Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Hannibal]

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[Dr. Strangelove]

Voting to not even hold a Senate trial on constitutional grounds is the best possible decision for most Republicans. You get to present yourself as a Defender of the Constitution, even though the position is largely nonsense, and at the same time avoid taking a stand one way or the other on Trump himself.

[Jeff Buchanan]

On the J&J vaccine. They did make an announcement mostly involving share pricing. Its up and that's without the billions they'll make on their vaccine once that starts rolling - probably mid to late February. I'm holding out for the single dose. Not in any hurry. J&J said their letting the science and the regulators play out.

[crashcourse]

go to any VA and they have a whole department for transitioning men to women and vice versa

they occupy a huge amount of resources from a surgical/GU/GyN/mental health aspect

theres a lot more running around then you think in the VAs

the active duty military doesnt need that headache

[Hannibal]

I don't care if our Army can win wars.

What's important is whether it practices Political Correctness in a caring and sensitive manner.

[Dr. Strangelove]

go to any VA and they have a whole department for transitioning men to women and vice versa

they occupy a huge amount of resources from a surgical/GU/GyN/mental health aspect

theres a lot more running around then you think in the VAs

the active duty military doesnt need that headache

This was studied in 2016 by the Rand Corporation. Out of 1.2M active duty personnel, as many as 6,600 but probably closer to 2,500 are transgender. And out of those the military concluded that "maybe" 130 would request surgery for a sex change.

https://time.com/4874380/donald-trump-military-transgender-how-many/

[Mike]

Seems like elective surgery to me that shouldn’t be paid for with public funds.

[Hannibal]

It's not just the surgery -- hormone replacement therapy gets pretty expensive too. Not to mention mental health treatment for the cocktail of comorbidities that come along with trasngenderism. It's a mental illness and a severe one at that. There's a reason why 41% of them peacefully sunset themselves.

And then, of course, there's that whole issue of housing men with women and the increase in rape risk.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-sex-attacks-in-womens-jails-by-transgender-convicts-cx9m8zqpg

Coming soon to a military barracks near you:

Transgender prisoners are five times more likely to carry out sex attacks on inmates at women’s jails than other prisoners are, official figures show.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I don't care if our Army can win wars.

What's important is whether it practices Political Correctness in a caring and sensitive manner.

Lots of signaling by Biden in particular with his rash of EOs but let's look at this one.

First, let me get this out of the way. My wife's son, deceased 2.5 years ago at 42, was transgender (no surgeries though he did hormones for a while and considered it). For several years before settling back in FL, he was an actor, dancer and cross-dressing performer in NYC. He defined as male when I married my wife and began to be exposed to this lifestyle. In his time in NYC he defined as female. While living in FL, he performed drag shows in Fort Lauderdale. He made a lot of friends there, mostly gay, lesbian or trans, that we are still friends with. I know a lot about this community, transgender people and that just like you and I and the rest of the human race, there is a mix of utter ass-holes and great people. So, I'm biased about admitting transgenders to the military, TIFWIW.

I was also on active duty when women appeared in combat roles as pilots, naval flight officers and on the flight deck as maintainers. As a Squadron CO, I had to deal with all three. I hated it because it WAS a distraction but in about a year or two, it became no big deal. These were highly skilled officers and enlisted that deserved the respect of myself and every other Marine in my unit. That they had tits and a vagina made no difference whatsoever when it came to doing their jobs. All that I encountered were very good at what they did .... starting off having to prove they were good. That trans people who might have had surgery to change their genetalia, use hormones to grow tits or testosterone to grow a beard and develop muscles are still people who are capable of doing a job and if they do, who am I to question what they do.

Right now, I am very good friends with a reserve USAF MSGYT who is a load master. He's gay, his husband is a also gay and a cross dressing performer. You'd never know that the Air Force MSGYT is gay. His husband, well, no shit. He does his job and I can tell you he never would have been promoted to MSYGT if he didn't do his job. He's retiring from the reserves in February after 25 years of service. He enlisted at 18 and will retire at 43. He's already flying commercial heavy freight as a civilian load master world wide and makes a shit ton of money doing it. So what if he's gay.

Anyway, admitting trans, gays, whatever to the armed services is no big deal. I've lived the experience when women started serving. No bid deal. I was homophobic until I made an effort to be accepting of that life style when I married my wife and came to know her son .......talented, smart, a huge loss for us and the literally hundreds of friends who comforted us when he passed.

