Tag: universities

Dutch Pro-Pedophile Academic Worked With Leading Transgender Medical Authority

Reduxx can reveal that a Dutch-American academic with a history of advocating for the normalization of adult-child sexual relationships has had a working relationship with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Theodore Sandfort’s research has been presented at the organization’s symposium as recently as 2016.

Sandfort, a Columbia-affiliated academic and LGBT activist, previously worked with self-declared pedophiles in the Netherlands, documenting adult men’s sexual abuse of boys as evidence to support his theory that adult-child relationships are “predominantly positive.”

Prior to relocating to Columbia University, Sandfort received a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was also the Chairman of the Interfaculty Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Utrecht University and Director of the Research Program “Diversity, Lifestyles and Health” at the Netherlands Institute of Social Sexological Research.

A faculty member at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, Sandfort has also been employed as a Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences, and worked at the university’s HIV Center alongside former WPATH president and Director of the institution’s Gender Identity Program, Walter Bockting. Like Sandfort, Bockting relocated to Columbia University from the Netherlands, having completed his doctoral degree in psychology from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

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Rutgers Professor Claims it is ‘Homophobic’ to Point Out How Hamas Brutalizes LGBTQ People

Maya Mikdashi, an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a lecturer in the Program for Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, participated in a recent discussion where she claims accurately describing Hamas’ brutalization of LGBTQ Palestinians should be labeled “homophobic violence.”

Mikdashi participated in a discussion titled “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle,” where she pushed back on the complaint that Palestinians and Hamas mistreat LGBTQ citizens.

She was joined by University of Illinois professor Nadine Naber.

Mikdashi’s claim? The mere assertion of Hamas’ brutality against LGBTQ people is itself a form of bigotry.

Fox News reports:

“So I’ve been at protests where I’m then told, ‘Don’t you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine.’ And we have to start naming this, actually, as homophobic,” Mikdashi said, as Naber vocally agreed. “You cannot rehearse violence to queer people and be like, ‘don’t you know … A, B, you would be…’ in really excruciating detail. I think we have to actually shift it.”

“It’s violence,” an audience member said.

“It’s homophobic. It’s violent,” Mikdashi agreed.

“Homophobic violence,” Naber affirmed.

“And we have to move it from thinking only in terms of pinkwashing to actually understanding pinkwashing as a form of homophobia,” Mikdashi said.

Naber further suggested that the concept was based on a “racist assumption” that Arab culture is “hyper-misogynist.”

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Harvard scrubs ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ film info from website

Harvard Law School scrubbed its website of an event page advertising a screening of the film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” amid concerns about endorsing violence.

Internet archives show the event page was removed sometime between Friday and Tuesday when The College Fix noticed it was gone. A post advertising the screening on Harvard’s Systemic Justice Project website also was removed prior to the event.

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a fictional story about climate activists who blow up a section of pipe in Texas, according to the film’s website.

The trailer opens with a man building a homemade explosive and ends with police arriving at the site of a pipeline that has been blown up. The characters call the bombing “justified” and “an act of self-defense.”

It is unclear if the Wednesday evening screening was canceled, rescheduled, or still took place.  The Fix contacted the HLS Film Society, communications office, and event moderator Professor Jon Hanson by email and phone Tuesday asking if the event had been canceled. None replied.

The Fix also reached out to the film society, Hanson, and the communications office March 28 with questions regarding the concerns about the film endorsing violence and university organizers’ stance on peaceful advocacy.

The film screening drew criticism online in recent weeks, including concerns that Harvard may be supporting violent activism. Critics include U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, an Illinois Republican, who said in a March 28 post on X that violent acts like those portrayed in the film are the reason he supports harsher penalties for eco-terrorism.

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Saturdays Only For “People Of Color” At UC Berkeley Farm; Report

A community farm run by the University of California at Berkeley only allows “people of color” to participate on Saturdays, according to a new federal complaint.

The report to the Department of Education accuses the Gill Tract Community Farm of racial discrimination in violation of Title VI.

Run by the public university, the farm is a research, education, and extension project “focused on ecological farming and food justice,” according to its website. It welcomes the public to harvest food if they “help with weeding, planting, and watering.”

However, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which filed the complaint last week, said the program discriminates against white people.

