Of all the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
Mark Twain
Something stuck me when I saw this piece on Twitchy:
Kaeley Triller’s been described as a “highly skilled female operative of the theocratic right” and considers herself an old-school AstroTERF. On Saturday she decided to share some of the matches a lesbian dating app found for her friend:
These are just a few of the “matches” on my friend’s lesbian dating app.
As you might guess there are plenty of people who insist that a woman like Kaeley is a bigot if she doesn’t consent to date and/or sleep with any of these people, but looking at this photo brings up an obvious question to me..
How many of the “transwomen” are as they would call it “transexclusionary” when it comes to dating?
I mean after all if these “transwoman” are in fact women as they maintain and are in fact lesbians as the also maintain then surely they would not exclude other “transwomen” from their dating pool would they. In fact if these woman are not rushing to choose other “transwomen” as both dates and sexual partners must we conclude that they are by their own standards bigots?
Now I don’t know the answer to my question and perhaps someone who has a greater knowledge of these dating apps and how they keep stats can figure it out. If they determine that the “transwomen” there are in fact happy to date other “transwoman” then I’ll gladly concede that my supposition is wrong.
But if in fact they are holding out for actual women then they become the ultimate confirmation of the Mark Twain quote above
GULF OF OMAN (Feb. 20, 2023) The guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60) approaches the dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE 3) in the Gulf of Oman, Feb. 20, 2023. Paul Hamilton is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elliot Schaudt)
Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) have been a part of the Navy since…always. Our Navy started out on surface ships, and surface warfare continues to be important, no matter what an Aviator, Submariner or SEAL will tell you. Yet increasingly I have to wonder, does the Navy understand why it is so hard to keep SWOs? You would think with hundreds of years of history this would be obvious, but given its latest actions, I’m not so sure, because the US Navy is facing a SWO manpower crisis, and is dealing with it in ways that simply won’t work.
Let’s go back to my original rules for Navy manpower. When times are good and we have too many Naval Officers, the Navy does the following:
Kick people out for failing physical fitness tests, even if they are otherwise good Sailors
Make it hard to get waivers for things like antidepressants and other medical issues
Begin nicely asking older Naval Officers to retire to make space for younger officers
Lower the number of Officer Candidate School admissions
Reduce bonuses
Make life increasingly difficult, so that more people naturally quit
Conduct a Reduction In Force (RIF) and simply remove people
This is a pretty good strategy to reduce numbers, slowly ratcheting up the pressure to ensure we don’t have too many officers hanging around. Naturally, if we have too few officers, the Navy turns this around by:
Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
Opening OCS and other admissions
Raising bonuses
Make life better for officers
Reduce opportunities to leave early
Op-Hold people
In the past, the Navy has done everything on the first list to bring down numbers. Now, they are doing…almost everything on the second list, but it’s not working, and it’s becoming glaringly obvious in the SWO community. If you listen to Admirals speak (and I don’t recommend that), you would think we’re doing OK on SWO retention. But a brief glance at the Health of the Force survey shows that disaster looms around the corner:
Future force structure increases outside the future year defense plan (FYDP) require DH billet increases, requiring increased retention. This compares unfavorably with a declining billet base across the FYDP as the Navy divests legacy platforms. Year groups 2015-18 require an average retention rate of at least 37.3%, exceeding the 10-year average. If fleet size projections remain accurate, Surface Warfare requires a retention rate of 44% in YGs 19-22 to meet future afloat DH requirements.
Health of the Force Survey
So we’re not making the retention rate we need now, and we have to increase this by 10 percentage points in the future, but retention is plummeting.
All the Manpower people in the Navy right now…
The Navy is already overlooking physical fitness failures, waiving medical conditions and opening up OCS admissions…which are now having a higher-than-expected failure rate. I would think most people would understand that lowering admission standards will likely lead to more failures in a difficult program, but apparently “most people” doesn’t include Navy HR.
So what to do next? Raise bonuses. And boy did they raise them.
