“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Word of The Week:
gwnofaoadfjsadf
noun
random typing on the keyboard by Wolf
Mole Day in some imaginary language
Used in a sentence
Wolf thinks that gwnofaoadfjsadf looks a bit like Welsh, even though it’s just jibberish.
A Bit of Music
This is a great but weird one.
The story is that Gretchen Wilson was a session artist for rock and country back before she got famous in country. Discussed here.
Apparently she’s always been quite a fan of Heart.
Let’s have some of the original!
OK – we have to finish with some science bluegrass for Mole Day. This is surprisingly good.
And now, back to business!
Election 2023 – The Final Stretch
Ohio Issue 1 is definitive. This is the ultimate groomer amendment, backed by the commies, begging to be added to the state’s constitution.
I will be doing what I can, which is never enough, to help defeat this monstrosity.
The choice is stark.
If this passes, parents will lose control of their kids FROM BIRTH – if the babies even make it that far.
I won’t be here on The Q Tree most of the time, during this home stretch, but I invite ALL OF YOU to bring the ammunition here. Bring the news about EVIL Issue One! Help me alert the nation to what they are doing in Ohio, which is worse than what they did in Michigan. Help the people of Ohio stop the insanity of “reproductive freedom” of CHILDREN FROM BIRTH.
After today, I will copy this post as a placeholder until the election is over. I will comment occasionally, but I will have to fight every day to STOP ISSUE ONE.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
What the heck! This chick will NOT get out of my Twitter X feed!
In the Bay Area today talking about vaccines for COVID, flu and RSV! Now is the best time to get #vaccinated to protect you and your family. pic.twitter.com/O3ZRIOutcA
"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?'" (John 11:25-26)
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Another Beths song I don’t think I’ve heard before.
How about a new version of Mo Ghile Mear by Celtic Woman?
Aw – we can’t have that one without playing the original, dream-inspiring version of the song brought here by cthulhu!
OK – gotta have some Wheatie music (TSFH). Lots of dancing – not just this lady flasher on the intro photo!
OK – let’s finish in a very classical way.
The Epstein Amendment – New Outrage Discovered
Just when you thought that the Epstein Amendment Issue 1 in Ohio could not be any worse, somebody figured out that it legalizes PROSTITUTION and (drum roll) CHILD PROSTITUTION.
Yes, it’s THAT BAD. “Reproductive freedom of all individuals” is what they’re selling us. YIKES.
Can this thing possibly win? Well, if it does, Ohio will become the playground of pedophiles.
Looks like NORMAL PEOPLE have their work cut out for them, stopping this leftist travesty.
I tried to follow De-Pat’s method of posting interesting headlines and articles. It didn’t work. As a scientist and a caver, if I see an interesting ‘rabbit hole’ I am instantly going to get side tracked. And what is the first thing I see? An intriguing clip of Mike Benz speaking about the Cabal’s strategy for neutralizing Alt Media. This the first I ever hear of Mike Benz.
Seems the conservative tree house jpg files just got deleted as I was writing this, just like Tony Heller’s did. Also the comment I just left on a 2 month old Mike Benz rumble video has been down voted. This is quite interesting given the subject of this article.
….My take-away from that is to be prepared. The exposing of the wrongs is just the first step. Then you have to be ready for the onslaught to come of smears, lies, firings, intimidation, and worse. It helps if people are united, as has happened with some boycotts. But on the whole we need to get on the same page and get stronger, IMO
And Mike Benz explains how the Cabal is working overtime to derail us.
I first noticed an online insurgency during the ‘Farm Wars’ over National Animal ID. It was strong enough that the USDA got THOUSANDS of HELL NO! comments on the Federal Register and it came up in the top 15 major concerns on change.org just before Obama was elected. It did not matter, Senator Burr crossed the aisle and co-sponsored the Food Safety Modernization Act that effectively handed control of American Farms to the World Trade Organization. It was passed during the lame-duck session. US Healthcare and the WHO are starting to follow a similar path.
After the Farm Wars, came the Tea Party. The Cabal deployed several methods to derail the movement.
“Twenty-four percent (24%) of U.S. voters now say they consider themselves a part of the Tea Party movement,”
After the Blair-Rockefeller poll’s ‘finding’ that the Tea party was ‘racist’ via a series of questions starting with “Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that minorities…” and the MSM blasting that ‘News’ 24/7, it was down to “Just 8% Now Say They Are Tea Party Members“ by January 07, 2013.
