Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is one of the top offenders in the United States when it comes to irreversible sex change procedures for children, according to a digital campaign launching Tuesday. The hospital, known as “CHOP,” boasts that it is the first United States hospital devoted exclusively to the care of children. It has programs devoted to helping children explore and attempt to change their gender — and according to the advocacy group Do No Harm, the hospital is “leading the nation” in offering “life-altering sex related interventions for minors.” Do No Harm is targeting CHOP with a new digital campaign that will make Philadelphia parents aware of the hospital’s devotion to gender ideology. The campaign also includes a video that discusses how much money CHOP has made from child transgender interventions and urges the hospital itself to “stop the harm.” “Our campaign shines a light on CHOP and Admiral Levine’s collusion that helped shape Pennsylvania into one of the nation’s most prolific promoters of sex change treatments for children,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the chairman of Do No Harm, told The Daily Wire. “By embracing experimental and irreversible sex changes for minors, CHOP has violated its primary duty to do no harm and to provide the highest medical care.” “We hope to provide patients and families with the resources they need to learn the truth about CHOP’s politicization of medicine enabled by powerful ideologues like Admiral Levine and former Governor Tom Wolf,” he added. The video notes that in 2008, CHOP started a progressive health policy think tank that ultimately became the CHOP Gender Clinic, and in 2015, former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf appointed a man who identifies as a woman, now Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine, as the general physician for Pennsylvania. “Together, Wolf and Levine engaged activists across the state, empowering CHOP to continue its self-proclaimed gender care for minors, even visiting schools for weekly referrals,” the video warns. “The reality? Children were prescribed puberty blockers and underwent sex change surgeries. CHOP’s actions have since altered hundreds of children’s and family lives forever.” It continues: “CHOP went so far as to train their staff to hide information about children’s perceived gender identity and coerce parents into supporting these irreversible sex changes while Levine was successful in securing millions in taxpayer dollars to cover the costs.” According to Do No Harm’s data, CHOP has written 768 prescriptions for children “undergoing sex-related interventions,” administered hormones and puberty blockers to 117 patients,  and performed sex-change surgeries on five minors, forever altering these children’s bodies and lives. The hospital has submitted $230,784 in total submitted charges. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+ CHOP is not the only hospital in Pennsylvania that is focused on these types of interventions for children. Do No Harm’s database notes that Penn State Children’s Hospital has had 10 minor sex change surgery patients, and the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh has had four. Throughout the state, many more patients are accessing so-called “gender-affirming care.” According to Do No Harm, the state has had 814 total sex change patients, and over $5 million in total submitted charges. CHOP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

'No current law'

'Our key finding: Hispanics have the same concerns as everyone else'

'This is absurd'

'Plagued by waste and inefficiency'

'blood on his hands'

'Donald Trump would have a very strong argument'

