Rogers must be somewhat strapped forcash if they're selling off three of their Ontario radio stations.
Corus has launched "The Ben Mulroney Show." No need to thank me for the bad news.
Dan Hennessey, the guy who voiced Braveheart on "Care Bears", Chief Quimby on "Inspector Gadget" and a few other characters from my childhood, has died at 82. Dang!
CP24 has relocated to Agencourt, for however much longer it continues to exist.
Dear Friends:
Having a hectic few weeks leading up to the Madoc Legion Open House and BBQ this Saturday Nov.30 AND preparing a Float - both as part of the Madoc Enchanted Christmas Event. But almost there!! :D Hope everybody can come out to make this event a great one - for the Legion and for the community!
And starting it all off - we have Madoc's Open Mic on Friday!! Looking forward to seeing old friends and new - and having a great evening!
We don't have Jerry this week - but we do have one of his sound boards! So Robert will be making you sound as good as you do already - with a little less sophistication. (: We have the mics and stands and monitors and PA system, music stands, remotes - and the greatest audience around! With many of our fine local musicians and a truly terrific bartender - it's sure to be a lot of fun!
So see you soon! We'll be looking for you. And if you miss the Open Mic there's more live music at the Legion the next day 2:00-5:00 with Mike Tremblett as well as hamburgers and a draw for the Christmas Raffle Baskets of local products - put together by members of Harvest Hastings!! You will also have an opportunity to buy a ticket for the Nov.30 draw at the Open Mic.
Have a great weekend - whatever you do! (Posters attached)
Elizabeth & Robert
The following is a response to this video.
First of all, spending time alone with women and not being in fellowship were not Lawson's real issues. Rather, it is quite evident the disgraced man's real problem was that he didn't care about people in the first place, only using certain people, i.e. young women for what he wanted.
Lawson's not being a glorified guest preacher at Trinity Bible Church doesn't seem like it would be the most difficult thing to prove: just find two or three congregants who can witness they were there the Sunday morning he was voted as their pastor.
This of course does not at all reflect well on Trinity Bible Church. If I were going there and the preacher just came in, delivered his sermon and high-tailed it out of there, I would be eagerly looking for an opportunity to speak to him about that.
Also, how did Trinity go so long without permanently filling the pulpit in the first place?
Did none of the elders or deacons, you know, the church government, find it odd the only people, apparently to the exclusion of everybody else, Lawson wanted to spend time with were the young adults. Kind of like the story of the alleged 9/11 terrorists who went to a flight school in Florida wanting to learn how to take off but not how to land.
The true way for Christians to make sure they don't go down Lawson's path a(and that's asuming the man was ever saved and started out with pure, godly motives to begin with) is to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Learn to see women as Christ sees them, as fellow human beings created in the image of God. This view would then be totally different from the view of the world and much of the church, since the church is just like the world, that sees women as objects. Whereas the world says touch them all you want, the wordly church says don't touch them.
Now to Good Fight's comments about fellowship. As if being in fellowship and finding "a good, solid church" are the same thing. There's precious little real fellowship in most so-called Bible-believing churches.
As for accountability, the state of the modern church shows one can be a member in good standing and get away with horrible sins. The first thing about accountability is that you have to be accountable to God. If I am not willing to take my sins before my Lord and Saviour in repentance then no amount of human intervention or interaction toward that end is going to do me any real good.
Secondly with regard to accountability, I have to be willing to confess my sins to my brothers and/or sisters as James instructs. Healthy churches aren't going to ask you alitany of questions on a regular basis about what you might bbe up to, nor are they going to come and search your house for stuff a Christian shouldn't have. The Christian needs to feel that he is in an environment where he can trust the brother or sister to whom he might confess a sin that they will practice confidentiality, love and compassion without compromise. You do not by and large find this in the institutional church.
You get precious little encouragement in most institutional churches, too. In fact, they're good places to go if you want to be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
"At least find fellowship with other believers the best you can."
I feel that I have that, even though I am more or less outside the institutional church. I have a number of fellow believers with whom I meet up on a somewhat regular basis, whether in person or on the phone. We encourage each other and there is a freedom between they and myself to be open about things.
God forbid I or any of these friends I also call brother and sister in Christ ever fall into the any of the sins mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5 but I would like to think that, if one of us did, the other one would go through the Biblical process with regard to them.
"Maybe you need to move somewhere, man."
Yes, because that's so easy for most people to do.