“Saturdays are exclusively BIPOC,” a farm manager wrote in a series of text messages cited in the complaint. “Exceptions have only been made for events that are BIPOC-centered and with plenty of advance notice and planning.”

The manager also advocated for “upholding boundaries around that safe and sacred space,” according to the complaint.

University spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the New York Post he was unaware of the allegations. After reviewing the complaint, Mogulof said the university takes such matters “extremely seriously” and will investigate the situation.

“The anonymous texts attached to the complaint have no specific information about time or place. And, as you can see, the Gill Tract’s website and calendar make no mention whatsoever of any program or activity of the sort described in the complaint,” Mogulof said.

“Having said that … I will contact the appropriate people on campus in an effort to determine what the facts are,” he told the Post.

The complaint asks the university to publish a statement reminding the public that everyone is welcome at the farm. It also asks the university to require training for individuals who run the farm.

“While the farm purports to be a welcoming place, the staff running the farm seem to think that racial segregation should make a comeback,” Mountain States Legal Foundation stated on its website.

“… But neither the Constitution nor federal law permit public institutions like UC Berkeley to engage in racial segregation.”

Other universities also have incorporated racial issues into their agricultural programs in recent years.

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Portland Community College Offers New Class on UFOs

Portland Community College is offering a niche new area of study this spring: UFOs.

“From Film to Real Life? UFOs, UAPs, Government and the Media” is an online class listed for non-credit in a category of study called “cultural exploration.” (Other offerings include low-cost Hawaii travel, foreign films and a “waterfalls and wine” tour of the Columbia River Gorge.)

The class is the brainchild of longtime local television news producer Brian Anslinger, the executive producer of KRCW’s lifestyle show Everyday Northwest. Previously, Anslinger worked as assistant news director and executive producer at KATU-TV.

Part of his mission with the class is to help students decode the confusing landscape of UAP sightings and research. (UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the updated name for UFOs, unidentified flying objects. Anslinger accepts both.)

“Having been looking at this subject for a long time and different aspects of it, I thought, gosh, if you see what’s happening on Capitol Hill or read headlines, I don’t know how you make sense of what’s actually going on,” Anslinger says.

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Duke University researchers help transgender woman, 50, breastfeed her GRANDCHILD using experimental hormone drugs so she could feel what it’s like to be a real mom – but critics call it ‘frankly disturbing’

A trans woman has been helped to breastfeed her grandchild, in what is thought to be a world first.

The unidentified 50-year-old was helped to express up to 30ml of milk at a time, after a four week course of hormone treatment.

Researchers from Duke University reported the woman ‘lactated for a total of two weeks’ and was able to feed the four-month-old baby.

The motivation for inducing lactation was to create a ‘bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children’.

She was moved to tears by the experience, which she said had the added benefit of affirming her female gender and making her breasts larger.

The patient later stopped the course of treatment ‘due to logistical barriers’.

According to the researchers, who published their study in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine, the patient had said they had ‘a last-minute idea’ about breastfeeding their grandchild.

‘The patient first expressed the unique desire to breastfeed her expected grandchild at an appointment with her endocrinologist in the spring of 2022,’ they wrote.

‘She disclosed that this was a last-minute idea that came to her very close to her daughter’s due date.

‘At five weeks after initiating treatment changes for lactation induction, she reverted to her previous medication regimen.

‘She states that she stopped pursuing her personal goal to breastfeed due to logistical barriers, such as the need to take care of her grandchild while her daughter was pumping.’

‘Her primary motivation for inducing lactation was to experience the bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children.

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Harvard University removes human skin binding from book

Harvard University has removed the binding of human skin from a 19th Century book kept in its library.

Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s.

In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin.

But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.

Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s.

He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes.

Harvard University explained its decision to remove the binding, saying: “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history.”

It added it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.

The library is also “conducting additional biographical and provenance research into the anonymous female patient”, the university said.

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Scientists Close To Controlling All Genetic Material On Earth

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have developed a new method to create human artificial chromosomes (HACs) that could revolutionize gene therapy and other biotechnology applications. The study, published in Science, describes an approach that efficiently forms single-copy HACs, bypassing a common hurdle that has hindered progress in this field for decades.