And the Jets! ... well ... remain the Jets

Featured Essays station eleven What Would a Station Eleven TV Universe Look Like? What The Leftovers and Watchmen can teach us about adapting Emily St. John Mandel’s books for television By Natalie Zutter | Published on November 19, 2024 Screenshot: Max Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Max Station Eleven, HBO’s 2021 adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, is a near-perfect singular season of television. I was so relieved when it dodged the trap of extending a limited series into an unnecessary sequel, even though creator Patrick Somerville’s post-apocalyptic world was so richly realized that he and the writers could certainly have envisioned new adventures for Kirsten Raymonde and the Traveling Symphony after they stepped back onto the Wheel at the end of those ten episodes. While Mandel had initially decided against consulting on Station Eleven, she revealed in a 2022 interview with The New Yorker that she would be collaborating with Somerville on adapting her subsequent two novels. With the book having marked its tenth anniversary this year, Mandel gave a new interview to Slate about how each novel feels like a time capsule; she candidly admits how she might have written each differently today. That, combined with tweets between Mandel and Somerville when the adaptation news was announced, gives a general sense of how these three seemingly incongruous genres—post-apocalypse, literary crime fiction, time travel sci-fi—could fit together. The answer, or at least a starting point? Parallel universes. The ESJM Extended Universe First, the books themselves. Station Eleven was published in 2014 and obviously took on new significance in 2020 during the start of the covid-19 pandemic, during which time the TV adaptation was already in production. That same year saw the publication of The Glass Hotel, which despite the extra anticipation of a sequel was instead likened to her earlier crime thrillers, centering on investor Jonathan Alkaitis’ Ponzi scheme and its aftershocks. However, it quickly became clear when reading that it was actually an alternate universe, however subtle, to Station Eleven. Most noticeable was an offhand mention of the dreaded Georgia Flu being contained (instead of the 99% mortality rate in the other world), plus the inclusion or expansion of characters Miranda Carroll and Leon Prevant, even if the novel’s central characters (Alkaitis and his wife Vincent) were all new to readers. Sea of Tranquility followed in 2022, clearly broadcasting its connections; Mandel’s most explicitly sci-fi novel, it deals in time travel up and down the timestream of The Glass Hotel, as well as raising questions about whether we live in a simulation—as the New Yorker profile pointed out, a fun thought experiment for Mandel in not having to completely commit to a certain outcome. “The books were in parallel universes,” Mandel told a reader via Twitter in 2022. “But if we get to do screen adaptations, they’ll all be in the Station Eleven universe.” To understand what that could mean, we must examine a sort of television narrative family tree whose limbs stretch from 2014 to 2023. The Lindelof/Somerville TV Universe Damon Lindelof and Patrick Somerville worked together on The Leftovers, then branched off—Lindelof to adapt Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and later introduce us to the divinely bonkers reality of Mrs. Davis, Somerville to adapt Station Eleven. Three of these four shows are perfect miniseries if you’re examining the generational fallout of a superhero-turned-supervillain forcibly attaining world peace via worldwide trauma, or if you’re pondering whether humans innately possess goodness or if they’ll only love thy neighbor via the gamification of an app. However, if you’re going to extend the story and world of Station Eleven in multiple directions, your definitive blueprint is The Leftovers, in which two percent of the world’s population simply disappears, and the rest of us are irrevocably changed by that absence. So, consider this your spoiler warning for The Leftovers, Watchmen, and Mrs. Davis. First things first, the question of balancing not only parallel universes, but those that mirror one another. Alternate Universes and Inverse Realities Whereas The Glass Hotel contained mostly subtle nods to the world of Station Eleven, with characters like Miranda’s boss Leon Prevant (Chike Johnson) playing a more prominent role—not to mention Miranda herself (Danielle Deadwyler) elevated to CEO!