I would never advocate a true lone wolf approach for any Christian, but the institutional church has forsaken the assembling together. We are supposed to be one in Christ, but church organizations often have division from other church organizations for ridiculous reasons.
When I talk to my sister on the phone or meet with my brother for lunch, the fruit of that let's me know that two saints have just assembled.
Some of the comments about Blessed Hope at the end of this video do somewhat come off as self-serving.
Here's more insight into Trump's potential cabinet and what these people are truly about.
Here's a recording of various radio stations from January 28, 1977 in the midst of a huge snowstorm that hit the Great Lakes region. Needless to say, there are several interesting things about this aircheck:
There are stations in here I'd never heard of before or was at most only vaguely aware of, such as WJJL and WWBK.
There is a brief aircheck of WOKR-TV Rochester with "Bowling for Dollars."
There is an aircheck of the now defunct WQXR-AM New York, the classical music station.
I didn't know disco had penetrated that much into the culture by as early as January '77.
The name Slepian connected with Buffalo always gives me pause.
There was an incredible variety of artists featured in that Castle's commercial.
Listen to it here.
National Review
‘Trust the Gender Science That We Won’t Publish’
By Abigail Anthony
October 23, 2024 6:24 PM
In 2015, Johanna Olson-Kennedy began leading a study on the effects of puberty-blocking drugs in adolescents. The researchers received nearly $10 million in government funding and, as part of the study, followed 95 children with gender dysphoria for two years to evaluate changes in mental health.
According to a 2020 article by Olson-Kennedy and other researchers, significant portions of the children in the cohort experienced serious problems before medical treatment: “Elevated depression was endorsed by 28.6%, and nearly a quarter (23.6%) endorsed lifetime SI [suicidal ideation], with 7.9% endorsing a past attempt. Just over one-fifth of the cohort scored in the clinical range for total anxiety (22.1%); 16.8% endorsed clinical-range physiological anxiety, 21.1% endorsed clinical-range worry, and 15.8% endorsed clinical-range social anxiety.”
According to a New York Times article published today, Olson-Kennedy said the drugs did not lead to mental-health improvements. She offered the explanation that the children had been doing well before the study began, stating, “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.”
Progressives have insisted that so-called gender-affirming care for minors is medically necessary because the children with gender dysphoria will commit suicide without it. The activists deceive parents into accepting gender-related treatments for their children by asking, “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” But now that the evidence doesn’t suggest that such drugs improve mental health, progressives claim that the children were perfectly fine before.
Certainly, the deliberate mischaracterization of research is dubious and troubling. But that isn’t the worst scandal: Nine years after receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers have not published the data.
Why? Well, Olson claims that she plans to publish the data, but the team has been delayed due to politically motivated funding cuts. Aside from that lame excuse and immature finger-pointing, Olson-Kennedy also told the New York Times that the findings might support the legal bans on gender-related medical treatments, one of which is being evaluated by the Supreme Court this term. “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said, adding that “it has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
She further expressed worries that the study’s findings could be used in court to advance the argument that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,” referring to children who consider themselves transgender. In other words, the data shouldn’t be released — at least not during this SCOTUS term — because they would show that critics of gender-related medical treatments are correct.
The data, if they ever are published entirely, would likely have political outcomes that Olson-Kennedy dislikes. But they would almost certainly have financial and professional consequences for her personally. Olson-Kennedy is the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, which is considered “the largest transgender youth clinic in the United States.” According to a biography, she is a “national expert” and “has been providing medical intervention for transgender youth and young adults including puberty suppression and cross sex hormones for the past 16 years.”
In a court document from 2023, she stated that “I have provided services for approximately 1,200 young people and their families” and currently had about 650 patients up to age 25. Olson-Kennedy is the president-elect of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health. Ultimately, she had a strong personal incentive for the study to arrive at a particular result — and without that desired result, she’s withholding the data. I’m tempted to reason that the evidence must be strong and contrary to what Olson-Kennedy prefers, or else there wouldn’t be an aversion to publishing it.
Scientists, like researchers in any other field, should be committed to one particular outcome: the truth. The “scientists” who refuse to publish results with politically inconvenient outcomes abdicate their academic titles and reduce themselves to activists. Yet, in today’s culture, we’ll continue hearing the same argument: You disgusting transphobic bigots should trust the science and the experts — even when we won’t publish the data.
Chapter 1
1: Habakkuk saw the condition of Judah in a special way: with a heart that was exceedingly troubled at the way things were.
