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Posted
5 hours ago, Pancho said:

The best people

 

I was coming here to post just this. The essence of the article is that TripleSecDef’s personal lawyer told the White House that a (very illegal, very unconstitutional) NSA tap of Hegseth’s aides outed them as the source of leaks surrounding Signalgate.

When pressed by the White House, the lawyer walked it back and said he never made any such claim and that he was just passing messages.  
 

The reality is that Hegseth’s executive team is fighting and backbiting and throwing each other under the bus. 
 

The level of amateurism in this administration is on par with Balkan countries. Just an inability to get shit together and be normal even for a minute. 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Why are they sitting in hi top bar table chairs on a basketball court?

That is, apparently, the FBI gym at Quantico.

Y'know Kashyap's fantasy is to turn the FBI into an MMA league.

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Posted

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist

Quote

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.

Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.

Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”

It’s not clear that anyone wrote the study cited in the MAHA report. The citation refers to a study titled, “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” along with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, that issue didn’t include a study with that title.

As the Trump administration cuts research funding for federal health agencies and academic institutions and rejects the scientific consensus on issues like vaccines and gender-affirming care, the issues with its much-heralded MAHA report could indicate lessening concern for scientific accuracy at the highest levels of the federal government.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s citation inconsistencies.

The anxiety study wasn’t the only one the report cites that appears to be mysteriously absent from the scientific literature. A section describing the “corporate capture of media” highlights two studies that it says are “broadly illustrative” of how a rise in direct-to-consumer drug advertisements has led to more prescriptions being written for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids.

The catch? Neither of those studies is anywhere to be found. Here are the two citations:

Shah, M. B., et al. (2008). Direct-to-consumer advertising and the rise in ADHD medication use among children. Pediatrics, 122(5), e1055- e1060.
Findling, R. L., et al. (2009). Direct-to-consumer advertising of psychotropic medications for youth: A growing concern. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, 19(5), 487-492.

Those articles don’t appear in the table of contents for the journals listed in their citations. A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, where psychiatric researcher Robert L. Findling currently teaches, confirmed to NOTUS that he never authored such an article. The author of the first study doesn’t appear to be a real ADHD researcher at all — at least, not one with a Google Scholar profile.

In another section titled, “American Children are on Too Much Medicine – A Recent and Emerging Crisis,” the report claims that 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. But searching Google for the exact title of the paper it cites to back up that figure — “Overprescribing of oral corticosteroids for children with asthma” — leads to only one result: the MAHA report.

The corticosteroids study’s supposed first author, pediatric pulmonologist Harold J. Farber, denied writing it or ever working with the other listed authors. He pointed to similar research he’s conducted, but said that even if the MAHA report cited that study correctly, its conclusions are “clearly an overgeneralization” of the findings.

“It is a tremendous leap of faith to generalize from a study in one Medicaid managed care program in Texas using 2011 to 2015 data to national care patterns in 2025,” Farber said in an email.

Spread across the footnotes of the 73-page document, those missing papers are listed alongside dozens of citations with more mundane errors like broken links, missing or incorrect authors and wrong issue numbers.
NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.

In one section about mental health medication, which Kennedy has railed against for years, the report cites a review paper it claims shows that therapy alone is as or more effective than psychiatric medicine. But one of that paper’s statisticians told NOTUS that conclusion doesn’t make sense, given their study didn’t even attempt to measure or compare therapy’s effectiveness as a mental health treatment.

“We did not include psychotherapy in our review. We only compared the effectiveness of (new generation) antidepressants against each other, and against placebo,” Joanne McKenzie, a biostatistics professor at an Australian university, said in an email.

Another paper, which the report says shows “antipsychotic prescriptions for children increased by 800% between 1993 and 2009,” actually found an eight-fold increase from 1995 to 2005.

Another medical researcher whose work was cited in a section about how screen time affects children’s sleep told us the MAHA report mischaracterized her study.

“The conclusions in the report are not accurate and the journal reference is incorrect. It was not published in Pediatrics. Also, the study was not done in children, but in college students,” Mariana G. Figueiro emailed NOTUS. She added that she even had more relevant research the authors could have used: “I was not aware of the choice, or else I would have suggested one of the other ones.”