—the TV version would likely conjure up the AU versions of many of Station Eleven‘s beloved characters. Imagine Sarah a.k.a. The Conductor (Lori Petty) and Gil (David Cross) in an artistically unfulfilling marriage grasping for the collaboration that will bring them back together. Or Jeevan (Himesh Patel) returning to the book’s source material by exploring an aimless career as a paparazzo—which, ironically, lines up with the actor’s current role on the IP satire The Franchise. There he could cross paths with a young adult Kirsten (which would match with a now-deleted tweet from Somerville about “Matilda [actress Lawler] all grown up”), who might go the child star route and eventually flame out if she gets caught in all the Hollywood bullshit instead of the post-apocalyptic purity of performance granted by the Traveling Symphony. And of course, we’d want to see Mackenzie Davis back as adult Kirsten, but a radically different version of the knife-wielding artist we met in Year 20. Somerville adding “Tyler too” also implies that we could see more of Arthur’s son (Daniel Zovatto), though one wonders if he’ll manage to create a cult even without the world ending (probably). One plot thread I’m pretty sure we’d get to see is Dr. Terry a.k.a. St. Deborah (Tara Nicodemo) again, but this time she wouldn’t be delivering miracle babies on the Winter Solstice in Year Zero, she’d be losing her medical license after participating in Alkaitis’ Ponzi scheme. In Station Eleven, not being at the hospital saved her from getting infected with the Flu; in The Glass Hotel, what she would be losing is post-apocalyptic sainthood. Screenshot: Max But what I’m most excited to see is how they would handle the Flu only killing one percent of the population, in an inverse to the original canon. The Leftovers series finale “The Book of Nora” ends with exactly this, as Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) climbs into an experimental device meant to transport her to wherever her husband and children vanished on the day of the Sudden Departure. What she discovers is harrowing: “Over here, we lost some of them; but over there, they lost all of us.” Ninety-eight percent of the world disappeared in that other reality, yet seven years later the survivors had rebuilt as well as they could; ironically, they had emotionally moved on better than the world that lost two percent, perhaps because a loss of such magnitude demanded nothing less. The Traveling Symphony’s mantra, quoting Star Trek: Survival is insufficient. The creative decision to have Nora tell the entire story to former love Kevin (Justin Theroux), instead of showing any of her incredible journey, leaves it up to the viewers to believe her or not. As the character who arguably suffered the worst from the Sudden Departure—and who was humbled to see her family move on beyond her loss, still having each other—hers is a voice we trust for the whole series, so it makes sense that we extend that trust to the series’ final moments. However, that doesn’t seem likely to be the case with The Glass Hotel; you can’t have an entire season-long monologue, not even from someone like Miranda who we’ve grown to love, or at least a version of her. In order to fully inhabit this reality where humanity dodged a pandemic bullet, we have to see every granular detail of the worldbuilding, and clock every minute (and massive) difference. Meta Worldbuilding Watchmen retells its own history through artifacts. Adrian Veidt a.k.a. Ozymandias’ (Jeremy Irons) little vanity play “The Watchmaker’s Son” says as much about the history and impact of Dr. Manhattan as does the glowing blue dildo that Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) totes around. The Tulsa police force’s masks and costumes are a response to the White Night massacre by the Seventh Kavalry, but it’s not until Angela Abar a.k.a. Sister Night (Regina King) ingests the Nostalgia pills that she truly understands the generations of trauma wrought upon Tulsa. Talk about time capsules! Screenshot: Max Somerville took a similar approach with depicting how Station Eleven, Miranda Carroll’s self-published graphic novel, becomes a foundational text for young Kirsten and Tyler in the early years of rebuilding and forging a new way forward. Even more fascinating was that they clearly had competing headcanons about what different characters and plotlines meant, with him creating his Undersea cult around it and her applying it to her all-or-nothing approach to family or foes on the Wheel. And obviously there’s the Museum of Civilization, which Clark Thompson (David Wilmot) fills with so much obsolete technology and cultural markers that he doesn’t recognize that he becomes one of the artifacts himself. But neither of these archives will exist in The Glass Hotel. Do the showrunners highlight their absence, or do they find new objects and spaces to highlight? What we do already have in the book source material are the home videos made by Paul Smith, who composes music to turn them into multimedia works while he and half-sister Vincent work at the eponymous glass hotel in the fictional Canadian village of Caiette. Vincent, who features prominently in them, does not appreciate the attention, especially after she marries Jonathan Alkaitis and then is part of his Ponzi scheme downfall. So it seems a sure bet that the TV series would feature these videos—especially because one of those videos captures a moment of time travel in Sea of Tranquility. In Vincent’s childhood video, a forest scene briefly transforms into what appears to be a train station, with the familiar sound of a violin and the decidedly unfamiliar sound of some futuristic transportation. This is bizarre enough on its own, but especially baffling that three people experience the same moment in 1912, 2020, and 2203. Further, Sea of Tranquility looks to exist in a post-covid world, as the time traveler accidentally makes a mention of a coming pandemic to a partygoer in January 2020; perhaps that means we’ll see masking culture and other covid signifiers woven into society as it jumps forward through the centuries, especially since the 23nd-century setting of that novel has a lunar colony dealing with its own pandemic.  