Quote:In recent weeks, several studies have emerged focusing on transgender individuals. One study in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior, for example, reported up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in states passing anti-trans legislation, including healthcare bans. Another study, with minimal loss to follow-up, found extremely low detransition rates among transgender youth over 6 to 10 years, along with high levels of satisfaction regarding their care. Yet, you won’t find these stories on The New York Times' website. Instead, as has become routine at the paper, there’s yet another hit piece on transgender care—one that, upon closer inspection, offers a distorted and unfounded portrayal of the current research and one researcher who has helped push that research forward.

The latest piece, which went viral in anti-trans circles on Wednesday, was written by Azeen Ghorayshi, who has a track record of publishing anti-trans articles, including a glowing profile of Jamie Reed, an anti-trans clinician who shared private information about patients at her clinic—some of which was later proven false. This new article makes explosive claims that Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a prominent gender researcher, is withholding potentially negative research on the risks and benefits of puberty blockers for transgender youth.

A further analysis of the article finds the central premise to be highly misleading.

Claim: Joana Olson-Kennedy is withholding research from the Trans Youth Care because of a charged American political environment over transgender people.

Fact: Twenty-eight studies have been published from the Trans Youth Care (TYC) Network study, including from patients on puberty blockers.

    “An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.”

Ghorayshi opens with a claim that Olson-Kennedy is withholding research on puberty blockers because of a “charged American political environment.” The research in question comes from the Transgender Youth Care (TYC) Network study, funded by the National Institutes of Health to evaluate the effectiveness of gender-affirming care for transgender youth. In her interview with Olson-Kennedy, Ghorayshi cites a quote from what was described as a “wide-ranging interview” on the researcher’s work. Olson-Kennedy explains that she is being meticulous with one of the registered studies on puberty blockers because she doesn’t want her findings “to be weaponized,” adding that the work “has to be exactly on point, clear and concise.” Ghorayshi then uses this quote to imply that Olson-Kennedy is withholding research for political reasons.

A closer look at the NIH-funded project’s research record shows that the team’s output has been extraordinarily prolific; if Olson-Kennedy is withholding research, her extensive publication history doesn’t reflect it. The project has resulted in 28 peer-reviewed papers, many with Olson-Kennedy as a co-author. These studies include those who are on puberty blockers, such as one on the height growth rate of transgender youth on puberty blockers, another comparing the effectiveness of puberty blocker implants, and a third showing that patients who presented for puberty blockers had better mental health than those who either waited, or were forced to wait, for hormone therapy. This is in addition to numerous influential studies the team has published on the positive effects of hormone therapy and other key characteristics of transgender youth.

Quote:    The reason that I shot my longtime friend and secretary, Mr Bayazid Elmas Doda, in his sleep without his suspecting at all is that I did not wish to leave him behind sick, in misery and without a penny, because he would have suffered too much.

Quote:One of the biggest remaining mysteries of Roosevelt’s counterfeit Nazi map is whether or not the president himself was aware of the ruse. After all—real or fake—the secret, unseen map worked entirely in Roosevelt’s interest.

Cull believes Roosevelt may have known, or at least suspected, that the map was a fraud. “What convinced me,” he says, “was that if you look at Roosevelt’s own handwritten edits in the first few drafts of his Navy Day speech, you can see that he crosses out a line that says ‘I have in my possession a map of undoubted authenticity’ and eventually revises it to ‘I have in my possession a secret map.’ It’s almost like he’s trying to distance himself from the smoking gun in those revisions.”

The Astounding Counterfeit Nazi Invasion Map You’ve Never Heard Of

Quote:Volume Five: The New Age

The American far right was brought to power with Ronald Reagan, through an alignment with the Christian Right, feeding into the neoconservatives ambitions of a Clash of Civilizations, a Hegelian Dialectic being played by Alexander Dugin, advancing the return of Russia as the Third Rome.

