Sugoi & Yokunai

Hawaii needs healthcare professionals badly.  It's just like those cities that voted to defund the police, and now there's crime, and they want the police back.

Sanity prevails.  Federal judge blocks Gov Luhan's unconstitutional gun ban. 

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Sheesh, the New York Times doesn't even try to be accurate anymore.  Thankfully for them, their readership is too uninformed themselves to notice.

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Academia's missing men.  Someone else has noticed this, too.  Take a look at MIT's 35 Innovators list.  Einstein, Feynman, Dirac, Oppenheimer – they wouldn't have stood a chance.

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Why it takes forever to get a doctor's appointment.  Patients need to read this.

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Google vs US government trial is underway.  This will be interesting.  Wonder what took them so long?

Related:  Tracking is now baked into Google Chrome browser.  Why do people continue to use this browser? 
Also, Google wants to create a digital watermark to secretly tag images in art.  Many questions about this technology.

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It's begun.  Authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming that the A.I. model is copying and training on their output.  This will be interesting, too.  Copyright is going to be hard to defend in the era of A.I.

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27 most dangerous college campuses.  University of Washington is #26.  Odd that none of the Ivy League schools are on the list, but Stanford is. 

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Phenylephrine is now acknowledged by the FDA to be worthless. 

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Genetically endowed to breath-hold for 13 minutes.  Some residents of the Bajau islands can stay underwater for as long as 13 minutes.  Not sure if it's because of the enlarged spleen, or if having a larger spleen is a byproduct of the mutation.

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Remember HMOs?  What happened to them?  This was Hillary Clinton's baby, when Bill was in office.  Physicians managed to untangle themselves from that, but then got involved in Obamacare.  The result was that the independent doctor became an endangered species, and hospitals became powerful conglomerates - at least until the money ran out.  But doctors are not trained to be actuaries, and never should have taken on the responsibility. 

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Google and Alexa will sell your conversation to advertisers.  Thankfully not Siri, at least not yet.  Why people use Google products baffle me.  If you like your browser habits to be tracked so you can be served ads, then by all means.  I use Firefox.

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Chinese scientists discover another gene-editing tool that doesn't involve CRISPR technology.  Cool.

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The Economist put out a networking guide for introverts.  "The real secret is to save your energy for the people who are most likely to be interesting to you."  This works in regular life, too.

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Yet another study showing that suggests that the bivalent booster is less effective than being unvaxxed.  This is a retrospective study, with all the due cautions, but still, it agrees with other studies.  Being boosted is a liability than a benefit.

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If you are a parent with small children, and living in California, it is really time to move.  Don't wait for heartache, anger and grief.

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Oregon is going to get $40 million as part of an opiod settlement against Kroger.  But they have no problem with fentanyl.  Pretty hypocritical, huh?

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Ted Wheeler is hiring ex-cons, some with murder convictions, to police Portland. 

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Maybe this is why urban centers are such heat islands.  Maybe it's not the CO2 output.  It's air conditioning.  The article says: "Air conditioner use is set to triple worldwide by 2050."  There's our climate change.

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Israeli and Singapore scientists discover that a natural substance, 3,3′-diindolylmethane, greatly reduces Strep mutans growth, and decreased plaque build-up and cavities.  This can be added to toothpaste.

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The evidence piles up.  People who got the booster are more likely to get COVID-19 again than the unvaccinated.  And it's amusing to see how the authors still claim that the vax does some good.  When is the public ever going to wake up?

Related: Kheriaty, Kuldorff, Hoft (Gateway Pundit) and Bhattacharya win against Biden and Fauci in First Amendment violation case. Great news!

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Mission creep.  Dems think that the solution to everything is just to throw more money at a problem.  Rather than solve the underlying problem.  So now Oregon is taking Medicaid money to use for housing the homeless. 

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Business group now comes to realize that NE Portland can't have nice things.  Yup, when you can't control your criminals and let sh#t get out of hand, don't expect other folks to put up with that.  It was a generous gesture, Nike, trying to elevate that neighborhood.  Guess it goes back to being Portland's ghetto.  Too bad, Nike – you tried.

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Another merger.  Legacy trying to merge with OHSU.  Umpqua Bank bought Columbia Bank.  US Bank bought Union Bank.  Now Kroger is merging with Albertsons (which owns Safeway) and 104 Washington stores and 49+ Oregon stores will close.  More jobs lost, although corporate says that they will try to honor union agreements.  Some QFC stores will leave the Kroger family and could be independent. 