ALSO the Tea Party Demonstrations WERE mostly NOT COVERED by the Fake News.
“Greedy super PACs drained the movement with endless pleas for money to support “conservative” candidates—while instead using the money to enrich themselves. I should know. I worked for one of them.” — PAUL H. JOSSEY
Not to mention the “conservative” candidates we did manage to elect, such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul magically turned into RINOS!!!
HOWEVER this does not mean people changed from supporting the beliefs that the Tea Party represented. POTUS Trump showed that in an overwhelming way.
Now, as Mike Benz revealed on a recent Devolution Power Hour, the Cabal has come up with a new high powered way to STOMP the first Amendment into the ground. That was as far as I got looking at recent news before I headed down the rabbit hole.
Devolution Power Hour #181 Featuring Burning Bright and Just Human – Wed 10:30 PM ET –
On the Devolution Power Hour @ 1:38:30 they have a clip of Mike Benz, formerly of the US State Department under POTUS Trump. Benz starts with a comment on Russell Brand and then gets into how the Globalists are killing alternate Media.
Very Rough Transcript:
The UK government asking Twitter and Youtube to de-monetize Russell Brand… ” You have to understand how far back the OP goes… I wish you could have been there in 2017 when all the ‘consensus building architecture’ was happening.” The censorship industry is their term for themselves. After BREXIT and the 2016 election, independent news online became more powerful than the Mainstream news [Globalist Media Complex] at tilting elections and influencing public opinion. “.. the foreign policy establishments enforcement, and basically conspiracy arms, these are secret clandestine services… They got together and they did a consensus building process after the 2016 election, I have all the clips and source documents, more than I could possibly publish [he was going to write a book] where they formulated a plan. Where they looked at alternative news as an INDUSTRY, and an ecosystem. Rather than as individual emergent phenomenon… They said there are a relatively small number of these alternative news INSTITUTIONS [Not people] There are a huge number of alt news stories that they spit out, [BUT] if we kill them at the institutional level, that is MUCH EASIER than killing each and every story… the message was every where but there were relatively few emergent messengers… So they said, how do we kill the messengers? Because that was the easiest way to kill the message.
“Well the easiest way to do so is to look at alt news online as being an INDUSTRY WITH REVENUES and to cripple its capacity. Now this is an important term here… Called CAPACITY BUILDING. This is a concept in the nonprofit world which refers to the pumping up of financial resources, and personnel and technological abilities. But #1 is FINANCIAL RESOURCES.
“So for example when the State Department wants to run an operation in a foreign country, they CAPACITY BUILD [think George Soros Open Society $$$] all their Civil Society and private sector and news media outlets there. They pump them up so they are more useful as assets…
“They [the globalists] said, we need to CRIPPLE THE CAPACITY of the alt news ecosystem in order to basically kill the institutions. They did not have the idea of killing it completely, it is like counter insurgency work, this is how they describe it… you never quite kill the insurgent group that is challenging YOUR government… The winning end stage is when you simply reduce it to a SMALL SCATTERED INEFFECTIVE .. to MANAGEABLE burning embers.
“THEY CREATED AN INDUSTRY TO KILL AN INDUSTRY.
“This is the plan they set about, THEY CREATED A CENSORSHIP INDUSTRY, to kill the alt news industry… I use the term industry deliberately…What that means is they wanted to Capacity Build the institutions with the capabilities to produce online censorship and capacity to cripple the entities with the ability to produce online news… that is what this is all about. That is why there is this government- private sector civil society news media fact checking whole society network.
“THAT WHOLE THING WAS SETUP AFTER 2016 TO DO EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH RUSSELL BRAND.
“There are two ways they set about crippling the capacities of alternative news.
#1 by getting them censored on social media so their volume is turned way down. [Think of shadow banning and Wolfie] and fewer people can access their messages.
#2. The other is by killing their revenue on their own websites or platforms. [Think of the possibility that Sundance kicked off all discussion of Q to protect his revenue stream…]
“This is the invention of NEWS GUARD for example. The whole reason they target the ad revenue of websites and they are targeting Russell Brand’s … and Elon Musk’s ad revenue, because that is the easiest and most effective way to cripple their capacities. Russell Brand will still be around but he will not be able to hire people, have a production studio…he will no longer be an INDUSTRIAL SIZE media participant. The news will be dominated by those with CAPACITIES.