Representatives of the American Security Council (ASC) and Le Cercle, the synarchist umbrella organization of the Fascist International, were involved in the Jerusalem Conference, organized by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1979, which produced an agenda that decided to characterize Islamic terrorism as the new threat. The result was to provoke Soviets to invade Afghanistan, and a counter-offence led by factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, funded through the Iran-Contra Operation, in league with the Safari Club of Saudi Arabia, and BCCI, involving members of the Secret Team put together by Ted Shackley of the CIA, who had been involved in the assassination of JFK, the Golden Triangle heroin trade and the Watergate “plumbers.”

Members of the Secret Team were also involved in a blackmail network that connected them to Project Monarch, an extension of MK-Ultra mind-control. Closely associated was the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which conducted “remote-viewing” experiments known as Project Stargate. And, as a result of the Esalen Institute’s interest in the Russians’ use of “psychotronics,” and inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit and synarchist known as the “Catholic Darwin,” these influences produced the New Age movement, aligned with the environmental agenda of the Club of Rome, as well as the development of the personal computer and the Internet.

Esalen claims to have inspired Boris Yelstin’s conversion to capitalism. Yeltsin in turn appointed Putin as his successor, whose main ideologue is the leading synarchist of our time, Alexander Dugin, known as Putin’s Rasputin. In league with the agents of the Priory of Sion mythos, and inspired by the Third Secret of Fatima, Dugin is aiming to create the Empire of the End Times, uniting Russia with the nations of Eurasia against the NATO and America. His plan is in diametrical opposition to the Clash of Civilizations advanced by the neoconservatives, and pitted against the Christian Right, created by the Second New Right under Reagan within the Evangelical movement, as a Trojan Horse for neoliberal economic policies, through organizations like the Moral Majority and the Council for National Policy (CNP).

Team B
Secret Team
The Reagan Doctrine
Reaganomics
Second New Right
Project Monarch
Down Under
Sex, Lies and Wiretaps
Noosphere
Project Stargate
New Age
Psychic Warriors
Disclosure
Christofascism
The Clash of Civilizations
Black Order
Sacred Geopolitics
Third Secret of Fatima
Order of Eurasia

Quote:Elizabeth was not yet queen when, at the age of 25, the princess first met an American president. Harry Truman and his wife Bess hosted Elizabeth and Prince Philip on a two-day visit to Washington D.C. Acting on behalf of her father King George VI, who was gravely ill at the time, Elizabeth gave Truman an ornate 18th-century ‘over mantle’ to hang above a fireplace in the White House, as Pathé newsreel from the time shows. The president said that, while he had received many guests in Washington, “never before have we had such a wonderful young couple, who have so completely captured the hearts of all of us.”

Here’s How Every Meeting Between the Queen and a U.S. President Went

Quote:Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message?

Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!”

Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

Quote:“You look tired, Anne,” he said.

“I am tired, and, worse than that, I’m disgruntled. I’m tired because I’ve been packing my trunk and sewing all day. But I’m disgruntled because six women have been here to say good-bye to me, and every one of the six managed to say something that seemed to take the color right out of life and leave it as gray and dismal and cheerless as a November morning.”

“Spiteful old cats!” was Gilbert’s elegant comment.

...

It was November—the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul. Anne was not wont to be troubled with soul fog. But, somehow, since her return to Redmond for this third year, life had not mirrored her spirit back to her with its old, perfect, sparkling clearness.

Quote:It is nothing short of a culture scandal that the first US science fiction feature film STILL hasn’t had any sort of home video or online release. There’s a perfectly good copy of the film sitting in the archives of MoMa in New York, and it’s even dragged out every now and then for film festivals and exhibitions. But for some reason MoMa seems allergic to letting the general public get its hands on the movie.

