So the nature of homosexuality and transsexualism is settled, incontrovertible, and beyond dispute? Yes, but only in newspapers, not in academia. A landmark survey of decades of research by two eminent scholars working in the United States claims that many of these assertions are simply not supported by the weight of evidence in scholarly journals. The report was released today by The New Atlantis, a well-known journal of science, technology, and ethics based in Washington DC. The editors have organised what is probably the best single summary of the scientific evidence on LGBT issues published to date.

“Sexual orientation and gender identity resist explanation by simple theories,” write psychiatrist Paul R McHugh and epidemiologist Lawrence S Mayer. “There is a large gap between the certainty with which beliefs are held about these matters and what a sober assessment of the science reveals. In the face of this complexity and uncertainty, we need to be humble about what we know and do not know.”

Similarly, the belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex — so that a person might be a “man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported either. Again, there are conceptual problems. Gender theorists argue that gender is not who a person is, but what they do – which underpins Facebook’s decision to offer 56 different gender options.

But this quickly becomes incoherent, with genders multiplying like snowflakes, each different, each inexplicable. They write:

“No degree of supporting a little boy in converting to be considered, by himself and others, to be a little girl makes him biologically a little girl. The scientific definition of biological sex is, for almost all human beings, clear, binary, and stable, reflecting an underlying biological reality that is not contradicted by exceptions to sex-typical behavior, and cannot be altered by surgery or social conditioning.”

This excellent study does not take sides on current legal and public policy controversies. But it does insist that debate needs to be informed by objective science, not partisan scholarship. It calls for more research on nearly 20 critical issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s a message that needs to be heard: too many lives are at stake.

Not since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has the area suffered such a deluge. With that disaster in the back of everyone’s mind, many have questioned why folks didn’t evacuate ahead of time. The difference with this flood is that it wasn’t a hurricane. There was no warning and people had no reason to expect to need to evacuate their homes. It was just a rainstorm that didn’t stop.

More than 40,000 homes in Louisiana have been damaged and 4,000 people remain in shelters because they can’t go back to their homes. 13 people have died due to the flooding and 75% of the homes in Livingston Parish have been completely destroyed, but it seems that these facts are irrelevant to the country. Last week, supplies had to be air-dropped to over a thousand motorists who became stranded for more than 24 hours by floodwaters as they were trying to evacuate the area.

Many of the rescues have been undertaken by groups of citizens called The Cajun Navy. The people of the area have pulled together and local fishers, hunters, and professional guides launched their boats to help the over-burdened police rescue efforts.

Guess which politician showed up with a truckload of supplies to help Louisiana flood victims? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Especially if they are Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama. In one bright spot, Presidential hopeful Donald Trump canceled a fund-raiser in New York to fly to Louisiana with his running mate, Mike Pence, where they were warmly welcomed by flood victims. A local resident said in a Facebook discussion about the visit: “Trump brought an 18 wheeler load of clothes, food, and toys and sanitary items. And gave our local community a huge donation all out of his pocket, he also took time to pass out the goods and even went out to the damaged homes.”

Instead of assistance, a united front, and an outpouring of love, flood victims are being forced to pay for permits to begin repairing their homes, adding further insult to injury. Are you disgusted yet?

But there are still tens of thousands of abandoned dwellings that remain standing, and some have sold for as little as one dollar in recent years. Once Detroit was the envy of the entire planet, but now it has become a global joke and in other countries they love to do news stories about “the ruins of Detroit” to show how rapidly America is rotting and decaying. Sadly, Detroit is far from alone, because there are other formerly great manufacturing cities that have declined just as fast as Detroit has.

In the city of Detroit today, close to half the population is functionally illiterate, and one survey found that 60 percent of all children in the city are living in poverty. It has been reported that 40 percent of the street lights do not work, and it is a very frightening place to be after dark. And don’t count on the police to help you. The size of the police force in Detroit has been reduced by about 40 percent over the years, and it has been estimated that it takes the Detroit police an average of 58 minutes to respond to a call.

If it was just one major city where all of these things were happening, that would be bad enough. Sadly, the truth is that what is happening in Detroit is happening all over the nation. In fact, St Louis and Memphis now have higher gun crime rates than Detroit does… What has already happened to Detroit is slowly happening to the entire country, but we never seem to learn from our past mistakes.

Prices of both government and corporate debt have been driven to new records as low interest rates and central bank responses, such as quantitative easing, have been deployed. Low rates push returns on cash lower and cause the price of income-generating assets to rise.

Quantitative easing, which has involved central banks buying bonds, has added significantly to demand. As prices rise, yields have fallen. Yields on benchmark UK 10-year Gilts fell to 0.5 percent this week, a new low. The market rates on some government debt are negative, meaning buyers are paying to invest.

In a letter to his investors, reported by CNBC, Mr Singer said the situation now “is in many ways the most peculiar period we have faced in 39 years". He expressed amazement that investors would be willing to buy bonds at current prices.

Italy could prove to be the next nation to leave the Brussels bloc, according to Mr Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank and senior advisor to president Bill Clinton. The country’s banks are weighed down by more than £300 billion of bad debt but cannot be bailed out under EU rules unless creditors take a financial cut first.