2: Just like our land today, Judah was full of violence.
3: Habakkuk was wondering what part he had to play in all this. Habakkuk surmised God had placed him in the land of Judah in that specific time for a particular reason.
4: The courts were corrupt.
5: God replies to Habakkuk, "I'm going to do something about all this."
"What are you going to do, Lord?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me."
6-11: "I'm going to have the Babylonians invade and take this nation into captivity."
12-17: "How can you do that, Lord?! They're more wicked than we are!"
Chapter 2
1: When Habakkuk didn't receive an answer to this last question right away, he resolved to wait for one. Habakkuk expected to be reproved, but that didn't mean he was going to give up on God replying to him. Meanwhile, Habakkuk went about his business in eager anticipation.
2-19: God answers Habakkuk, in part, with the phrase that sustains all Christians: namely, "The just shall live by faith." (verse 4)
The explanation, I think, can be summed up as, "One day, Habakkuk, Babylon, because it is as wicked as it is, will also be destroyed, not only because of all the evil it has perpetrated against other nations but for how it has dishonoured and failed to worship and glorify Me."
Chapter 3
1: Habakkuk replies to the Lord.
2: Whenever Christians pray for justice to be done, we should also not neglect to, as well, ask God to remember mercy in His wrath.
3-16: Habakkuk looks back at incidents in Israel's history as well as to the future after what God has told him in the previous chapter.
17-19: "I know there are terribly difficult times ahead. However, even if all the crops fail and there's no food in the grocery stores, the big box stores, the dollar stores, the convenience stores, the gas stations, the restaurants, or anywhere else, I will still trust, rejoice and get my joy from the Lord because He gives me strength, enables me to walk through the parts of life that are difficult to navigate and lifts me up."
National Review
DEI Training Material Increases Perception of Nonexistent Prejudice, Agreement with Hitler Rhetoric, Study Finds
By Abigail Anthony
November 25, 2024 11:00 AM
A new study found that diversity, equity, and inclusion materials have a wide range of negative consequences, including psychological harm, increased hostility, and greater agreement with extreme authoritarian rhetoric, such as adapted Adolf Hitler quotes.
Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were preparing stories on the findings, but axed them just before publication citing editorial decisions.
The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released the study “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias” on Monday. The study examined whether the themes and materials common in DEI trainings foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts, and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors. The study consisted of three experiments — one focusing on race, one on religion, and the last on caste.
Although proponents of DEI trainings claim that they are designed to educate individuals about biases and reduce discrimination, the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators. In one experiment, the DEI materials made people more willing to agree with Hitler quotes that substituted “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the highest caste in the Indian caste system.
“Participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” the study reads. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”
In the experiment focused on race, the researchers randomly assigned 423 Rutgers University undergraduates into two groups: one control group exposed to a neutral essay about U.S. corn production, and the other exposed to an essay that combined material from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. After exposure to either text, participants were presented with the following race-neutral scenario: “A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”
The results showed that participants primed with Kendi and DiAngelo materials perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer, despite the absence of any racial identification and evidence of discrimination. Those participants also believed that the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant, had caused more harm to the applicant, and had committed more “microaggressions.”
In addition to imputing bias without evidence, the participants who read Kendi and DiAngelo were 12 percent more willing to support suspending the admission officer for a semester, 16 percent more willing to demand a public apology to the applicant, and 12 percent more willing to require additional DEI training to correct the officer compared to participants in the control group.
“Educational materials from some of the most well-published and well-known DEI scholars not only failed to positively enhance interracial attitudes, they provoked baseless suspicion and encouraged punitive attitudes,” the study states.
Lee Jussim, a professor at Rutgers University and one of the study’s authors, told National Review, said researchers purposely built some ambiguity into the scenarios.
“In social psychology, we purposely study situations that have some ambiguity in order to evaluate whether and when people’s biases influence their judgments of those situations,” he said.
In the experiment on anti-Islamophobia trainings, the researchers presented over 2,000 participants with either the essay about corn or content drawn from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding organization that addresses Islamophobia. The participants were then presented with a scenario involving two hypothetical individuals, Ahmed Akhtar and George Green, who were both convicted of identical terrorism charges for bombing a local government building.
The participants exposed to the corn essay perceived Akhtar and Green’s trials as equally fair and did not indicate any perception of Islamophobia. However, those exposed to anti-Islamophobia training materials rated Akhtar’s trial significantly less fair.