“They want to Up build Mainstream and the Censorship industry and kill the capacities of Alt News.
“IT IS ALL ABOUT CAPACITY TARGETING.…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So I went looking into Mike Benz and found this 2 month old video.
In this episode of the Patrick Henningsen Show on TNT Radio which aired on July 18, 2023, Patrick talks with former US State Dept. official and executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, Mike Benz, about the rise of the public-private mass-censorship industry based in Washington DC and Silicon Valley, but whose tentacles now span internationally. Federal agencies like the DHS (and its censorship arm CISA), the FBI and others – have built a command and control communications pipeline directly into Big Tech, and deploy weaponized A.I. tools – where they can enact speech control operations and manipulate political outcomes, and even elections. We discuss its emergence following Crimea’s breakaway from Ukraine in 2014, and its proliferation in the aftermath of the 2016 election of Trump. All this and more.
INTERVIEW: Mike Benz – ‘Exposing Gov-Big Tech Censorship Industry’
This is a very, very good interview. If nothing else watch from 30 minutes to the end (39 minutes) It is about ‘Data Scrapping’ and the use of AI to do automated censorship. Before that he discusses the EU putting in place censorship laws that are coming out of NATO. Remember NATO started out with Hitler’s Chief of staff becoming NATO’s Chief of staff: Nazi war criminals became high ranking commanders in NATO after WW2
The Patrick Henningsen Show has 2.31K followers but this video only had 946 views and 7 likes. HOWEVER, despite this low volume and being 2 months old, my comment was down voted in less than 2 hours. Sure looks like Rumble has an AI BOT infestation!
Mike Benz on the partisan nature of government censoring online speech (2:30 minutes)
MORE Mike Benz: https://rumble.com/search/all?q=Mike%20Benz
…….
phoenixrising(@phoenixrising) explains why Russell Brand was targeted. (Seems I am in good company. 🤓 )
“The pandemic created at least 40 new Big Pharma billionaires; pharmaceutical corporations like Moderna and Pfizer made $1,000 in profit every second from the Covid-19 vaccines; more than two-thirds of Congress received campaign funding from pharmaceutical companies in the 2020 election; Pfizer Chairman Albert Bourla told Time magazine in July 202[?] that his company was developing a Covid vaccine for the good of humanity, not for money, and of course Pfizer made a $100 billion dollars in profit in 2022.”
Maher, desperately trying to get a word in edgewise on his own show, reminded Brand that “a lot of people would be dead without the vaccine.”
To which Brand snapped back: “If you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit hugely from medical emergencies, where the military industrial complex benefits from war, where energy companies benefit from energy crisis, you are going to generate states of permanent crisis where the interests of ordinary people separate from the interests of the elite.”
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Just grabbing stuff I’ve never heard off YouTube….
A version of Copperhead Road like you’ve never heard….
Aw, heck – let’s make that country rock just a bit!
So what ever happened to Gretchen Wilson? She’s had a few scrapes and close calls, but as of June 2023, she’s apparently still out there!
https://youtu.be/QnfEp9OmAMs
Let’s try something REALLY weird – Carrie Underwood x Joan Jett
Field Report
The crazy realpolitik world continues to be interesting. The battlefield landscape on Ohio Amendment Issue No. 1 seems to be shifting as people realize that this amendment serves the interests of pedophiles and groomers, resulting in parent-free sex-change of kids. I cannot predict which way the vote will go now. Passage and defeat are both possible.
And then Random Nuisance vetoes a state groomer bill in California? What’s up with that? Is he reading the tea leaves? Hmmmmmm.
Happy that Carl is back, and YUGE thanks to Gail for helping out Deplorable Patriot in this time of trouble. Prayers for DePat and family. May God shelter and comfort them.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Word of The Week:
instigate
verb
To initiate or bring about, often by inciting.
To urge on; goad.
To goad or urge forward; to set on; to provoke; to incite; — used chiefly with reference to evil actions.
Used in a picture (h/t Barb)
Used in a picture (as the associated noun)
Music time!
Beginning with some classical (your mileage may vary on the “sadness”)….
But check out these social media-driven “fiddle girls” – very interesting phenomenon!
To make it more commercial, just add some MTV….
So let’s finish with a string quartet of sorts!
AHHH – what the heck – I need some boy music. A song that cthulhu played Friday that takes me back. Mmmmmm, mmmmmm.