Embattled prime minister Matteo Renzi says he will resign if he loses the October referendum on constitutional reform, which could allow the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which has promised the public it will hold a vote on whether or not to remain in the Euro. The expert says an “amicable divorce” must be considered to avoid a “political cataclysmic event like Brexit”. In his new book, 'The Euro: How A Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe' Stiglitz also advises Germany and Greece should pull out as member states.

Mr Stiglitz said: “In other words, the Eurozone’s member countries are democracies and one sees increasing hostility to the Euro, which is unfortunately spilling over to a broader hostility to the broader European project and liberal values. That’s going to be the end.”

When asked by Britain’s Independent newspaper to elaborate on that statement, Soros doubled down: “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

Since I began to live it out. Those unfamiliar with Soros would probably dismiss that claim as nothing more than the typical blathering of an irrelevant madman. But those who have followed his career and sociopolitical endeavors realize that while he may be mad, he is a mad billionaire, and billionaires tend not to be irrelevant.

Especially not mad billionaires with self-centred agendas who believe that normal rules don’t apply to themselves. Soros has learnt that with enormous reserves of unethically earnt money at his disposal he has the power to make the once unthinkable acceptable. His work as a self-professed “amoral” financial speculator has left millions in poverty when their national currencies were devaluated, and he channelled so much cash into moulding former Soviet republics to his liking that he has bragged that the former Soviet empire is now the “Soros Empire.”

In his book “Soros on Soros,” he says: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others…. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself to be someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply.

According to the documents, Soros has given more than $30 million to groups working for Hillary Clinton’s election in November, making him her largest single donor. So it is likely the case that the media’s support for Clinton has played some role in the mainstream media’s bid to bury the story.

On the surface, the vast number of groups and people he supports seem unrelated. After all, what does climate change have to do with illegal African immigration to Israel? What does Occupy Wall Street have to do with Greek immigration policies? But the fact is that Soros-backed projects share basic common attributes.

They all work to weaken the ability of national and local authorities in Western democracies to uphold the laws and values of their nations and communities. They all work to hinder free markets, whether those markets are financial, ideological, political or scientific. They do so in the name of democracy, human rights, economic, racial and sexual justice and other lofty terms.

In other words, their goal is to subvert Western democracies and make it impossible for governments to maintain order or for societies to retain their unique identities and values. The DCLeaks exposed the immensity of the Soros-funded Left’s campaign against the foundations of liberal democracies. The “direct democracy” movements that Soros supports are nothing less than calls for mob rule.

The peoples of the West need to recognize the common foundations of all Soros’s actions. They need to realize as well that the only response to these premeditated campaigns of subversion is for the people of the West to stand up for their national rights and their individual right to security. They must stand with the national institutions that guarantee that security, in accordance with the rule of the law, and uphold and defend their national values and traditions.

What few consumers grasp is that the global abundance of food depends on weather extremes remaining rare. If extremes of weather become commonplace, global food surpluses will turn into shortages. In the larger context, the global food supply chain is a real-world system that cannot be "fixed" with financial gimmicks. No amount of money-printing will replace crops lost to weather extremes, replenish depleted fresh-water aquifers, magically rebuild top soil lost to erosion or repair the environmental ravages of industrial pollution.

Most people don’t appreciate that it takes six months to grow a wheat crop and only a single extreme weather day to wipe out a large part of its yield potential. In my part of the world, a single night of frost at the wrong time can reduce hundreds of thousands of acres from 2 ton yield per acre to just a few hundred pounds per acre. A few hot windy days can cut it in half. As can a week of wet weather during summer harvest. We are seeing an increase in all these types of events in the grain growing region where I live.

The vulnerability of global food production to extremes of weather is a profound reality that few grasp. A single hard frost can decimate yields in a day or two just as effectively as drought can devastate crops that are not irrigated. In effect, the global abundance of food depends on the rarity of weather extremes. If weather extremes become more common, it will follow like night follows day that agricultural yields will plummet accordingly.

Few people expect anything other than a permanent stable abundance of grains and other foodstuffs. The idea that multiple failures in multiple crops could make basic foods scarce is not even considered a possibility.

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon’s “Continental Drift: Britain and Europe From the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism” was published shortly before the recent referendum, but it helps explain Brexit by putting “Mrs T” and the controversies of the time in historical perspective. It traces the clash of views during the dissolution of the British Empire and the simultaneous quest for a European market.

Thatcher herself later became the totemic emblem of Euroskepticism, a ferocious critic, at one point waving her handbag in protest against the “arrogant, unelected European super-state.” According to one recent exuberant comment, “Brexit was her posthumous triumph.”

One of the reasons for her change in attitude was her growing belief that the “Eurocracy” had become “a cover for German hegemony” — another irony, since the purpose of the European movement from its beginning in 1945 was to solve the “German problem” by developing a set of interlocking institutions that would prevent Europeans from ever again slaughtering one another. She often invoked the ghost of Churchill to sustain her views, whether on the danger of Germany or the need to resist the lure of Europe.