I foresee a lot of familiar motifs anchoring the two adaptations—lots of repetition and inversion. After all, everything is cyclical. Dream Casting the Future There were truly no small parts on Station Eleven, with guest actors like David Cross making an impact even in just one episode or two, and a mix of established names and unknowns in the core ensemble. I anticipate similar casting choices for the new characters, but here are some general vibes based on my own reading. Screenshot: Prime Video Vincent Alkaitis (née Smith) being described as chameleon-like calls for someone like Maya Erskine, who demonstrated in Mr. & Mrs. Smith her ability to play someone with the skills to melt into the role of anonymous newlywed and killer spy while still falling prey to something as tedious as feelings. Or Ali Ahn, whose extremely competent and snarky CIA agent on The Diplomat nonetheless struggles to compartmentalize her love life and her work life, both equally dangerous. I’m feeling Dean Norris (Breaking Bad) as Ponzi-scheming Jonathan Alkaitis, as he could play heartless equally as well as the vulnerability of experiencing his “counter-lives” and regret in prison. As for Vincent’s half-brother Paul, I’m split on a number of male actors, from Lukas Gage to Jacob Tremblay to Alex Wolff. Looking to the future, Lupin star Omar Sy could shoulder time traveler Gaspery-Jacques Roberts’ mindfuck-y assignment in Sea of Tranquility with flair and tragic flaw. And with lunar colony author Olive Llewellyn being a stand-in for Emily St. John Mandel, my mind goes to Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder or Severance’s Britt Lower, both of whom could deliver the bemused humor of this author witnessing life imitate art while on book tour—both on the Moon and Earth—for her pandemic novel. Time Travel and Simulation Hypothesis As Gaspery-Jacques investigates the strange spaceport moment experienced by strangers 300 years apart, one of his developing theories is that perhaps it’s a glitch in the system—that perhaps we are living in a simulation, one that is falling apart. It’s a delightful narrative curveball after following Mandel to the end of the world (in macro) and the end of the world (in micro) for two books; in the New Yorker profile she cackles when the subject is brought up, but then later simply says, “I like to experiment.” So let her experiment! I want to see Sea of Tranquility take this concept way further than Mrs. Davis’ Holy Grail sneaker commercial-as-beacon, far beyond the revelation that the Mrs. Davis algorithm was originally invented as a Buffalo Wild Wings app. Let’s lean into the absurd, bleak humor of living in endlessly unprecedented times, not to mention the desperate wish that maybe it’s all a dream, or at least that these tragedies and tribulations are all at someone else’s hands, that none of it may matter at all. Except of course it matters, because we keep making art. Because there is one foundational text in Sea of Tranquility, and that is Marienbad. The Play’s the Thing One of the points from Somerville’s initial tweet (since deleted, alas) that stuck with me was the notion of a Station Eleven feature-length TV special, presenting the comic’s entire plot arc as a legit adaptation instead of watching the characters interpret various key scenes. My initial reaction is resistance, if only because those were some of my very favorite moments in the series; what makes Kirsten’s play with Jeevan and Frank so compelling is how they scrounge their costumes from random apartment trash, how their self-quarantining in the apartment mimics the undersea station, how they come up with innovative solutions for the floating fish and fake blood. Screenshot: Max But a way to split that difference could be to do the “proper” adaptation with Marienbad, Olive Llewellyn’s pandemic novel from Sea of Tranquility, which is clearly a fictionalized version of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven. The thing is, we don’t actually know much about the content of the book itself, just how it affected its readers and how it turns Olive into a reluctant prophet even if she’s just writing about events that have come before and that will come after. We don’t even know what the title means! Though this review in The Brooklyn Rail draws a keen line to the 1961 French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad, with its nonlinear storytelling between two people who either have or have not met before this moment. In fact, Mandel joked via tweet about delivering her pitch for the plot and lead characters of Marienbad, which means that the first details we learn probably won’t be until we watch Sea of Tranquility—which feels like just the way it’s meant to happen.[end-mark] The post What Would a <i>Station Eleven</i> TV Universe Look Like? appeared first on Reactor.