System Report
The system is back up, as of the writing of this post.
What a fight.
On the subject of “war is hell”, let the following video (set to Wheatie’s favorite music) be a reminder of why peace matters. (You have to go to the link – it’s pretty graphic.)
Wasn’t Gail saying something about Prussia? I seem to recall…..
As for the present….
Has the UFO propaganda got you scared? AS IF!
No, it has you bored and dismissive. Interesting psychology – isn’t it? So why did we get all of THIS stuff first?
Enjoy the epic music set to alien invasions – or something like that.
The plugin “nonce” problem got fixed, as well as some security issues.
The fact is, we’re dependent on “plugins” that are often weak links in WordPress security AND functionality. The team fixing our commenting system seems to be small and subject to competing duties.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Word of The Week:
trinitite
noun
Trinitite, also known as atomsite or Alamogordo glass, is the glassy residue left on the desert floor after the plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The glass is primarily composed of arkosic sand composed of quartz grains and feldspar that was melted by the atomic blast.
You’ll see why I chose trinitite later in this post.
OK – here is the epic orchestral Wheatie music I was looking for….
Maybe some “Celtic mystique” music?
How about “Viking folk music”? No guarantees of authenticity here.
But let’s finish with some orchestral-backed vocals…..
OK – that was inspiring!
Carl was back on Sunday! Praise God!!!
I know it has been a while since I said “Trust The Plan”, but every once in a while I realize that it’s there.
Some very interesting posts (and replies) on X. Let me give you a guided tour.
This is an oldie but goodie on an old QAnon account that does indeed put time frames in perspective.
Now That We Have Confirmation From Dr. Jan Halper-Hayes That There Is In Fact A Military Intelligence Plan In Place Playing Out, This Timeline Puts Things Into Perspective. pic.twitter.com/dNOPGzlz5j
I found the reply here terribly interesting. It’s worth looking at Brian’s full tweet.
You have an enduring spirit—and always keep in mind, in prayer we are saved, even though we cannot see what it is (that’s called faith). With reason, we can see and test it because we can see and touch it…faith and hope are things that you cannot see, you need to trust that one…
This is also going to be big – Lara Logan’s new production on January Sixth.
Trennis Evans pled guilty to one misdemeanor charge of entering a restricted building & he is forced to serve out his sentence in jail where he is held in solitary confinement for a few days at a time. The cell where he is housed is where they put prisoners to punish them. All… https://t.co/OhCoMlGpXn
Now – check this out – a long train of tweets to some fascinating references.
First – UGH – the photo on the right.
Munchausen by proxy (MBP), also known as factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), is a mental health disorder in which a caregiver, often a parent or guardian, intentionally fabricates or exaggerates physical or psychological symptoms in someone under their care. This could… pic.twitter.com/QbahOR55cn
That post notes the prior self-cutting by the young woman, visible in the photo. A pro-trans poster excuses the cutting as a result of gender dysphoria thereby requiring the surgery, while I might see the surgery as the ultimate form of “cutting”.
As an aside, I think the mom may be relieved of some guilt here. She was likely ready to believe anything that the doctors and trans activists told her. Thus, it is to some extent likely to be a kind of “Stockholm syndrome X Munchausen by proxy syndrome”.
The original poster responds with an excellent old article questioning trans surgeries.
Jest to zwyczajnie nieprawda: nawet lewicowe publikacje były wielokrotnie zmuszone przyznać, że "tranzycja" nie pomaga:https://t.co/4GIbkxsUfj
New Data Show “Gender-Affirming” Surgery Doesn’t Really Improve Mental Health. So Why Are the Study’s Authors Saying It Does?
This is an absolutely fascinating example of “agenda science” and intentional misrepresentation of data. Check out the summary of the article:
Data from a new study show that the beneficial effect of surgery for transgender people is so small that a clinic may have to perform as many as 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health treatment. Yet that’s not what the authors say. That the authors corrupted otherwise-excellent data and analyses with a skewed interpretation signals an abandonment of scientific rigor and reason in favor of complicity with activist groups seeking to normalize infertility-inducing and permanently disfiguring surgeries.
This is EXACTLY what is wrong with science all over the place now. COVID science is just like this. Mask science, too. This dishonesty of interpretation is everywhere. AGENDA SCIENCE.
Here is the full text of the article, saved from censorship.