A Journey in Science Fiction Movies

Quote:Although filmed as a regular comedy, The Last Man on Earth was banned by the Virginia State Board of Censors for having women contending over a single man. As stated by the Board in a 29 October 1924 memorandum:

Although "The Last Man on Earth" is a comedy which has somewhat elaborately been staged, and does not purport to carry a serious message, the picture is of such a nature as to justify its total rejection in its present form. It is full of suggestive situations and questionable sub-titles calculated to convey a double meaning. The dignity of womanhood is flouted in almost every reel and an effort is made to win the laughter of the beholder through indecent scenes and salacious or smutty sub-titles. Even if the sub-titles and situations depicted could pass muster, there would still be a question as to whether or not the costumes worn by the actors come within the bounds of propriety.

The story of the comedy represents women of various ages contending in the most shameless fashion for the possession of a young man. Little, if any, attempt is made to conceal the fact that they are impelled by sex impulse. In some of the scenes the suggestion is so broad as to give one a positive shock.

Virginia’s Board of Censors

Quote:Humanus is a "simulation game" (what we call "serious games" nowadays). It was designed by Paul A. Twelker and Kent Layden, and published, in 1973, by a company then called SIMILE II, and now known as Simulation Training Systems.

The game consists of a handbook and a cassette tape, and I happen to have one of the few remaining tapes (but not the handbook).

The game allows us to explore some of the hard issues that would befall people in a bomb shelter after a some kind of biological war or plague. The audio is relatively brief, but the questions it raises are profound, provocative and timeless.

Gather a small group of deep thinking players (middle-school-age on up) around your audio source. Once you start the audio, you'll hear what sounds like strange computer sounds followed by a computer-generated voice - uninflected, echoey. It announces its presence: "You are the survivors. This is a voice printout of your survival computer. You may call me Humanus."

Quote:In the perplexing subculture of UFO beliefs, individuals with cult-like followings and frequent claims associated with dubious “whistleblowers” aren’t uncommon. But how can you separate genuine voices from those leveraging UFO lore for personal or financial gain?

In a new documentary, Dark Alliance: The Inside Story of the Cosmic Con, filmmaker Darcy Weir dives into one section of the UFO counterculture, narrowing in on two well-known figures: David Wilcock and Corey Goode, presenting them as case studies in manipulation and the spread of misinformation within the UFO community and its associated areas of belief.

In Dark Alliance, Weir takes his viewers on a journey of exploration into how these two controversial figures came to fool not only the community they serve, but also some of the people who brought them to the top.

However, the cautionary tale Weir presents is far from new: the events he chronicles echo the actions of cults and similar groups from over the years, many of which bear a resemblance to some of today’s alleged UFO whistleblowers, self-proclaimed insiders, and cult leaders.



Inside America’s UFO Cults: A Look at Manipulation and Misinformation in the UFO Counterculture

Quote:For me, however, there is never a November 3 (what a date this continues to be!) that goes by that I do not think about another “Greek Island,” especially on this 25th Anniversary of its national exposure on NBC-TV’s “Dateline” documentary hosted by Stone Phillips.

This “Greek Island” was never intended to be a warm and welcoming place. In fact, it was nowhere near Greece, nor was it even an island, at all. But it was all too terrifyingly real!

The “Greek Island” indelibly imprinted into my November memory was the code name of a top-secret Cold War (Circa1960-1990’s) facility that lay underneath The Greenbrier, the legendary, five-star, historic resort in the hills of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

That secrecy effectively ended in May 1992 when the Washington Post Magazine published a cover story “The Last Resort,” that initially exposed it. But “the bunker’s reality” wasn’t made official until November 3, 1995 when NBC-TV’s “Dateline” program, hosted by Stone Phillips and produced by Chris Scholl, revealed it in a 20-minute featured segment.

