so. because it literally made him into a zombie it's crazy. you know we don't have to do anything it's not our fault you know she was crazy and all that. appears traumatic. because of. venezuela's president snick us majority says he's ready to talk to the opposition leader to end the country's political crisis but refuses to negotiate. with venezuela torn between rival beaches and the jury acquitting it's a coup by washington when it gets america's track record to change. that film and buys its in the trunk campaign is released on bail after being charged in the mind of. president trump how many us congress approved

a temporary plan to end the government shutdown. of the funding for his. son so. the latest on these stories has to. stay with us for the big picture. on this week's show the trump transgender military band stands for now and we're going to talk about what the rest of us don't understand about transgender americans but first an update on a story we've been following all along the flint water crisis who is being held accountable and another crisis developing faith as the food and drug administration has east cigarettes in the crosshairs i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture america.

five years ago awaiting a new pipeline to bring flint michigan in the pure glacial waters of lake huron city managers appointed by the governor of fed the flint river through lead infected pipes four years ago children were testing with high lead levels which can cause permanent brain damage three years ago the state attorney general promised to investigate quote without fear or favor of who's to blame today nobody is behind bars and seven of fifteen defendants have pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and the records will eventually be expunged meanwhile many in flint have been drinking bottled water for years what next let's ask attorney corey stern with the new york firm levy koenigsberg representing twenty five hundred children in flint a corey about those misdemeanor charges as robert muller's noose tightens and roger

stone under arrest it seems to this legal layman that prosecutors go easier on little fish when they're after the whale could former governor rick snyder a republican still be held accountable. in the criminal context yes i think if we were to learn anything thus far from watching under a microscope the mower investigation nationally and internationally i think we would all agree at this point that we won't know the end of this story until he and his team decide to tell us how it ends i think the same is true in flint you're correct seven out of fifteen individuals who have been charged criminally have pled guilty to crimes to misdemeanors and yes you're correct that it appears to many people as though they'll be a slap on the wrist essentially to those folks but i have faith in prosecutors and folks who. for

a living attempt to put criminals behind bars and bring justice to individuals and communities that they've got to plan and hopefully this seven please will lead to a larger effort and maybe some bigger fish to fry in terms of governor snyder himself absolutely my guess is he is a target of the investigation and in order to create a case and to build a case against someone of that stature at that level in this or any climate it's important to have cooperation from key witnesses or and either fortunately or unfortunately key witnesses in this case or folks who have also been charged with crimes so i think the jury you know no pun intended is still out and my guess is in the next six to eight months we'll have a much clearer idea of what the prosecution's plan is how they're going to utilize the seven folks or so have pled guilty and how high their investigation will actually reach right now status quo flints mayor is telling residents that a new system construction is ahead of schedule meantime they're being told that

good water flowing through bad pipes will render those pipes less toxic fact or spin. it's hard to tell i think science is on the side of facts there the issue that you have is that you've got a community of about one hundred thousand to one hundred twenty thousand individuals who for a very long period of time beginning in two thousand and fourteen even till now believe that they were lied to and misled by their government and so at the moment the vigils who are posturing or or putting forward that the water is becoming better to drink as a result of good water flowing through bad pipes are from the same place as the folks who for years and years told these individuals that their water was safe when they knew that the water actually wasn't so there is some fact in the science however the idea that a community of folks without more information without more description without more

education or simply going to take as gospel the word of folks who have previously lied to them is foolish and so nothing has really changed in flint in terms of individuals deciding to and actually going ahead and utilizing the water that's from their taps out of fear and mistrust sure heya during her campaign gretchen whitmer michigan's new governor a democrat criticized a permit that allowed nestle to pump up to four hundred gallons of groundwater per minute for their ice mountain bottled water brand and now as many in plant are wary of drinking what flows through those pipes however cleansed nestle is providing free bottled water there so they're giving michiganders back their own water. yes so the water that any bottled water has to come from a source it's not as if whether it's nestle or aquafina or or any any any cellar of of you know pristine water gets their water from rain i mean water has to be

bottled from a source and it just so happens that in this instance the source of nestle's water is coming from one of the good water sources. in in michigan it is tale of when i guess for everybody to put some context on it governor whitman when she was candidate whitmer disagreed with then the republican administration's decision to stop providing bottled water to the people of flint in mid two thousand and eighteen. nestle was criticized for taking water from from a good water source wall the optics war that folks in the flint were no longer with bottled water and were still suffering from the bad water right so gretchen whitmer as a candidate and now as governor won this one because she was able to either shame or convince nestle to provide bottled water to a community that had previously relied on bottled water but the previous administration the republican administration had stopped supply it's