A new study appearing last month in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that “gender-affirming” surgery is associated with reduced demand for subsequent mental health treatment in a sample of persons diagnosed with “gender incongruence.” Predictably, such news received wide media interest and coverage. And yet even a cursory reading of the study itself tells a far less optimistic story than the media narratives—as well as the authors’ own inexplicable confidence—have offered. Indeed, the analyses would seem to suggest the benefit of a hormonal or surgical course does not outweigh the demonstrable physical and financial costs of such treatments. Future studies might suggest otherwise, but not this one.
The study’s shortcomings have nothing to do with the data, nor the methods employed by its authors (and public health researchers) Richard Bränström and John Pachankis. The data come from the Swedish Total Population Register, a massive, longitudinal survey effort that collected information from over 9.7 million Swedes, or about 95 percent of the country. No complaints there. The analyses are high-quality: the authors tracked respondents over time and assessed their use of mental health treatment (for a mood or anxiety disorder) in 2015, as well as other related measures (such as hospitalization after a suicide attempt), as a function of time since gender-affirming hormone and surgical treatment. Its measurement precision is excellent, and would satisfy most methodological purists. So far, all good news. But then come the scholarly interpretations of the study’s results, which are remarkably out of step with the far more modest conclusions they merit.
The study found no mental health benefits for hormonal interventions in this population. There is no effect of time since initiating hormone treatment on the likelihood of subsequently receiving mental health treatment.
First, a word about the hormones: the study found no mental health benefits for hormonal interventions in this population. There is no effect of time since initiating hormone treatment on the likelihood of subsequently receiving mental health treatment. Given the surge in interest, demand, and supply of hormonal therapies to self-identified transgender persons today, you would think that it is a solution that pays obvious benefits in reduced subsequent need—over time—for treatment of mood or anxiety disorder, or hospitalization after a suicide attempt. Yet there was no statistically significant effect. In fact, the confidence intervals actually reveal a nearly significant aggravating effect of hormonal treatment on subsequent mental health needs.
It is the surgical effect, however, that has grabbed all the attention. Bränström and Pachankis detected a statistically significant effect of time since last “gender-affirming” surgery on reduced mental health treatment. The adjusted (for controls) odds ratio for this was 0.92, meaning that, among respondents diagnosed with “gender incongruence” who then received gender-affirming surgical treatment, the odds of being treated for a mood or anxiety disorder (in 2015) were reduced by about 8 percent for each year since the last surgery. In other words, it would appear that the surgery—or more typically, the series of surgeries—benefited their mental health.
But the authors discuss a “linear decrease” in seeking subsequent mental health care that is simply not visible in the study’s graphs, where post-surgical mental health treatment hovers stably around 35 percent among those in their first nine years after surgery, and then drops to only 21 percent of those patients who are in their tenth (or higher) year since their last surgery. However, only 19 total respondents reported their last surgery as having been completed 10 or more years ago. By contrast, 574 (out of 1,018 total) reported their last surgery as having been conducted less than two years ago. (Surgical treatment is clearly surging.) This means that the apparently helpful overall effect of surgery is driven by this comparatively steep drop in mood/anxiety treatment among only 19 patients. By the math, that would seem to indicate that four out of these 19 Swedes (i.e., 21 percent) sought help in 2015 for mood/anxiety problems.
While the study reports the adjusted odds ratio of the overall effect of time since surgery (0.92), which I cannot replicate without having data access, you don’t need the data to calculate an unadjusted odds ratio from the information presented there. This can tell us the baseline effect of time since surgery on receiving mood and anxiety treatment, only without the controls (like age, income, etc.). Doing this reveals the fragility of the study’s key finding: if a mere three additional cases among these 19 had sought mental health treatment in 2015, there would appear to be no discernible overall effect of surgery on subsequent mental health. The study’s trumpeted conclusion may hinge on as few as three people in a data collection effort reaching 9.7 million Swedes, 2,679 of whom were diagnosed with gender incongruence and just over 1,000 of whom had gender-affirming surgery.
The study’s trumpeted conclusion may hinge on as few as three people in a data collection effort reaching 9.7 million Swedes, 2,679 of whom were diagnosed with gender incongruence and just over 1,000 of whom had gender-affirming surgery.