“These results suggest that anti-Islamophobia training inspired by ISPU materials may cause individuals to assume unfair treatment of Muslim people, even when no evidence of bias or unfairness is present,” the study states. “This effect highlights a broader issue: DEI narratives that focus heavily on victimization and systemic oppression can foster unwarranted distrust and suspicions of institutions and alter subjective assessments of events.”
The third experiment about caste involved nearly 850 participants and used materials developed by Equality Labs, a self-described “South Asian feminist organization” that works to “end caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, and religious intolerance.”
Participants were exposed to either caste-sensitivity-training material from Equality Labs or an academic essay about caste, then were presented the following scenario: “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.” (The names were reversed between respondents to avoid the possibility that the results reflected inferences drawn from the names themselves.)
“Rather than using a purely neutral control like the corn essay, we had a more historically accurate and less politically charged, less accusatory, control essay on caste to see if we still see pernicious effects of the DEI training,” Jussim said. “And the answer is yes.”
Compared to the group that read the neutral academic essay, the participants who were exposed to the DEI materials had a significantly higher perception of “microaggressions,” perceived harm, and assumptions of bias. Additionally, those who read the DEI materials showed a higher willingness to punish the admissions officer and assessed Hindus as more racist.
In the caste experiment, participants were interviewed and asked to rate the accuracy of the following Hitler quotes that replaced “Jew” with “Brahmin”: 1) “The Brahmin was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples. . . The Brahmins are a people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering,” 2) “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Brahmin,” and 3) “Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one virus: the Brahmin! We will get well when we eliminate the Brahmin.”
Compared to the control group, the participants primed with DEI content had more than a 35 percent increase agreeing with the “parasite” statement, a 27 percent increase in agreeing with the “devil personified” statement, and a 33 percent increase in agreeing with the “virus” statement.
The researchers concluded from the three experiments that DEI materials can “engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment.”
“This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment,” the report reads.
The study was set to be covered by Bloomberg and the New York Times, although both publications axed their articles just before publication, according to communications reviewed by National Review.
“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5 year history.”
Two reporters at Bloomberg had agreed to cover the study and wrote an article. One of the journalists had described the coverage as “an important story” in communications with the NCRI and expressed being “eager” to publish the article; that journalist had further stated on November 11 that the article should be published in the next few days.
However, an editor — Nabila Ahmed, the team leader for Global Equality at Bloomberg News who “lead[s] a global team of reporters focused on stories that elevate issues of race, gender, diversity and fairness within companies, governments and societies” — informed the NCRI on November 15 that Bloomberg would not go forward with the article.
The NCRI asked for either a scientific or journalistic explanation, and Ahmed directed the researchers to Anna Kitanaka, the executive editor of Bloomberg Equality. Kitanaka told the NCRI that what stories get published and when is entirely an “editorial decision,” and did not provide details on why the publication axed the article.
A New York Times reporter told the NCRI that he would cover the new study on DEI materials, and further told the institute that an article was prepared to run on either October 14 or 15.
However, on October 12, he told an NCRI researcher that the Times would “hold off” on covering the study on DEI due to “some concerns,” and suggested that the publication would revisit the study if it underwent the academic peer-review process.
Although the reporter disclosed that he did not have “any concerns about the methodology” and that someone at the Times’ “data-driven reporting team” had “no problems” with the study, he stated that he had concluded the study wasn’t strong enough after speaking with an editor.
“The piece was reported and ready for publication, but at the eleventh hour, the New York Times insisted the research undergo peer review after discussions with editorial staff — an unprecedented demand for our work,” an NCRI researcher told National Review. “The journalist involved had previously covered far more sensitive NCRI findings, such as our QAnon and January 6th studies, without any such request.” (The New York Times wrote to National Review and denied that the story was “ready for publication.”)
The Times reporter suggested that the research wasn’t strong enough.
“I told my editor I thought if we were going to write a story casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the work of two of the country’s most prominent DEI scholars, the case against them has to be as strong as possible,” he wrote to the NCRI.
“Our journalists are always considering potential topics for news coverage, evaluating them for newsworthiness, and often choose not to pursue further reporting for a variety of reasons,” a spokesperson for the New York Times told National Review. “Speculative claims from outside parties about The Times’s editorial process are just that.”
National Review has reached out to Ahmed and Kitanaka with Bloomberg but has not yet received a response.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated with comments from the New York Times.
This weekend, my computer speakers were picking up Pastor Melissa Scott.