a win for nestle because nestle appears as if they're doing a humanitarian work for the people of flint and on some level it's a win for the people of flint because they're actually getting bottled water it's weird sometimes how the cycle how the cycle works but in this instance i think that everybody's better off as a result of then candidate and now governor whitman is shaming of nestle into providing this water and nestle still gets to use the water that it's been using from michigan to fill its bottles thank you attorney cory stern best of luck with your action on behalf of those kiddos and flint and people of flint we haven't forgotten you. my pleasure thank you for having me and i hope everybody continues to think about those there's another self-inflicted crisis looming children are vaporing t.v. commercials from category dominant jewel offer that their products can wean grownups off cigarettes but aren't for kids the commissioner of the u.s. food and drug administration a doctor is not happy the f.d.a.

has the power to ban cigarettes and commissioner gottlieb threatens that if the youth use continues to rise and we see significant increases in use in twenty nineteen on top of the dramatic rise in twenty eighteen the entire category will face an existential threat how serious is the threat to children's health let's ask dr dominic got siana the author of well now today's comprehensive health and wellness guide he practices internal medicine in chicago doc how addictive is nicotine. and you can see it's very addictive i've counseled addiction for twenty years and i think is secondary to the heroin and i've gotten people off heroin but nicotine is a is a very dicked of drug and what's important here is that we have a new way of inhaling nicotine that hasn't been studied the cigarettes only been around for about eight or nine years and in two thousand and fifteen joel started

making i'm cool with a little flash drive a lot of props here this is the jewel product there is there are other ones that i think that appeal to kids that that this is a blue product and this is the out so and their delivery systems that vaporizes their nicotine salts that they prize and and they and held in the lungs and it contains nicotine. or some other binding agents and so forth and there's a heating element that aerosolize it and it gets to the brain in about ten seconds gives you a nicotine high it's very effective july even brag but it is very effective so for kids it's not really recommended how this all started i think with this look back a little bit scott gottlieb the commissioner for the f.d.a. making these statements along with a serious warning from the u.s. surgeon general because other other medical groups american heart association american lung association american academy of pediatrics american family my family practice all got and pressured the f.d.a.

and a certain they came out with a warning to joel and specifically cited joel because you know these i actually i interviewed my office managers kids and they there are different flavors they banned and i actually you know some of the ones that was banned the fruit medley the candy certainly appeals to kids and we look at advertising live or not did it one hundred sixty eight for women and cigarettes and then you're slams and you've come a long way baby yeah they're incredibly successful in medical school as all the trend in cigarettes going up and cancer going up twenty thirty years later and women unfortunately. i think it's a yes well you're the doctor i'm just a layman but it's obvious even to me this is addictive enough that the vapors in that smoking the huddle they gather outside the building even on chilly winter days when i see the vapors among them exhaling like cloud looks almost as big as the vapors body so even if the vapor of any age are using flavored non nicotine

vaporing juice this can't be healthy for the lungs can it. well the jury is not out on this it's not as i don't believe it's as bad as cigarettes certainly and you know in all fairness one of the jolan adults you know it's not accepted way to get off cigarettes it's a nicotine but what's happening is the dual use they do it during the day when we're not allowed to smoke in a lot of facilities and they do it during the and they get and it's flavored and kids do it i interviewed office managers family and it tastes good it's you know they can hide it because it looks like you can see it looks like a flash drive and it's also maybe a hip and cool thing to have you know and you know it's something that you know i think it has been studied lung tissue is fragile actually talk to my dad is a lung doctor of sixty years last night he's not in favor of either hasn't been studied and researched the word from the c.d.c.

is that more research has to happen what nicotine does to the lungs but there's other substances it's derived from tobacco plant that nicotine is derived so there's other stuff it's not the tar and the other combustible things and cigarettes it's combustible and tars definitely eighty seven percent of lung cancer and twenty's have an average cause of death related to smoking we know that for ninety thousand americans die of this but we don't know everything you know in the substances there's formaldehyde potentially which is because of us along damage so fragile and tissue where we haven't been we haven't studied this sure but there's. there's cautions you know this that children that i talk to my smokers and age fifteen fourteen i could look at them and say it was open for forty years by their skin and other things and you know they can decrease the risk of getting cancer the worry is the bridge to keep to keep that nicotine addiction and go to smoking at a later time maybe when you're twenty and thirty and then you got packer's history