An increase of just three treated individuals (from 4 to 7 of 19) brings the overall effect to zero. On the other hand, a decrease of just three treated individuals (from 4 to 1 out of 19) yields an (unadjusted) odds ratio of 0.88, which would enable a claim of a 12-percent reduction in mental health assistance from getting the surgery. These large swings in estimates are due to very small adjustments in the data. As is often the case with small samples, tiny changes lead to large fluctuations in estimated effects. But, for this patient population, you are not going to find larger data collection projects than the Swedish data. This is as good as it gets when it comes to studying transgender medical experiences and outcomes.
Another helpful statistic I calculated is called the NNT, or “Number Needed to Treat.” It’s a measure of clinical impact. In this study, the NNT appears to be a staggering 49, meaning the beneficial effect of surgery is so small that a clinic may have to perform 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health assistance [ref] In this case, the NNT = -1 * [1/[(OR-1)UER] + OR/[(OR-1)(1-UER)]]. Using an adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 0.92 and an unexposed event rate (UER) = 0.453, I get NNT = 49 cases. The UER I employ here comes from the mood/anxiety treatment rate for “perioperative” individuals with gender incongruence, as reported in the study’s Figure 1. The term “perioperative,” however, is vague and not defined by the authors. (It could mean right before or right after surgery.) It is not, however, a control group (that is, of Swedes diagnosed with gender incongruence who have not pursued surgical treatment). However, even such a control group would have limitations, including selection bias (e.g., screening for co-occurring mental illness or a lower level of gender dysphoria). Indeed, a prospective randomized controlled trial is not possible with this population. Nevertheless, the number employed offers a reasonable baseline UER, given the available data. NNTs below 10 “usually denote a worthwhile difference when comparing one intervention with another,” notes Leslie Citrome in “Quantifying Clinical Relevance.”[/ref]. If no other treatment was available, or the treatment was not invasive and the hazards were insignificant, clinics might consider surgery a low-risk but low-payoff approach. But none of those applies here. Conducting 49 surgeries to secure one additional patient who benefits? Unheard of.
The authors are nevertheless quick to declare that “this study provides timely support for policies that ensure coverage of gender-affirming treatments.” I cannot see how such confidence is merited. Time since hormonal treatment yielded no discernible effect on subsequent use of mental health treatment, while the modest effect of surgery hinges on a handful of cases from an earlier era (10 or more years ago) when very few gender dysphoric patients pursued surgery at all. And it’s not a leap to wonder whether those who did so a decade ago are a different kind of group than those who do so today. Moreover, suicide—the threat that seems to prompt all the urgency in doing something radical to alleviate psychological distress in these patients—may well have claimed an unknown number of Swedes who had had gender-affirming surgery ten or more years ago. We just don’t know, because the study does not track completed suicides for this sample.
If this were a clinical trial seeking to establish the efficacy of a particularly invasive medical treatment in comparison with a non-invasive standard protocol, there is no way that these published results would favor the invasive treatment—in this case, “gender affirming” surgery—when the statistical difference in outcomes was so tiny and fragile. This is not, contrary to what Bränström told ABC News, an evidence-informed treatment. That the authors corrupted otherwise excellent data and analyses with a skewed interpretation signals an abandonment of scientific rigor and reason in favor of complicity with activist groups seeking to normalize infertility-inducing and permanently disfiguring surgeries.
Physicians should not be pushed to prescribe such profoundly consequential treatment by threat of call-out, malpractice suits, patient demand, or—in this case—the overreaching interpretations of quality data. Clinicians are being bullied into writing a radical prescription based on fear, not on sensible conclusions from empirical data.
But this reasonable position is getting more difficult to defend. Less than two months after another team of activist psychiatrists landed a weak study on “conversion” therapy in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, its lead author has commenced a movement aimed at a wholesale ban on such a notion. This is alarming, especially since the idea itself—“converting” from having become convinced you are born in the wrong body to concluding that you can live with the body you have—is nonsensical. There is no defined psychotherapeutic method for treating gender dysphoria that can be widely characterized and consistently identified as “conversion therapy” in order to be banned. Nor has there been a clinical trial evaluating specific psychotherapeutic methods of counseling gender dysphoria that could potentially demonstrate whether such methods are helpful or harmful.
This is not how normal medical research works.
Can’t end this discussion without some interesting discussion of trinitite.
