ErinInTheMorn @fifi_EY 2/…always advocated that trans minors & their families must have no alternative source of care, & subsequent Tory ministers have personally put their signature on renewals of it, and even personally rejected proposals for improvement that have been put forward by NHS England…

@janethooton_ @ErinInTheMorn @fifi_EY 3/…as a result of wider & public consultation. They & their civil servants listen only to GIDS on trans minors - it was GIDS advised against <18s being allowed #GenderRecognition in 2004, & since, on the basis that no one under 18 can be certain of their gender identity, just…

@janethooton_ @ErinInTheMorn @fifi_EY 4/…as many other staff at their trust wrote⬇️ to the press in 2002 (when the first instigator of this case, psychoanalyst Susan Evans was on staff too) that no trans people should be allowed that recognition but needed

@janethooton_ @ErinInTheMorn @fifi_EY 5/…to "cure" us instead. Yet GIDS proved incapable of defending its super-conservative protocol in court - no doubt because GIDS has always expected challenges to be from patients seeking care more like that elsewhere, arrogantly ignoring that services in countries where the…

1/23 We haven't had a lot to celebrate during this pandemic. But achieving the milestone of offering vaccine to the over 70s, health and care workers and the most clinically vulnerable just before target date is a huge cause for celebration, given the scale of the achievement.

2/23 When Margaret Keenan got her first jab in Coventry on December 8th last year, who’d have thought that, by Valentine’s Day, we’d have vaccinated over fourteen million people across the UK in just ten short weeks? Amazing, extraordinary and truly, really, world class!

3/23 I’ve been struck by how much joy and relief has been brought to those doing the vaccinations and those receiving them. A GP told me yesterday that nothing had given him greater pleasure in his long career. And that the patient's relief was sometimes overwhelming.

4/23 It's vital to recognise the extraordinary contribution of the staff and volunteers who have made this happen. One of my close family had their jab yesterday and was in awe of the volunteer standing outside in the freezing cold for a four hour shift meeting and greeting.

5/23 What I wanted to share in this thread was the slightly untold story of some of the extraordinary challenges the NHS has had to overcome to deliver this target. Requiring superhuman effort from NHS leaders and staff, way beyond the call of duty. Five challenges set out below.

Fun fact: the standard advice for if a dog, cat, or human bites your hand, is to feed the bite. Push your hand further into their mouth, forcing the jaw open.

Nurses, EMTs, veterinarians, etc are taught to respond this

The advice for a human biting you is to jam your hand or arm deeper into their mouth, and rub the spot under their nose back and forth.

If you attempt to remove your hand, or forearm, the teeth do what they're supposed to and gouge out a chunk.

This vicious wolf attack illustrates proper technique.

So: every EMT and nurse who gets bitten by a human, is trained to jam their hand or forearm deeper into the mouth, feeding the bite so the jaw widens enough to remove the limb

Also, every redneck learns this along with the advice of "never run from an angry dog"

A staple of anti-lockdown conspiracism in yoga/wellness is that public health measures are oppressive, authoritarian, and stifling what it means to be human. Masks suppress identity and speech. Vaccines assault the sovereign body. Influencers must rise up against tyranny! /1

Ironically, pandemic management in economies where yoga/wellness is lucrative has been a neoliberal, choose-your-own-adventure mess in which centre-right governments barter with public health to enact a patchwork of half-measures that punish the poor and marginalized. /2

The goal is not universal health rights, or protecting medical systems, or saving as many lives as possible. The goal is to return to business-as-usual, using public health as a pit stop on a productivity race off a cliff. The ice caps aren’t melting fast enough, I guess. /3

Right-leaning governments, like influencers, have assessed the COVID threat with the magical bias of limitless optimism. Then they work to normalize COVID casualties as a new cost of doing business. *This* is what alt-healthers and Qamoms call “socialist”, or “communist”. /4

Centre-right governments and wellness influencers share a goal: get back to the optimism of making productivity heroic and consumption virtuous, without any reflection on structural issues of injustice, or what universal health care funding and standards would look like. /5

Let’s talk about ORGANIC.

Robert Paarlberg’s new book on the food system is out today, and here’s an excerpt.

He’s not a fan of organic, and he makes some good points but misses others.

Here we go.

Organic's biggest shortcoming is that you need more land to grow the same amount of food.

The yield penalty happens in almost every crop, in almost every study.

The gap could narrow with more research/varieties, but it won’t go away.

This has big, bad climate implications.

The second issue I have with organic, which Paarlberg shares, is that its basic criterion is naturalness.

Natural doesn’t mean safe, or even safer. A farming standard based on it forces farmers to sometimes use more dangerous, less effective tools.

On human health, there’s scant evidence that pesticide residues on conventional produce are harmful to consumers (though it’s possible farmworkers could be at risk).

What I don’t want is for folks who can’t afford organic to worry about feeding their kids conventional produce.

On the plus side, Paarlberg acknowledges that the organic standard has some real advantages for animal welfare.

This is why I buy organic animal products.

Many in the organic world would like more regs ensuring animals have decent lives.