Remembering ‘Project Greek Island’

Quote:Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A hypothesis with supporting evidence

Abstract

If all aspects of the mind-brain relationship were adequately explained by classical physics, then there would be no need to propose alternatives. But faced with possibly unresolvable puzzles like qualia and free will, other approaches are required. In alignment with a suggestion by Heisenberg in 1958, we propose a model whereby the world consists of two elements: Ontologically real Possibles that do not obey Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, and ontologically real Actuals that do. Based on this view, which bears resemblance to von Neumann's 1955 proposal (von Neumann, 1955), and more recently by Stapp and others (Stapp, 2007; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2006), measurement that is registered by an observer's mind converts Possibles into Actuals. This quantum-oriented approach raises the intriguing prospect that some aspects of mind may be quantum, and that mind may play an active role in the physical world. A body of empirical evidence supports these possibilities, strengthening our proposal that the mind-brain relationship may be partially quantum.

Quote:Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International, where he worked on a classified program investigating psychic espionage for the US government (now commonly known by one of the program's many codewords: Star Gate).
....
a degree in electrical engineering, magna cum laude and with honors in physics, from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), a masters in electrical engineering focusing on cybernetics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and then a PhD in psychology, also from UIUC. For my dissertation I developed and tested what was probably the first computer-based, artificial-intelligence-enhanced, touch-typing training system (in 1979).
...
As of November 2021, I've participated in some 42 TV and film documentaries, and I've been a consultant for a number of feature films with psi-oriented themes.

(11-04-2024, 05:52 AM)Bally002 Wrote: The hand sign given by politicians at the end of this latest OP was understood to me to be the sign of worshipping the devil with horns.  Thumb in or thumb out doesn't matter.

Anyway I'm behind the times as I'm an old fart but would never use this hand gesture due to beliefs.

Otherwise great insights,

Kind regards,

Bally)

Quote:In 1952 television was just beginning to make serious inroads in the American living room. Household penetration that year was at 34.2 percent, a sign of the coming boom that would take that number close to ninety percent by the end of the decade. The 1952 election marked a sea change in politics, in that it was the first year that candidates used television to communicate to voters.

That year also brought another new phenomenon: election night as a television event.

LIFE photographer Al Fenn spent election night in 1952 visiting network newsrooms to document their coverage, which was headlined by the presidential race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.

While the network news productions from 1952 inevitably look dated in comparison to what we see in modern digital age, plenty is not that different from what we know today.



But the most notable aspect of the 1952 election coverage was the urgency to let viewers know who was going to win—and it was especially true at CBS. The network deployed a room-filling UNIVAC computer that promised to predict the presidential election based on early voter returns. It was a good idea, but CBS’s problem in 1952 was that while the network had the technology, it didn’t trust the computer’s predictions, leading to a historic lost opportunity.

Political prognosticators had expected a close race between Eisenhower and Stevenson. So when the CBS computer predicted at 8:30 p.m. that Eisenhower would win the electoral vote by a landslide margin of 438-93, the network news director decided not to share the projection because it was so out of line with conventional wisdom. But in fact the computer had it right, almost exactly. The final electoral college result was 442-89 in favor of Eisenhower. Only hours after the original prediction did CBS reporter Charles Collingwood tell viewers that the computer had been way ahead of everyone else. This was a watershed demonstration of the power of technology, and of early data. In the coming years the practice of exit polling would help networks call many races as soon as the polls closed.

The modern detail that was notably missing from the 1952 election coverage was a big one—color coding for political parties. While you can see a shaded electoral map in the background of one photo, back then colors weren’t as meaningful or codified because Americans were watching in black-and-white. The idea of blue states and red states was still a ways away.

Quote:The 'Electronic Brain'

CBS' Charles Collingwood was the reporter assigned to UNIVAC, one of the world's first commercial computers.

"This is the face of a UNIVAC," Collingwood told the CBS audience. "A UNIVAC is a fabulous electronic machine, which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis of early returns as they come in."

The "face" Collingwood refered to was just the console. He sat in front of a mock-up of the console in New York. It was the size of a large desk, with something that looked like a blinking bookcase sitting on top. The real UNIVAC, which took up the better part of a room, was nearly 100 miles away in Philadelphia with its programmers and a CBS camera crew.