Right, there was probably a meteor strike. No way something like that doesn’t get the “why did this happen” treatment from generations to follow. Here’s the Forbes article.https://t.co/6WVj4kxPzs
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Word of The Week:
Brix
unit of measurement
Degrees Brix (symbol °Bx) is a measure of the dissolved solids in a liquid, and is commonly used to measure dissolved sugar content of an aqueous solution. One degree Brix is 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution and represents the strength of the solution as percentage by mass. If the solution contains dissolved solids other than pure sucrose, then the °Bx only approximates the dissolved solid content. For example, when one adds equal amounts of salt and sugar to equal amounts of water, the degrees of refraction (BRIX) of the salt solution rises faster than the sugar solution. The °Bx is traditionally used in the wine, sugar, carbonated beverage, fruit juice, fresh produce, maple syrup and honey industries. The °Bx is also used for measuring the concentration of a cutting fluid mixed in water for metalworking processes.
As opposed to
Birx
Scarf Wench
Have not read her book, I must admit. Nice scarf.
YouTube says “violins” while I’m looking for “Wheatie epic music”, so let’s go with that….
Hey – what about the cellos?
Yeah! You remember last week…..
But we simply have to finish with the cellos!
Yeah, I’m spending far too much time in the near vicinity of Marxists and their downstream effects, and it shows. But still, kinda fun.
Continuing to pray for Carl. Thank you to DePat for helping out with a perfect Sunday message about Sunday itself!
And now for some useful scoop from the front lines.
TL;DR – Ohio has a sneaky “children’s sexual rights amendment” on the ballot.
In the course of our political work, I’ve come into contact with an interesting assortment of people representing a wide variety of political interests. There is often some “adjacency” and “intersectionality” as the other side loves to say, and in particular we run into specific candidates, issues or causes which matter to our group.
You may or may not have been following the August “Issue 1” vote in Ohio, which was designed to make it harder to amend the Ohio constitution – meaning a 60% vote for passage of amendments instead of just 50%. The proposal had other features that weakened it, but the main factor leading to its defeat was the fact that the Ohio Dems had an abortion amendment coming in November, and that amendment was unlikely to get 60%+ support. The Demmunists got out the vote to defeat fundamental improvement of the Ohio constitution, using abortion. It worked like crazy.
The new abortion amendment is likely to pass in November, ironically as “Issue 1”, but worried Dem operatives have confided that the proposal has two weaknesses which give them a bad feeling. Some have even called these two problems “poison pills” in the amendment.
One is that the amendment leaves open the option for abortion due to “mental health of the mother” until birth, despite otherwise making abortion restrictable once the baby is viable (which is not well-defined). Pro-life forces can usually get voters out to the polls on this.
The other weakness is that the amendment implicitly removes parental rights regarding one’s own children, because the “reproductive rights” are granted to “individuals”, not adults. The term “individuals” is designed to include teens, and even logically includes younger children. So the right-to-life people are focused on the problem of abortion without the consent of the parents. This is also something that can bring pro-life voters to the polls.
But THESE are not the worst aspects of the bill.
The part of the amendment which grants this right to all individuals, which necessarily includes children of unspecified age, covers not just abortion, but anything of a reproductive nature. The amendment uses specific language to say that it is not limited to the examples listed, which include abortion and fertility, but which curiously do not include sex change or “gender affirming care” – and yet these things and more would clearly be covered as reproductive.
In other words, this amendment is a sneaky way to take away all parental rights regarding sex change of children – or indeed, anything else touching on reproduction.
I repeat – this amendment allows children to submit themselves to “gender change”, and takes away all parental rights to oppose it.
The amendment MAY even take away parental rights regarding sex education, or anything where the “individual” has “reproductive rights”.
Do you see what they’re doing here?
The amendment uses tricky lawfare wording to distract and deceive voters, implying that it is mainly about abortion, when it is dangerously relevant to transgender issues.
An overt sexual rights amendment for children could never pass, but an abortion amendment might.
It’s very interesting to note that Ballotpediavery deceptively HIDES the sneaky “not limited to” wording of the amendment in their description of it, except when they are forced to quote the amendment verbatim.
Et tu, Ballotpedia?
The Dems are getting ahead of the storm on the REAL sneakiness by making sure the controversy is all about Republicans changing the term “fetus” to “unborn child” on the text of the ballot issue, which generally clarifies the abortion part without changing the meaning in any significant way, in my opinion. Thankfully, the Republicans did NOT try to conceal the “not limited to” part, so we can still make that case without contradiction.