So far, I like Jimmy, the new guy midddays on The Wolf.
Not surprised Westwood One is discontinuing syndication of the Daily Wire hosts, namely Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles. As I've written on here before, who wants to tune in at a specific time to hear audio from a few YouTube videos cobbled together with both commercial breaks and live reads from hosts during segments?
National Review
Woke Academics Fear Trump Will Make Science Great Again
By Andrew Follett
November 17, 2024 6:30 AM
Leading research institutions have only further discredited themselves with their fears that the Trump administration will depoliticize their work.
Woke academics funneling scientific funding toward political activism are terrified President-elect Donald Trump is about to Make Science Great Again.
Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, responded to the news in a series of now-deleted tweets about Trump being her once and future president by stating, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists” and urging “solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f*** them to the moon and back.” (Asterisks ours, not hers.)
Helmuth’s live-tweeted breakdown concluded with her asking advice “for what workplaces can do to help people who are devastated by the election,” showing that the activists attempting to take over science suddenly find themselves threatened. Helmuth is now leaving the publication.
Such activists have in recent years infiltrated even the hard sciences. They helped convince publications such as Scientific American and Nature to openly endorse Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, an action that even the Atlantic — which also endorsed Harris — admitted “undermines trust in expertise.” Records show that 93 percent of political donations from higher-education professionals went to Harris or other Democratic candidates.
Left unsaid is the clear worry that the massive taxpayer gravy train for left-wing causes masquerading as science is coming to an end. Government funders of science like the National Science Foundation openly admit they have paid $270 million since 2001 to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
And to be clear, this money has rendered American science increasingly untrustworthy.
“Perhaps one of my biggest worries . . . is that Trump will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science,” given his anti-science rhetoric, Lisa Schipper, a geographer at the University of Bonn in Germany specializing in global warming, told Nature. Nature goes on to worry about a Pew Research survey finding trust in science has fallen steadily since 2019.
But the magazine never asks whether, perhaps, this rising distrust of increasingly partisan science is merited. Even Nature admits elsewhere that roughly half of “scientific” research in “soft” fields like psychology cannot be independently replicated.
Helmuth, for example, studied psychology and tried to expand Scientific American’s coverage of it during the pandemic after running a lecture tour aimed at combating “misinformation through science journalism.” Hilariously, she was once a “neutral” judge for controversies in science. Perhaps the real misinformation was coming from inside Scientific American all along?
As I previously wrote for this magazine, “Republicans and independents are right to be skeptical when scientists make broad claims for their research but can’t get consistent results, or when scientific findings are twisted or misrepresented to support the researchers’ ideological beliefs.”
The idea that the entire country, even supposedly liberal bastions such as universities, is awash in racism and sexism has seemingly become a consensus among these once-respected scientific publications. For example, in October, just before the election, Science chimed in, citing a research paper that claimed to have discovered “some of the most robust evidence of racial bias in promotion and tenure” at America’s universities.
“Among more than 1500 tenure and promotion decisions at five U.S. research-intensive universities, Black and Hispanic faculty members received more negative votes than their equally productive white and Asian colleagues,” wrote Science magazine in its summary of the researchers’ findings.
“In sum, the results support the double standard hypothesis and provide evidence that different outcomes in P&T decision-making processes contribute to the sustained underrepresentation of URM [underrepresented minority] faculty in tenured faculty positions,” the paper claimed.
The credulity-straining hypothesis is that American universities, the most left-wing places on the planet, famed for their diversity initiatives, are incredibly prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and against women. In this alternative worldview, the University of Michigan alone spending a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) must have simply been a cover for the institution’s deep racism.
And mysteriously, nobody at Nature, Science, or Scientific American, or in the peer-review process, viewed this finding as odd, despite its basic statistical errors.
Analysis of the data by University of Buckingham political-science professor Eric Kauffmann shows clear evidence of “p-hacking” — effectively, torturing the data until they confessed to whatever the researchers wanted. The study’s findings claim that African-American and Hispanic scholars in universities are less productive because they contend with discrimination. Kauffmann’s analysis of the same data found exactly the opposite conclusion.
“Black and Hispanic candidates for full professor are significantly more likely to get promoted for their level of publications and grants than White or Asian candidates. Figure 3 shows a 10-20 point advantage for minority candidates over Whites/Asians,” Kauffmann wrote on his Substack. “This result is again significant at the powerful .1 percent level. . . . In short, academia discriminates against White and Asians when it comes to promoting people to professor.”