lung cancer and other types of cancer stroke heart attack and emphysema that you have risks that well ok about that cool factor you mentioned having reveled in the british invasion in my teens i realized that young people are prone to fads what is your advice to parents who want to keep their kids from vaporing. well you know i think first challenge an entrepreneur that has to maybe some form of maybe something cool that we have that it's a vapor that doesn't have nicotine at it maybe but that's not here yet but you know i think that you know it's like i think there are natural highs you know that we don't necessarily need to turn i tell my adult patients i can speak you know we don't want cigarette smoking what are what are triggers why do we why do we want to do this and what are the other things we can do i think. that we don't necessarily need nicotine i think kids by their very nature want to rebel and. maybe some kind of direct them toward another. expose them to other things and activities and lives

that they can they can do a size you know vaporing nicotine got you might be a better solution i've got about thirty seconds so i need the short answer but for grownups are trying to which smoking arre cigarettes useful or what else would you recommend as the patch work. you know what ok it's not recommended there's smoke free gov is the short answer is as all the recommendations i think now i've had patients have done hypnosis the nicotine patches transdermal on your on your chest you know they think it's a short period of time you're on it you're off it and it doesn't have that long term benefit problems but they can take patches and cold turkey is the most successful but look at your stresses to see what's making you want to. write a good solution as well cause and effect thank you dr dominant guts again i'll say i do thank you coming up who are the seven hundred thousand transgender americans

somewhat don't the rest of us understand about our neighbors this is the big picture on our team america. about the right location but the wrong oh you'll be able through it. you'll school you know the. big dream tonight is there anything special.

ah. ah ah. ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah. ah ah ah ah ah. ah. ah ah ah ah ah ah

this week the united states supreme court decided not to decide about president trumps twenty seventeen transgender military band justices deferring to lower court challenges already in progress it's estimated that some fifteen thousand transgender individuals are now serving and there are over one hundred thirty thousand transgender veterans then defense secretary james madison expressed concern that a subset of transgender persons diagnosed with gender dysphoria experience discomfort with their biological sex resulting in significant distress or difficulty functioning and the american psychological association defines gender dysphoria as a conflict between a person's physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he she they their words identify what don't the rest of us understand about transgender people and

how are the workplace public accommodations and sports changing let's ask jen smith who has degrees in history and political science and has been writing and speaking on the dangers of that transgender ideology as it poses to women and children and dr collins wright is an everly research fellow at the department of biology at. state welcome to you both jan most of what most of the rest of us have heard on this issue is just political noise right wing wedge issues like who uses wood yeah that's pretty much it you know get us past and tell us what i. can and confusion and i think that starts with with the language so if like if we're going to talk about the subject i think we can or would do well to take some advice from the philosopher voltaire who said when entering a discussion you need to define your terms so this is part of the confusion i'm talking about so i am transgender ok so if you break that word down into its

component parts you've got trans and gender what's happening in society today is we are confusing and conflating the words gender and sex so starting with gender and like say this is important to understand what's happening gender is basically a classification system. refers to different forms of behavior dress. basically a social expectations that are put upon the sex in the given society and their arbitrary they change over time to change from culture to culture but i would argue they're fluid so you've basically got to box masculine and feminine i as you can tell sort of dip into both boxes and that's fine that's called transgender the confusion that's happening right now is that people are confusing gender with sex sex is a biological reality ok and that's in your body and you're either x. x. or x. y. and that's something that cannot be changed but when we are talking transgender issues

today we have a lot of people who are assuming that because you switch genders and that changes your sex who are rats not true right ok collen just this week a south dakota state senate committee let stand a policy that lets transgender students play on the team that matches their gender . identity do women who used to be men have an unfair advantage competing with other women or vice versa and can we d. segregate sports. so i think it's pretty clear that men do have a competitive advantage over over females in sports so men on average are much larger they are taller they're faster they're stronger they have been more grip strength the larger hands bigger lungs all kinds of things that give them a competitive advantage over females in competitive sports basically so the whole reason that we had you know segregated leagues based on six in the first place is to account for these biological differences that we have between the sexes and if

we didn't have these segregated leagues then you would essentially never see female athletes competing at a high level just because they simply wouldn't be able to compete but what we have now is sort of a situation where we have biological males that are saying that they have the right to compete against females because they simply identify as a female but these leagues were never created these segregated leagues or events were not created to reflect sort of an internal way of of how you feel about yourself or how you want to express some deep internal feeling of masculinity or femininity these were created to acknowledge real biological differences between men and women in competitive ability in athletics and this is something that you simply can't identify away and in terms of vice versa you said i actually have no problem with having trans men so biological females competing against you know biological male leagues because they're actually not at a competitive advantage they have