Very typical Dem behavior – distract to a smaller, winnable controversy. And, of course, the leftist media is helping. And very typical RINO idiot behavior, following the left’s laser pointer focus on minor stupidity instead of WINNING on the fact that this is exactly what the Democrats call it: Ohio Issue 1, Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative. The trick is, this amendment should really be called Ohio Issue 1, Children’s Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including But Not Limited To Abortion, Sex Education, Gender Reassignment, and Sex with Adults Initiative.
Are you seeing how bad this is, and how stupid the Republicans are?
They should be printing up yard signs in big bold letters:
SAY NO TO CHILDREN’S SEXUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
This bill for an amendment, if it passes, will destroy public education in Ohio. [Admittedly, some conservatives are actually rubbing their hands in glee at this possibility!] Teacher’s unions will be utterly free to “trans your kids” and even more, under the color of an “individual’s reproductive rights”. Whether the bill destroys education completely depends on whether private schooling can lock out transgender ideologues from their teaching staff. Nobody can trust left-wing teachers once this passes.
So watch out for this CHILDREN’S SEXUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT – which is definitely a DEMS CAN TRANS YOUR KIDS AMENDMENT – and see if the national conservative media catches on to its insidious nature RE spreading the trans agenda to red states using abortion. If they don’t, Ohio will join Michigan and California as a “fleeing resident” state starting next year.
Note how the “pro-choice” side and the old feminists (including TERFs) were THROWN UNDER THE BUS by the Pritzker transgender males to get their much bigger agenda into law. “You want to protect abortion, ladies? Here, try this amendment!” The Pritzkeroids don’t care if people catch on and abortion is defeated, because their number one fundraising issue is still preserved if they lose. A simple 12-week bill (Robert Kennedy Jr. gets this) would PASS and WIN in Ohio, satisfying everybody on their bottom lines, but NO, we can’t have THAT!
Does the amendment do anything to protect pedophiles and sexual consent by minors? With the lunatic leftists on the Ohio Supreme Court, I am certain that it does. These goofballs actually decided that bail increases based on danger of the accused individual to the public were illegal, until an amendment to allow higher bails for dangerous criminals was passed over Demmunist objections.
Remember – THIS BILL ENSHRINES REPRODUCTIVE/SEXUAL RIGHTS FOR MINORS.
The left always goes too far. The trick is catching them early.
And here I thought this was an exciting election already!
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Word of The Week:
muster
verb, noun
To call (troops) together, as for inspection.
To cause to come together; gather; assemble.
To bring into existence or readiness; summon up: synonym: call.
A gathering, especially of troops, for service, inspection, review, or roll call.
The persons assembled for such a gathering.
A muster roll.
A gathering or collection.
A flock of peacocks.
idiom (pass muster) To be judged as acceptable.
Etymology (2)
Middle English mustren, from Old French moustrer, from Latin mōnstrāre, to show, from mōnstrum, sign, portent, from monēre, to warn; see men- in Indo-European roots.
Middle English, from Anglo-Norman monstrer, to show etc. and Middle French mostrer, moustrer (whence the noun monstre, which gave the English noun), from Latin mōnstrāre (“to show”), from monere (“to admonish”).
Used in sentences
She managed to muster the courage to ask him to the movies. The team will need all the strength they can muster to win this game. Opponents are unlikely to be able to muster enough votes to override the veto. They can be removed from store shelves if they don’t pass muster with the agency. That was the method of accounting for passenger attendance at musters both for training and in the event of an actual emergency.
Time for some Keith Urban with a video that goes weirdly well with the small-town urban cowboying of my new local political activist lifestyle.
Check out the big band CMA live version, too!
https://youtu.be/wWNAQYaLadI
And just in honor of all the old guys who still rock!
Praying for Carl to get through this bout of Captain Corona unscathed.
Thank you all for putting up with my absence. Big thanks to Valerie for subbing for Carl on short notice.
We’re not even out of summer and it’s basically 10 weeks until the election. Not sure I can keep up this pace all the way to the end – and this is an OFF-YEAR election! How do these people do it? I cannot keep up with them.
I’m learning so much I never knew. But they created millions of “new baby Trumps” when they went after Trump, and I’m one of them. They created people who decided that the only way to fight these commies is to get out in real life and ENGAGE.
And we WILL. The political response that you FEEL as they go after Trump is coming back at them from 1000 directions, and WE are one of them.
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