In other words, the data show a candidate’s perceived diversity resulted in a competitive edge, not in discrimination. But every single science publication’s reporting on the study favored left-wing racial ideology over scientific truth. As Kauffmann observed on X, “had they done the analysis properly, the paper would not have been published. But researchers and publications lapped it all up without question since it accorded with their priors.”
There’s little willingness and even less incentive in academia to question left-wing dogmas, which is why Scientific American claimed, with very little pushback, that European men invented women in the 18th century in order to have someone to oppress.
In an age when even DEI’s staunch backers in the New York Times admit that there’s no evidence DEI initiatives improve any of the problems they purport to solve, and quite a bit of evidence they make matters worse, why is “the science” going in the other direction?
It probably has something to do with the fact that academia has a powerful ideological — and, increasingly, financial — incentive to believe left-wing dogma, and all sorts of ways of manipulating data to make said data conform to such preconceptions.
Academia is privileging its own politically correct hypothesis, making a classic unscientific assumption of following ideology rather than the data. What’s worse is that Nature and Science are doing it, too. This raises the troubling prospect of a fundamentally biased canon of “scientific” knowledge.
How can academia be trusted when it gets something so obviously wrong? Maybe, just maybe, it can’t.
Can the new administration restore science funding to its rightful function of aiding the impartial search for truth, rather than serving as a taxpayer money-laundering scheme for progressive pet projects? Time will tell, but woke academia is on high alert.
This video makes an excellent point, but there is something I'd like to add.
Conversely to Voddie Baucham, it is pretty arrogant to think you couldn't mess up your salvation.
Christianity is a relationship with God, as so few of you big time preachers seem to emphasize. Voddie, if you took the attitude that your wife loves you and chose to marry you so therefore there's nothing you have to do to maintain the relationship and nothing at all you could do to ever cause that relationship to come to an end, how long do you think your marriage would last?
National Review
New Zealand Study: ‘Dearth’ of Evidence Supporting Use of Puberty Blockers
By Wesley J. Smith
November 21, 2024 2:00 PM
It is increasingly clear that there is little scientific basis for administering puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric youth. Consequently, many European countries have now effectively banned their use outside of official studies. Now, the New Zealand Ministry of Health has similarly found that there is a “dearth” of evidence supporting blocking normal adolescence in youngsters who feel that their gender is different from their sex.
The New Zealand study reviewed all the literature on the question published before September 30, 2023. In other words, it was a study of the findings of published studies.
First, it found that studies claiming that puberty blockers helped ease depression were of very poor quality. From “Impact of Puberty Blockers in Gender-Dysphoric Adolescents” (my emphasis):
block quote
Impact of puberty blockers on mental health and wellbeing outcomes: Six outcomes the review focused on were GD, depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidality and quality of life. Current evidence indicates a significant improvement in depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation for individuals treated with puberty blockers. However, the quality of this evidence is low with a high risk of bias.
block quote end
In other words, the studies showing benefit were not based on good science and were almost certainly infected by ideology.
And here’s the conclusion:
block quote
Evidence about the impact of GnRHa [a hormone blocker] on clinical and mental health and wellbeing outcomes is scarce, with available evidence largely of poor quality. While there are studies on non-medical interventions that show improvements in the mental health and wellbeing of gender-dysphoric adolescents, these generally rely on small, localised cohorts, making it difficult to extrapolate to other, larger cohorts.
block quote end
The science is not settled!
In terms of clinical outcomes, bone health and metabolic parameters in particular need ongoing monitoring in gender-dysphoric adolescents prescribed GnRHa. . . . Given the dearth and poor quality of evidence, and New Zealand-specific evidence, there is an urgent need for high-quality, longitudinal data and research to help us understand the specific needs of gender-dysphoric adolescents in New Zealand.
This study adds heft to those who consider it scandalous that the Biden administration continues to push so-called “gender-affirming care” as if it were settled science and “medically essential.” In particular, Admiral Rachel Levine deserves scorn for pushing puberty blockers (and surgeries) without age restrictions.
Also, shame on the American Academy of Pediatrics for obstinately continuing to push “gender-affirming care,” the transgender-health organization WPATH for its part in jump-starting this agenda, and medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine for validating it. Shame also on the states that have passed laws allowing courts to deny custody to parents who won’t allow their children to be subjected to this medical experimentation.
The transgender moral panic may finally be in retreat, at least when it comes to (mal)treating children. Policy-makers need to keep up the pressure.