a disadvantage because they haven't gone down that developmental pathway that is made them into adult males that gives them all the advantages that you would expect to come with that right right some seven hundred thousand americans about three tenths of a percent of us identify as transgender in the workplace half of transgender employees say they've been harassed about a quarter say try. has cost them their jobs and some three quarters say they felt more comfortable at work after transitioning a dear friend of mine who is a transgender woman impressed upon me that as you suggested you're both suggestive we're talking about self identity more than anatomy so i was unsurprised to learn of a journal of sexology study that pointed out that some ninety eight percent of transgender identified persons have not had surgery over a million and a half people have seen this you tube video of an aggrieved game stop customer taking issue with a store clerk addressing her and another customer in line as you guys

a term i often hear my gal pals used to address each other it's a smart phone camera video so it's fuzzy enough that i won't presume the clerks understanding as to whether you recognize the customer as a man or a woman but jan personal pronouns obviously mean a lot to that customer how forgiving are you if a stranger honestly miss recognizes. i really don't let it trouble me because we need to understand that the whole sort of transgender craze is relatively new and people have been raised and brought up to reflexive lee referred to somebody who appears male as he and him so like you're showing that video there from the game stop and i would say that but that's an over reaction this is a person who is not appreciating the fact that people are conditioned to respond this way and you're not going to get people to change overnight furthermore there are some people who won't change their language to accommodate people because women

for instance feminist and stuff are very opposed to what's going on in terms of male body trans being allowed into previously female only spaces and you talked about that journal of sexology study where it said that ninety eight point two percent of trans gente. identified persons have not had the genital surgery so when you look at the sort of super pretty fashion model trance and stuff that you see on t.v. on other networks and stuff that's a bit of an illusion that's a bit of a mind game that they're playing with the public transponders don't look like that and most people are unaware of that statistic that you cited from the journalistic sexology and that's an important step when women are trying to decide whether they want to let them into their private spaces you know i'm glad you mentioned that and i want to ask collin to follow up on that what fundamental misunderstandings does the mainstream media perpetuate reporting on transgender issues i got about forty

five seconds. you know i think the main issue is that they equivocate between the internal sense of identity and biological sex and also though they'll talk about how they think that hormones are maybe the only thing that are giving men the competitive advantage over women in sports which completely negates the fact that what we should be looking at is the effect that testosterone or other hormones have on the development of an individual from adolescence into an adult and these things aren't reversed when you simply start taking cross six hormones and jan down to thirty seconds but we've talked about the mainstream media social media many think has course and our society is that a plus or a minus in telling the transgender story. well i mean social media is you know. it's certainly playing a big factor in what's going on because so many people are on there now and it

allows for what i certainly in my experience it's mainly been conflicts between those who sort of support self id and those who don't and so they can get pretty heated on social media but i sort of expect more from the mainstream media like this conflation of the words gender and sex that needs to be straightened out because that's leading to this illusion that people can. change sex they can't like i can express any way i want i don't want anybody to tell me that i can't do that i'm glad i can change that i'm glad you've drawn that distinction it'll help the rest of us understand a lot thank you jen smith and collin write for your time on the big picture thank you and thank you for watching the big picture if you see us somewhere else you can also watch our team america live now at youtube dot com slash r t we're also live and direct t.v. three two one and on the pluto t.v. app one three two and on dish two eight zero and all of our shows are available anytime anywhere on any device if youtube dot com slash the big picture r t

m holland cook in washington back here same time next week in the mean time i am at home and cook on twitter where if you follow me i'll follow you with federal furloughed workers missing another pay day we should all question more. disclosure you. see it's going to. those whom you know most of the both of you know it was not it was or. not but you . please them please the ways of the why do you buy because that's the why.

are. you. going to. get. in there you know you. the country has gone into a nihilistic fever that's why i think they got it hit the road and get out the traveling across america to find what makes america take them the charlatans the geniuses this is the quintessential american hero this is it we've come to a point around which element is going inside we always are on the margins someone called the culture listening party the american jobs. we're starting last with is to begin to headed east into the swamp we're going into the belly of the b. i think i want to leave now governor any more gonzo than the me may be completely

different but the end of this. and the instant media darling and certainly a fresh face the newly minted congresswoman alexandria ocasio cortez is rattling some democratic establishment cages she calls herself a democratic socialist and she has some big clients is the democratic party and america ready they oversee. the fight there's someone else moving inside of me or controlling my body. the byproduct. the drug it is the cause like some fear depression. because it will warn anyone to zombie is.