A new paper estimates the number of gender surgeries performed over the period 2016-2020. Here's the breakdown by age:
The total number of gender surgeries in the 12-18 age group was 3,678, nearly all of them breast/chest surgeries. The annual number of surgeries started at 200 in 2016 and rose steadily through 2019 before dropping a bit in the COVID year of 2020:
At a guess, upwards of half of these surgeries were performed at age 18, which means minors received 1,839 surgeries, or 367 per year. In the most recent year studied (2020) the number was probably around 500.
Is 367 per year a lot or a little? I guess that's up to you to decide.
This is the 405-105 interchange near LAX. I've posted this photo before, and the only real difference is that I kept this one in color instead of desaturating it to black-and-white.¹ You wouldn't think that would matter much since it's not a colorful picture in the first place, but it does change the feel and texture a little bit.
¹In the B&W version I was also more aggressive about erasing the cars to produce a more deserted look.
Politico reports today on the strange partnership between progressives and hard right-wingers who don't want to reauthorize FISA Section 702, which has been routinely and massively abused in the past to spy on Americans. Until recently, the two sides mainly wanted to reform Section 702 so that the FBI requires a warrant before it's allowed to read emails, texts and so forth sent by Americans.
But lately the right-wingers have shifted. They are now focused on reforming "traditional" FISA:
Traditional FISA involves the use of court orders to surveil individuals physically inside the United States. Conservatives allege that the Justice Department has abused it to unlawfully spy on allies of former President Donald Trump — and in particular, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
....“The Carter Page investigation is just one example of the FBI abusing FISA to surveil American citizens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “I will be allowing FISA to sunset if we do not see significant reforms in the agency.”
FFS. But I suppose this isn't surprising. Conservatives these days are obsessed with conspiracy theories to the exclusion of almost everything else. In particular, they have spent years claiming that the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016—which was kicked off after they got a tip about Carter Page—was illegal, unwarranted, and motivated by partisan witch hunting within the bureau. Nobody believes this except for extreme MAGAnauts, but they believe it with a burning passion.
Because of this we might lose our only chance of reforming Section 702 to require a warrant before the FBI scavenges through mammoth databases of communications by American citizens. Great.
A while back I watched a TV show with a plot point that featured a government agency bringing down an airplane just to kill a single person on board. Has fiction turned into real life today?
Reuters has reported that the Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday, the TASS news agency reported, citing Rosaviatsia, Russia’s aviation authority.
....The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give ample motive to the Russian state for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.
....The plane has been under US sanctions since 2019 because of its connection to Prigozhin. The Wagner chief has been reported to use the plane, including shortly after his failed mutiny, when the plane departed from St Petersburg to Belarus on the morning of 27 June.
The air defense missile theory is just rumor at this point, but who knows? It's hardly unthinkable that Vladimir Putin would do something like this. It's the kind of thing that happens when you launch a military coup in Russia, even if you call it off and apologize afterward. All ten people aboard the plane were killed.
The federal fiscal year begins on October 1st and goes through September 30th. We are currently in FY23, which began in October 2022 and will end in a few weeks.
But why? What's the deal with starting our fiscal year in October? I'm glad you asked. Here's the answer.
For our first 50 years, we used a normal calendar year. There was no such thing as a budget back then, just appropriations that were passed whenever an agency happened to request one. So nobody really cared very much about when the official accounting year started.
In 1842 the fiscal year was changed to begin on July 1st. Nobody knows why. One account says it was done for the "convenience of the public service," which obviously doesn't tell us anything. Why was it more convenient? Another theory says it had something to do with seasonal fluctuations in revenue. Or maybe it was a middle finger to President John Tyler, though it's hard to see why he'd care. (And he signed the bill making the change.)
In 1974, the fiscal year was changed to its current structure (effective in 1976). By this time Congress did pass budgets, which were getting bigger and more complex all the time. They were never able to finish by July 1st, so they moved the start of the fiscal year to October 1st. This gave them three more months to pass a budget.
Today, of course, Congress is unable to finish a budget even by October 1st. Maybe it's time to come full circle and go back to a calendar year, which would give Congress until January 1st to finish up?
Or maybe it doesn't matter. The president, after all, releases a detailed budget document by March every year. It's hardly impossible. The real problem isn't so much size and complexity, but partisanship. Congress spends all year fighting over the budget and refusing to broker a deal until the very last second. If the fiscal year started on January 1st, it would just allow them three more months of brinkmanship and grandstanding and it would require them to hang around through the holidays. We might as well just leave things as they are.
A paper released today documents one of the most impressive uses of AI language models yet. A woman with ALS who was physically unable to speak—but still had a normally functioning language center in her brain—was fitted with electrodes that fed their output into a large language model similar to ChatGPT. It was able to produce sentences at 62 words per minute with a 76% accuracy rate.
Accuracy went down with larger vocabulary sizes, but improved with more electrodes and more training:
Obviously this is just the beginning. With more electrodes and faster processing, this BCI should be able to produce virtually normal, error-free speech. Needless to say, it could also be used by people with normal speaking capability—for example, to produce writing without ever saying a word. Do it in reverse and eventually two people might be able to communicate telepathically.