Artificial chromosomes are lab-made structures designed to mimic the function of natural chromosomes, the packaged bundles of DNA found in the cells of humans and other organisms. These synthetic constructs have the potential to serve as vehicles for delivering therapeutic genes or as tools for studying chromosome biology. However, previous attempts to create HACs have been plagued by a major issue: the DNA segments used to build them often link together in unpredictable ways, forming long, tangled chains with rearranged sequences.

The Penn Medicine team, led by Dr. Ben Black, sought to overcome this challenge by completely overhauling the approach to HAC design and delivery. “The HAC we built is very attractive for eventual deployment in biotechnology applications, for instance, where large-scale genetic engineering of cells is desired,” Dr. Black explains in a media release. “A bonus is that they exist alongside natural chromosomes without having to alter the natural chromosomes in the cell.”

To test their idea, the scientists turned to a tried-and-true workhorse of molecular biology: yeast. They used a technique called transformation-associated recombination (TAR) cloning to assemble a whopping 750 kilobase DNA construct in yeast cells. For context, that’s about 25 times larger than the constructs used in previous HAC studies. The construct contained DNA from both human and bacterial sources, as well as sequences to help seed the formation of the centromere.

The next challenge was to deliver this hefty payload into human cells. The team accomplished this by fusing the engineered yeast cells with a human cell line, a process that had been optimized in previous studies. Remarkably, this fusion approach proved to be much more efficient than the traditional method of directly transferring naked DNA into cells.

The results were stunning. Not only did the engineered HACs form successfully, but they did so with much higher efficiency compared to standard methods. Furthermore, these designer chromosomes were able to replicate and segregate properly during cell division, a key requirement for their long-term stability and functionality.

“Instead of trying to inhibit multimerization, for example, we just bypassed the problem by increasing the size of the input DNA construct so that it naturally tended to remain in predictable single-copy form,” explained Dr. Black.

But the researchers didn’t stop there. They also devised a clever way to visualize the HACs in their native, uncompacted state. By gently lysing the cells and using a special centrifugation technique, they were able to isolate the HACs away from the rest of the cellular DNA. This allowed them to confirm that the HACs maintained their single-copy status and circular topology, without any unwanted rearrangements or additions.

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COMMIEFORNIA: UC Berkeley Parents Hire Private Security to Protect Children From Violent Crime Surge

Parents of students at University of California Berkeley have become so concerned about their offspring’s safety they have hired private security to secure the local vicinity.

SFGATE reports that parents were forced to take matters into their own hands amid a surge in violent crime around the UC Berkeley campus located outside of San Francisco:

Parents and community members of SafeBears, a nonprofit organization started in 2022, raised $40,000 at the end of 2023 to launch the pilot program, which started March 6 and concludes on Saturday, according to the group’s website.  Six security guards from Streetplus, a third-party contractor, are patrolling five routes around the campus and the university’s residence halls on foot and by bicycle from 6:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. daily.

The security guards are not armed and will not enter university property, the website says, but are trained in de-escalation and CPR. They also must earn a California “guard card” from the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, requiring them to clear a background check from the California Department of Justice and FBI.

While the program will not be continuing beyond this weekend, parents hope that they will be able to convince the university to take more action.

“While we will not be extending the length of our private safety pilot beyond March 23, we will certainly continue to push the administration at UC Berkeley to do more to protect students from violence,” Sagar Jethani, president of SafeBears, told SFGATE.

The move comes amid a surge in violent crime in the local area, which is notorious as one of the most left-wing places in the entire country.

According to the Berkeley Scanner, over the course of 2023 robberies increased by 29 percent, property crime by 58 percent and sex crimes remained around the same.

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The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

ON A HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.

As they started to explore the gardens, an inexplicable feeling of depression descended upon them, a melancholic atmosphere they described as “a dreamy haziness” and “eerie and unpleasant.” They began to encounter people clothed in strange attire. They saw “two men dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats,” and later a man whose “face was most repulsive, —its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.” Passing over a bridge, they found: “a lady was sitting. I supposed her to be sketching. She turned and looked full at us. Her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual.” Eventually, they found their way out of the gardens, and returned to their accommodation in a daze.

The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.

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