"It's there with its operator," Collingwood said. "On the right of the UNIVAC, there's something which looks like a typewriter. That's the way UNIVAC talks."

This explanation was rudimentary but the general public had never seen a computer work a live event before. And Collingwood was trying very hard to personify what was being called an "electronic brain" with lines like: "He's sitting there in his corner humming away."

Ira Chinoy, associate dean of journalism at the University of Maryland, wrote a [588 page] dissertation examining the introduction of computers on election night entitled: Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age.

"It was by no means a done deal that computers should be a technology used in news in any way, let alone on election night," Chinoy says.

For CBS, using a computer was a bit of a gimmick — a sideshow. But for Remington Rand, the company that made the UNIVAC, this was an enormous gamble.

"There was a clear awareness that if they messed this up on election night, it might set their nascent industry back quite a bit," Chinoy says.

And there was good reason for worry. Early in the evening things weren't going well for UNIVAC.

"Have you got a prediction for us, UNIVAC?" Collingwood asked.

There was no response. The typewriter didn't move and to the audience at home the UNIVAC must have looked like a big, dumb box.

"You're a very impolite machine I must say," Collingwood said. "But he's an awfully rapid calculator."

An Unlikely Result

This was the common scenario during the few times Walter Cronkite actually turned to Collingwood and the UNIVAC that night. But behind the scenes in Philadelphia not everything was as it seemed. The UNIVAC did make a prediction, but someone held it back. Most likely, it was the computer programmers themselves, and the most likely reason: because the prediction seemed so ridiculous.

Before election night 60 years ago, the race between Stevenson and Eisenhower looked close. But early in the night, with just over 3 million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted the odds were 100 to 1 in favor of Eisenhower.

Even early returns, without the aid of a computer, were indicating an Eisenhower landslide. But the odds still seemed inconceivable. The computer printout, revealed hours later, read: "It's awfully early, but I'll go out on a limb ... The chances are now 00 to 1 in favor of the election of Eisenhower." The printout read 00 instead of 100 because the programmers never imagined needing an odd greater than two digits.



It wasn't until after midnight that a Remington Rand representative, Art Draper in Philadelphia, came on the air with an explanation.

"As more votes came in, the odds came back and it was obviously evident that we should have had the nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place," he said. "It was right. We were wrong. Next year we'll believe it."

A Cultural Icon

UNIVAC's early "faltering" turned into a publicity coup for the company. Some newspapers later carried headlines like: "A Machine makes a Monkey out of Man." And UNIVAC became a cultural icon.

"It became synonymous with the product — like Kleenex and Xerox and Scotch Tape," says Alex Bochannek, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

The UNIVAC showed up on the cover of a Superman comic book. A Warner Bros. cartoon had Wile E. Coyote build one to help him capture the elusive Bugs Bunny.



But there was often an undercurrent of mockery, a hint that this supposedly all-knowing machine wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be.

"This idea of calling them Giant Brains gave them a lot more credit than they really deserved back then," Bochannek says. "They didn't have quite the brain capacity a lot of people attributed to them."

The Computer History Museum has one of the few remaining original UNIVAC consoles on display. It's a large panel propped on top of a 1940s-era steel desk with a keyboard. An operator used the keyboard to send instructions directly to the computer.

Much of the system was housed in a cabinet big enough for a person to walk in. There were more than 5,000 vacuum tubes and tanks of mercury (Mercury Delay Lines) where data was stored as sound waves for memory. But UNIVAC also had rows of magnetic tape drives for long-term storage.

"That is what really made this machine so useful to businesses," Bochannek says. "You had tapes with large capacity, which wasn't really available on these early computing devices."

Man Vs. Machine

Back in 1952, NBC also used a computer on election night: the Monrobot. It was much smaller than UNIVAC and less powerful, but it didn't falter on its prediction of an Eisenhower landslide. Still, says Chinoy, ambivalence about using a computer on election night continued for much of the decade.