The Trump administration commissioned the report to investigate the root causes of chronic illnesses in the U.S. From exposure to pesticides and microplastics to cell phone radiation and food coloring, the report points to many potential culprits — and claims it offers “a clear, evidence-based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms, and societal shifts needed to reverse course.” The commission is also scheduled to release a “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” report in August.

Kennedy has enthusiastically promoted the report, calling it a “milestone” in a post on X after its release.

“Never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this,” Kennedy wrote.
 

Shocking. Who could've predicted this?

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Posted
5 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist

Shocking. Who could've predicted this?

This is literally the governing principle of the Regime controlling our country right now:

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3a3JJE30MNbh7kTNQDtE

They reach the conclusion they want.  Then find the 1% of people out there who say something consistent with that authority, and cite them as "the gold standard."  What makes them "the gold standard?"  Well, they're the ones who say what we want them to say.  Duh.

We are committing cultural suicide by stupidity, and doing it with passion and vigor.

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Posted

Huh. How odd. 
 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-official-shut-down-russia-095504636.html
 

Quote

A senior official who dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal.

Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views.

He has been noted for his focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.

Mr Beattie, the acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal “thank you” message from Vladimir Putin.

In the years before joining the government, Mr Beattie wrote social media posts suggesting Western institutions should be “infiltrated” by Putin, while he also attacked what he described as the “globalist American empire”.

Donald Trump is under pressure from many in his party, particularly senators, to take a tougher stance on the Russian leader while he continues to refuse to sign a ceasefire deal as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Many of Mr Beattie’s social media posts also concern China, repeatedly calling on the US to surrender Taiwan to Beijing, and labelling Britain a “poor and pathetic kingdom” that would be “far better off under Chinese dominion”.

Quote

State Department sources expressed scepticism over whether he had undergone security vetting, a process which has been relaxed under Mr Trump.

Mr Beattie was a member of the first Trump administration, but after being sacked in 2018 for allegedly attending a white nationalist conference, he reinvented himself as an “alt-Right” media figure.

In May 2021, public records show, he married a Russian woman called Yulia Kirillova in a ceremony in Broward County, Florida.

Quote

Ms Kirillova, who according to her Facebook page was educated in Moscow before studying abroad in Canada and Washington DC, is the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a Russian drinks magnate who part-owns a flat with her mother, Natalia.

Mr Chernikov, whose net worth was estimated to be $150 million in 2005, reportedly received a letter of thanks from Putin for his help in the election campaign which first brought the Russian leader to power.

Spoiler

According to Ms Kirillova’s Facebook page, she moved to Washington on Jan 28, roughly a week before her husband began his role at the State Department.

Despite his wide-ranging brief at the heart of the US government, Mr Beattie is said to have focused a disproportionate amount of time on seeking to dismantle the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi, while building cultural ties with Russia.

‘Censorship network’

R/Fimi, which tracked and countered propaganda from sources including Russia, China and Iran, was a relatively small agency with a budget of just over $50 million at the time it was shut down.

The US’s adversaries are estimated to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on foreign disinformation.

Mr Beattie’s news outlet Revolver had spent years attacking R/Fimi, accusing it of being part of a “censorship network” designed to silence conservative voices.

Sources said Mr Beattie had doggedly pursued the agency after being appointed, taking it apart piece by piece.

Contractors were sacked and officials were ordered to stop communicating with others in the State Department or external partners without explicit permission.

Even before it was disbanded in mid-April, when Mr Beattie told staff in a brief speech that it was “severely misaligned” with the administration’s priorities, its work had essentially wrapped up.

Mr Rubio confirmed in an interview distributed by the State Department the same day that Mr Beattie had played a major role in abolishing R/Fimi.

At the same time as Mr Beattie was working on dismantling the agency, he is said to have pushed to rebuild relations with Russia, insisting on instituting cultural exchange programmes in fields such as ballet and hockey.

He is also said to have taken a significant interest in classified material related to Russia, prompting widespread concern about turning over sensitive information to him.

Sources were highly sceptical if it had undergone a security vetting process, which the State Department’s website notes can take anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to complete.

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Gil Bang said:

Unlike the current Secretary of The Navy, Milk actually served in the navy, in subs.  Sure he was gay, but it's a sub!  

150 men go down, 75 couples come up.

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Posted
2 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

Unlike the current Secretary of The Navy, Milk actually served in the navy, in subs.  Sure he was gay, but it's a sub!  

 

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