The BLS reports today that it has revised its employment figures for the past year. Between March 2022 and March 2023 we produced 300,000 fewer jobs than we originally estimated. This is about 0.2% of all jobs, which isn't a lot. Here's what it looks like:
Meh. The biggest loser was transportation and warehousing, which was revised downward by 2.2%
The Wall Street Journal reports that we have 97 fewer nursing homes than we did last year. What struck me about this number was how small it was. Not 97 thousand or 97 million. Just 97. That's not very much, is it?
Naturally I was curious about this, but it turns out there's not much data available about long-term care in general. The CDC does some tracking, but its most recent data is from 2018. Sometimes them's the breaks, though, so here's the overall change in the biggest categories of long-term care between 2014 and 2018:
Generally speaking, my instincts were right: There were 15,600 nursing homes in 2018 serving 1.3 million people. A loss of 100 nursing homes (serving about 10,000 people) is indeed a very small number—a little over half a percent.
What's more, this didn't represent a drop in long-term care so much as a reconfiguration. Other options increased, and the overall total was up by 250,000.
However, during this same period the population of people over age 75 increased by 2.1 million That's a lot more than 250,000.
So although the drop in nursing care facilities is probably not significant, especially with the growing trend toward home health care, the fact that long-term care options overall are growing a lot more slowly than the population means that facilities for taking care of our parents are being stretched thin. During the 2014-18 period, long-term care lagged behind population growth by nearly two million slots and I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true for the next four years. It's no wonder that finding long-term care has become so excruciating.
We remain committed to restoring the true FY 2022 topline spending level of $1.471 trillion without the use of gimmicks or reallocated rescissions to return the bureaucracy to its pre-COVID size while allowing for adequate defense funding.
Right off the top, I confess that I'm confused by this number. It refers solely to discretionary spending—which excludes Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that are automatically funded—but every place I look has a different figure for discretionary spending. The OMB, for example, says that discretionary budget authority for FY22 was $1.788 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office says $1.661 trillion. HFC says $1.471 trillion. And all of these are different from actual outlays.
Whatever. But even if we accept the $1.471 trillion number, keeping it at no growth produces an FY24 budget cap of $1.63 trillion after accounting for inflation. This means we have three different numbers in play:
HFC demand: $1.471 trillion
Debt ceiling agreement: $1.59 trillion
Based on real FY22 level: $1.63 trillion
So what's the deal here? It's no surprise that the HFC doesn't accept the debt ceiling cap since they were mad about that from the beginning. But do they not believe in inflation? It's a real thing, not some kind of partisan flim flam. The Senate is working off the debt ceiling number, which is really and truly a cut from FY22 levels. Why is the HFC opposed to this?
Plus there's this:
These numbers are all from the Congressional Budget Office, so the comparison across time is apples to apples. It's shown as a percentage of GDP, since that's the normal way of presenting budget numbers. And I charted it back to 2000 so you can see I'm not cherry picking anything.
Bottom line: the HFC has nothing to complain about. Discretionary spending in 2023 is already below pre-COVID levels, and based on the debt ceiling agreement spending in 2024 will be not only below pre-COVID levels, it will be below year 2000 levels. What more can they want?
I'm not pretending to be naive here. Needless to say, I know exactly what they want: whatever number produces the biggest cuts in programs that liberals want. They give the game away with their other demands:
Include the House-passed “Secure the Border Act of 2023” to cease the unchecked flow of illegal migrants, combat the evils of human trafficking, and stop the flood of dangerous fentanyl into our communities;
Address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus them on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts and targeting law-abiding citizens; and
End the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military’s core warfighting mission.
These are just wet dreams, not things that have even a remote chance of passage. But this is their price for agreeing to a temporary spending extension if new budgets aren't ready by the September 30 deadline—which everyone knows they won't be. So it's basically just a fancy way of saying they won't vote for an extension under any circumstances because they'd prefer to shut down the government instead.
Still, as crazy as the HFC is, none of this would be a problem if Kevin McCarthy were willing to pass a clean extension with both Republican and Democratic votes. It's only his insistence on passing an extension solely with Republican votes that gives the HFC any power. Without their votes, Republicans can't gin up a majority on their own. Bring in Democrats, though, and there's no problem putting together a bipartisan majority.
This is a bearded iris growing in the Canadian WWII cemetery in Bény-sur-Mer. The cemetery is near Juno Beach, about ten miles north of Caen in Normandy. The stark background of the flower is not due to any kind of photoshopping. It was growing against a white gravestone, and in the sunlight it was bright enough to appear completely featureless.
The total number of gender surgeries in the 12-18 age group was 3,678, nearly all of them breast/chest surgeries. The annual number of surgeries started at 200 in 2016 and rose steadily through 2019 before dropping a bit in the COVID year of 2020:
At a guess, upwards of half of these surgeries were performed at age 18, which means minors received 1,839 surgeries, or 367 per year. In the most recent year studied (2020) the number was probably around 500.