"The way we think about technology, if we look in the rearview mirror," he says. "They march in, they became a fixture on election night and that's it. NBC actually backed away from using a computer in 1954 and decided a good reporter is better than any kind of statistical device."

Yet, all three networks were using computers by the next presidential election in 1956. ABC, however, staged a challenge: "Man vs. Machine."

The network invited pollster Lou Harris and a team of 100 reporters in the field to compete against a computer, Underwood's Elecom, to see who could call the election first. Again, it was a matchup between Eisenhower and Stevenson.

When it came to crunching numbers, the computer was untouchable, but the predictive models used in its programming were simplistic. UNIVAC was taking the early raw vote count and making comparisons with some past presidential elections.

Harris, who based his prediction on specific voting districts that he thought would mirror the overall outcome, tallied results with slide rules. His team won. And incumbent Eisenhower won by an even bigger landslide than in '52.

"Basically patterns emerge from data," says Harris, now 91. "If you can't read them right, then you can't tell the story."

Improving The Technology

Harris wondered if computers could do better. So he spent time at IBM, which by now had become the industry's leader. There, Harris pushed the IBM programmers to create more sophisticated election night software.

"I said, 'Look, I've got to get the computer to print out this, this and this,' " Harris says. "And they said, 'Good Lord.' It was multiple dimensions versus simple dimensions."

Harris, who had been John Kennedy's pollster for the 1960 presidential race, was contracted by CBS for the 1962 midterm elections. Harris, and his computer-generated predictions, were fed to Cronkite.

"He said to me after we made the first prediction, he said, 'Lou you better be right. My whole future depends on it.' I said, 'Walter, I'm sure it will be,' " Harris says.

Cronkite was calling race after race before anyone else, including the Michigan governor seat for George Romney. It was quite a coup because the returns, two hours after the polls closed, had Romney behind Democratic incumbent John Swainson.

The only governor race Harris couldn't call was in Massachusetts. And that vote resulted in a recall. Harris has been credited with coining the phrase "too close to call" that election night in 1962.

The Computerized Future

Although NBC walked away with more ratings share for its popular Huntley-Brinkley team, there was no doubt about who really won that night.

"This was a huge triumph for the then newly created CBS News election unit," says Martin Plissner, author of The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections.

Plissner joined CBS in 1963 and was the network's political director for more than three decades. Newsrooms, he says, were no longer questioning the value of computers on election night.

"They understood that the quality of the information they were getting out of it depended considerably on the quality of the information they were putting into it," he says.

In the last 60 years there have been election night disasters, but when the information was good and the programming was clever, computers could be immensely powerful tools.

In retrospect, Chinoy says, it may be hard to understand why computers didn't "march in" and take a central place immediately on election night 1952.

"New things engage us and also scare us," he says. "We're drawn to them, but they're disruptive."

You can see that on the CBS broadcast 60 years ago.

"This is not a joke or a trick," Collingwood told his television audience, "It's an experiment. We don't know. We think it'll work. We hope it will work."

In the end, it did. And of course, computers were also getting faster, more powerful. Big hulking early computers like the UNIVAC were shrinking. By the late 1960s, tiny electronic circuits, or microchips, would transform the industry and computers would begin to find their way into all of our lives.

The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President

Quote:No such shenanigans marred Leeds civic life on that Friday morning, as an amiable official party, including the Leeds Chief Constable and his deputy, Councillor F. Bentley, the Chairman of the Watch Committee, and other Councillors, took post on the steps of the Philosophical Hall on Park Row. The presence of the worthy assemblage was noted by a reporter and photographer from the Evening Post who had strolled along from their then Bond Street office to record the historic event:

“Up to the time of its beginning the usual burly figure of the policeman stood in the centre of the four roads. At the appointed minute the policeman stopped all four streams of traffic and retreated to the footpath. The electrical device came into instant operation” (16 March 1928).

When the Robots Came to Leeds