I get the hospital thing - I dealt with this when I practiced in a prison setting and trans prisoners were getting hormone therapy but no sex change operations. I had been married to my wife with a trans/gay son for a while and was already mostly accepting of that lifestyle. The only hard part was dealing with the ass-holes, prisoners. prison officials and doctors that tormented gays and trans people, with prisoners and occasionally correctional officers, physically harming gays and trans people offering stupidly that they deserved it.

I can't speak to the work load of medical surgical units that military and VA hospitals have to deal with. No experience so, I have to defer to Crash's take on that. But I have a sense a bigger deal is being made of that than it actually is. JMO.

[Hannibal]

Jeff --

Transgender "women" in prison commit sexual assault when they are housed with female inmates more often than the other female inmates, per the article above that I posted. i see no reason for the military to be any different. Transgenderism isn't homosexuality. Trans "women" can be still attracted to females. Housing unrelated people with the sex that they are attracted to in close quarters is a recipe for disaster. Before society lost its collective mind, we accepted this as self-evident.

Transgenders commit suicide at a 41% clip. Children and teenagers who take cross gender hormones find themselves permanently damaged by them if they later choose to transition back, but the transgender community openly encourages it anyways. Schools are starting to encourage it too. It's an extremely unhealthy community and lifestyle, both mentally and physically. We shouldn't indulge the illnesses of transgenders any more than we indulge the illnesses of anorexics or bulimics. It's not good for anyone involved.

[THE_WIZARD_]

I don't care if our Army can win wars.

What's important is whether it practices Political Correctness in a caring and sensitive manner.

Yes I just want us to be loved by terrorist nations...

[Jeff Buchanan]

I wrote yesterday about a study that was underway in Israel that had determined that the control arm in the study (conducted by a public health service unit) had found a 33% reduction in the likelihood of SARS-2 infections after 14-18d and one shot.

Clalit, Israel’s largest health fund, compared 200,000 people aged 60 or over who received a first dose of the vaccine to a matched group of 200,000 who had not been vaccinated yet. It said that 14 to 18 days after their shots, the partially vaccinated patients were 33 percent less likely to be infected.

The link is a twitter link. Fuck that. I want to see the study!!! Sorry, I got distracted.

Now, a second PH unit in Israel, conducting a separate study, has found the Pfizer vaccines are a slam-dunk measure to stop infections from occurring, well, caveats pertain and I still want to see the study. Regardless, it's encouraging and that kind of news we need more of.

........Maccabi’s research arm said it had found an even larger drop in infections after just one dose: a decrease of about 60 percent, 13 to 21 days after the first shot, in the first 430,000 people to receive it.

I smell a race to the top between these two Israeli PH units. I've heard Jews a re very competitive. heh. The NYT's article isn't paywalled. It was in tis evening's news feed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/world/middleeast/israels-vaccine-data.html?action=click&campaign_id=154&emc=edit_cb_20210126&instance_id=26439&module=RelatedLinks&nl=coronavirus-briefing&pgtype=Article&regi_id=66290138&segment_id=50326&te=1&user_id=eb3770cd26926d6908b2da6e075b25bf

[Jeff Buchanan]

In other vaccine news, Biden announced today the purchase of 200m more vaccine doses - I assume from Moderna and Pfizer. Pfft. Drop in the bucket with 2 shots required for coverage but signaling and messaging from the WH is strong for, as Talent notes, the folks who lap this up but don't know anything about it.

Just to underscore the sillyness and politics of all this. The Sun Sentinel ran a "breaking news story" this afternoon following a noon press conference Desantis held, that Desantis was back tracking on his claim that FL is reserving about 50% of it's allotted doses to insure that at risk seniors get full protection of two shots. The articles headline had little to do with the piece. It was an attack headline, false, that deep down in the written article, the author repeats exactly what Desantis said about reserving doses but not what she thought he meant. I raged for a moment and contemplated emailing the idiot then thought, no, vaccine politics are going to get worse. Ignore them, listen critically to the news, fact check everything.

By March with the single dose J&J vaccine FDA approved and in full production. We'll be rolling in vaccine, I can wait. I sense an impending "miracle" issuing forth from Washington about this time and a downing out of the doomsday naysayers not to mention a quietness over the liberal press about COVID.

[iam416]

We’ve already bought 200M from Pfizer and 400M (maybe more) from Moderna already. At Chairman Joe’s goal of 1M per day, we’ll get through those by Halloween of 2022.

[iam416]

I’m sure we’ve bought from others, too. PDJT was spreading risk — wisely.