NAVADMIN 045/23 discusses continuation bonuses for SWO Lieutenant Commanders (LCDRs). SWO leave after their first Navy tour at a fairly high rate, and it’s hard to persuade them to stay in long enough to promote to LCDR around their 8-9 year mark. So why not pay them $22K a year IF they stay in after promoting to LCDR? It’s certainly worth a shot.
NAVADMIN 046/23 establishes a payment schedule for SWO Department Head bonuses. If a SWO screens for Department Head and agrees to stay for two Department Head tours, they can get bonuses up to $105K in total over 6 years. Conveniently, that would put them right at the point of getting a continuation bonus as outlined previously.
Now, normally this would work. Throw enough money at people, and you can normally get them to stay. But it’s not going to do that, and the reason is hinted at in the Health of the Force Survey:
Improving retention requires a multi-pronged approach. First, community managers are allowing more individuals to lateral transfer and re-designate. This will divest end strength in year groups with smaller DH requirements, freeing inventory for future accessions. Second, several monetary and non-monetary efforts are underway to improve Surface Warfare retention. Surface Warfare Officers now have a career-long continuum of monetary incentives with the introduction of the SWO Senior Officer Retention Bonus (SWOSORB) in FY22. Third, the community offers improved education opportunities including: postgraduate education opportunities, tours with industry, and fleet-up options for increased geographic stability. Fourth, Surface Warfare recently modified the career path to incorporate multiple family planning opportunities for career-minded SWOs. Finally, SWO released the junior officer survey, senior officer survey, and junior officer exit survey to solicit retention feedback.
Health of the Force Survey
Two things stick out:
Family Planning opportunities? I thought Navy was all about killing babies, or at least circumventing existing laws to do so? Guess that’s not so popular when retention is on the line?
The Junior Officer Exit Survey results.
I’ve read the JO Exit Surveys. They’ve existed for years, and they say the same things over and over:
We don’t train people enough
The job is thankless and people treat JOs like dirt
JOs find Navy life is incompatible with having any outside life or family time
That’s every survey, ever. Pay doesn’t make the top three retention issues in almost any survey. In the past though, enough money would make people overlook how bad the job is. But when truck drivers make over $100K a year, or companies pay project managers $150K or more a year, that $105K spread out over 6 years starts to look really small. The Navy caps officer bonuses at $330K over a career. Civilian companies don’t. Pay isn’t going to fix this crisis.
The ONLY hope for retaining SWOs is to increase quality of life. This would mean closing the sea duty billet gap, addressing the shipyard maintenance problems, and make driving a warship fun again. These are all inside the Navy’s wheelhouse, but it seems increasingly incapable of taking these actions. I suspect that the top SWOs are looking down thinking “You young officers are pathetic, back in my day we worked 16 hour days on shore duty and we BEGGED FOR MORE!!!”
Given that pay won’t fix it, and Navy won’t address quality of life issues, I predict we get operational holds on people leaving in the next 6-12 months. I’d like to be wrong, and maybe next year you can repost this and laugh at me, but I have a bad feeling I’m right about this.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you like this post, why not donate to DaTechGuy, or purchase one of the authors books?
Posted: February 25, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized
If you want to know the difference between the Trump years and the Biden years you can’t do better than this paragraph
As recently as Thursday of last week, FEMA again denied aid to East Palestine. The message was clear: help was not coming. But the following day, within a couple of hours of Donald Trump announcing he planned to visit the town, the Biden administration reversed course and announced it would send aid to East Palestine.
Jason “Sonny” Pratt:I get it, by day the mild mannered children’s book author, by night the fearsome masked avenger.
Jon Sable [in B.B. Flemm guise] Just the opposite actually. If anyone knew Iwas writing Children’s books…I don’t even want to think about it.
Sonny Pratt: Well if you’re embarassed about being a children’s author why do you keep doing it?
Jon Sable:Sonny, There’s just so damn much money in it.
Jon Sable Freelance #7 1983
One of the things that has become very apparent in reading about the Transgender push among medical centers, particularly involving the young is that it’s a cash cow.