America is outgrowing the Democratic Party. That’s not a partisan claim; it’s demographic reality. Blue states are shedding population and will have less representation in Congress and fewer votes in the Electoral College after the next census. Two nonpartisan nonprofits, the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Redistricting Project, crunched the numbers last year and came to conclusions that ought to shock Democrats into changing the way they govern places like California and New York. States that voted for Kamala Harris this year are set to lose 12 seats in the House of Representatives, and an equal number of presidential electors, after 2030, according to the two groups’ extrapolations from Census Bureau data. California is on track to lose four congressmen and electoral votes. New York will lose three, Illinois two, while Oregon, Minnesota and Rhode Island are each going to be down one. Solidly Republican states will get most of the gains, with Texas picking up four congressional seats and electoral votes, Florida acquiring three, and Idaho, Utah and Tennessee each adding one. This year’s battleground states—all of which Donald Trump won—on balance come out slightly ahead of where they are now in the post-2030 projections: Arizona and North Carolina will be up one congressman and electoral vote, and Pennsylvania down one. In an era when control of Congress depends on razor-thin and sometimes single-digit margins, the net loss of 12 seats from reliably Democratic states, and Republican states’ gains, will give the GOP an edge in the House, even if redistricting removes some red congressional seats in blue states and adds some blue seats in red states. At the presidential level, the effect is like flipping a midsize deep-blue state to the GOP: the 12 Electoral College votes Democratic states are losing equal the Electoral College representation of Washington state today. These are much more dramatic shifts than the 2020 Census brought about; its net result was only a slight gain for Republican states. Why does 2030 look so much worse for Democrats? Governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul (and Andrew Cuomo before her) bear the blame. This decade began with blue states under strict COVID lockdowns, while Republican strongholds like Those big GOP states were already easier places to start a family or business, and they handled the COVID crisis better, coming out of it with stronger economies and presenting a more attractive picture to Americans looking to migrate within the country. Newsom, Hochul and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker simply aren’t competitive with Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Texas’ Greg Abbott when it comes to making their states desirable destinations for ordinary homebuyers or employers in search of a business-friendly environment. Regulatory red tape and vertiginous housing costs are driving middle-class Americans out of the biggest blue states. If anything, the forecast for 2030 is an early warning: Unless Democrats get the cost of living under control, their biggest states will see their population plunge in the next 25 years. Demographers at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy estimate New York State could lose 2 million people, 13% of the present headcount, by 2050. “Conservative estimates suggest a population decrease of 1 million by 2050, but we think an even greater decline is more likely,” Jan Vink, lead analyst of Brooks School’s Program on Applied Demographics, told the Cornell Chronicle. High rates of foreign immigration to blue states, which were generous about offering public benefits to newcomers, kept population numbers up even as birth rates fell and the sting of bad policies grew sharper. But by voting for Trump, Americans also voted for less immigration, and now California, Illinois and New York will have to entice residents from other states to relocate if these big blues hope to hold on to their national political clout. In the long run, governors and state governments are the key to Congress and the White House. It’s not only Trump who defeated Harris this month—GOP governors have been beating their Democratic counterparts for years and turning the country red, slowly then quickly. The 2028 presidential election will be the last one fought on the present electoral map. But the elections of the 2030s are already taking shape, and several governors who aspire to the party’s nomination in ’28, such as Newsom, are only making the next decade’s fights for the House and White House much harder for Democrats to win. As the sun sets on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it’s premature for Democrats to think about the next presidential election until they rethink the kind of governors they elect in the largest, yet shrinking, blue states. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Why Democrats Are Losing Tomorrow’s Elections Today appeared first on The Daily Signal.