You not only have low risk (in terms of complications leading to death) elective surgery but you have drugs and hormone treatments taking place over the course of years or even decades and a psych department staying busy with counseling that can last just as long.
That’s a ton of billable procedures and products for EACH person who dives into the Transgender pool that will keep your practice and department in the black for many many years and all it requires is to throw out that pesky first principle of medical treatment “Do no harm” and replace it with “Do no harm to your bottom line.”
While exposing this might be effective to some degree against hospitals and practices that depend on donations and sponsors no amount of public shaming or twitter quips or thoughtful commentary or even detailed exposés is likely to cause people who have abandoned both Judeo-Christian ethics and medical ethics for profit to change their behavior.
A woman in Ontario who identified as transgender and underwent hormone therapy, a bilateral mastectomy, and a hysterectomy filed the first lawsuit in Canada against her healthcare providers for facilitating her transition.
Michelle Zacchigna, a 34-year-old woman from Orillia, Ontario, recently announced a lawsuit she filed against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who treated her over the years, alleging that they failed to address her complex mental health needs and instead allowed her to self-diagnose as transgender and undergo irreversible procedures that she now regrets.
It’s worth noting that this woman is 34 and started this process at 21 meaning that this has been going on for a very long time before attention was being drawn to it.
“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deepened voice and male-pattern balding, and without the ability to get pregnant. Removing my completely healthy uterus is my greatest regret,” Zacchigna wrote in a blog post for Lighthouse Forum.
Zacchigna’s lawsuit claims that the healthcare providers who treated her failed to address her serious mental health issues and developmental disabilities and instead offered her irreversible medical interventions.
“The Defendants permitted Michelle to self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment without providing a differential diagnosis or proposing alternative treatments,” reads the Statement of Claim filed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
I suspect this is the first of many such lawsuits we are going to see over the years as people who have been castrated and sterilized in their youth discover that it doesn’t bring them the relief promised by those who drugged and cut them up for fun and profit.
Mind you as I noted this woman was 21, can you picture how strong that argument might be for a person who started this as a teen, as a minor, as a pre-teen. The lawsuits practically file themselves. Once we start seeing jury awards in the millions or even tens of millions (after all when your life has been destroyed by thirty you might have fifty years of suffering to pay for. the cost benefit analysis will change in a real hurry.
These suits will be a series of solid jabs to the transgender body mutilation industry, and now Florida is preparing a follow up right cross taking a completely different tack:
The new bill, called the Reverse Woke Act, flips the gender transition movement on its head by requiring employers that provide coverage for gender transition procedures also to provide coverage for de-transitioning. It even puts employers on the hook for de-transitioning coverage for people who are no longer employed by the company if they worked there when they transitioned.
“An employer that covers the cost, directly or through benefits, of gender dysphoria treatment for employees must also cover the total costs associated with treatment that reverses the gender dysphoria treatment, regardless of the rate of coverage provided for the initial treatment,” reads the proposal introduced by Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia.
“An employee who received gender dysphoria treatment through coverage provided by an employer is entitled to full coverage by that employer of the total costs associated with treatment that reverses gender dysphoria treatment if the employee later determines that the gender dysphoria treatment was not appropriate for him or her and wants to reverse the treatment, regardless of whether the person is currently employed by that same employer at the time of such determination,” the bill continues. “An employer’s obligations under this section are not affected by whether the initial treatment is provided in this state, and an employer may not make coverage of subsequent treatment contingent on whether the employee receives such subsequent treatment in this state.”
So if you’re a woke employer or corporation coving Transgender transition to show just how moral you are, you are on the hook to take care of the person who changes their mind,even if the person in question no longer works for you. You could be stuck dealing with such cost years or even decades later and subject to civil suits if you don’t pay up.
Can you say “Cost prohibitive?”
Or to paraphrase Sherman: We cannot change the hearts and minds of those woke people in the medical profession, but we can through the courts & legislatures make the financial risks of the transgender industry to hospitals so terrible that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.
This is the first step in a long march, may legions follow.
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