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Japanese scientists have discovered a biomarker for schizophrenia.  I would not have guessed what it is - hydrogen sulfide content in hair.  There, saved you a click.

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Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best.  Nice list to have.  Gotta check out some of the obscure ones. 

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The evidence is accumulating: the “high effectiveness” of the first booster was mostly bias.  Dr. Shahar is an medical doctor/epidemiologist, who probably was vaxxed himself, given that he was/is an Israeli and is still in medicine here.  He presents data that shows that the original vaccine was modestly effective at best, but the boosters are worthless.  Just in time.  And to counter reports like this, Berkeley Public Health has created a journal that will fight "disinformation" about the vax.  Imagine that – a vax so "effective" that it has to have a special journal created to counter those who claim that it is worthless at best, harmful and dangerous at worst.  When was this ever necessary before?

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Officials say that the levels are too low to be a threat, but the study admits that it was small, and that they didn't claim it was exhaustive, so who really knows?  The officials clearly don't, and I suspect they don't want to say.

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If you know these piano pieces, you can pretend that you're Horowitz.  Well, sorta.

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Great news.  The Lahaina Banyan is still alive.

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Another one bites the dust.  Bye, Mutual Fish.  You withstood WWII and the Great Recession, but couldn't survive today's Democrat policies.  We understand.

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OHSU researchers discovered another pathway involved in Alzheimer's dementia, related to microglial death.  It's not really the discovery of a different type of Alzheimer's disease, as the title suggests, but the discovery of a new pathway to cell death.

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Two-Thirds of College Students Think Shouting Down A Public Speaker Can Be Acceptable.  Can't wait for these folks try to enter into the business world, and wonder why no one wants to hire them.  Then we have to pay off their student loans.

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India's leaders want to rename the country to Bharat.  Well, OK. 

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US deficit explodes even as interest rate rises.  Because the latter is trying to keep up with the former, all the while Congress continues to spend, driving up inflation even further.  Credit debt usage is also soaring, but not for the reasons in 2020.  Back then people had to transact online because of lockdowns and limited mobility.  But now, it's to survive on credit, which is different. 

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Portlanders live in property tax hell.  And to make it worse, you aren't getting what you pay for.  And the criddlers who don't pay taxes actually get to run the show, enjoy the benefits you provide.

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Oregon's AG is worried that A.I. might provide kids with pornographic materials.  It's not like the public and school libraries in blue states don't already provide LGBT porn anyway. 

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A founder's guide to stress and uncertainty.  You don't have to be a founder to learn from these insights.  "Stress and uncertainty will always be a part of our lives".  That's the truth.  Recognize avoidance behaviors and learn to deal with them positively.

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Mission creep.  Teachers threaten to strike if their districts don't provide kids with free housing.  How about just do your job as teachers?

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Wait a minute.  I saw this article (Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness) and was intrigued.  Was I wrong about Universal Basic Income?  Is giving all those homeless people money the right thing to do?  Then I read the Methods section of the paper:

Our preregistered screening criteria were: age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10), alcohol use (AUDIT), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) based on predefined thresholds.  
To ensure accurate responses, the screening survey was conducted under a cover story without any mention of the cash transfer.

To mitigate potential risks (e.g., theft, assault) from providing cash transfer to some participants but not others within the same shelter, we randomly assigned each shelter to conditions, such that all participants recruited from a given shelter were in the same condition.

Workshop consisted of a 1-h session every 3 mo for 1 y, where participants were guided to complete self-affirmation, goal-setting, and plan-making exercises to help participants brainstorm strategies to regain stability in their lives.  Coaching consisted of three 45-min phone calls per month for 6 mo with a certified coach trained to help participants learn from their own experiences to increase self-efficacy in developing life skills and strategies to achieve their life goals.

Nah, this isn't going to work in real life.  It will be money wasted. 

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This is major. SARS-CoV2 spike protein persists for months in those with PASC (Long Covid).  With the discovery that whole vax-generating plasmid contaiminants were found in a percentage of vaccines, I strongly suspect that there has been integration of vax plasmid into the genome, causing continuous production of spike protein.  The next step is to sequence the isolated spike proteins, to see if there are pseudouridines, present only in the vax.  I'm surprised this hasn't been reported yet. 

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Despite the Farmer's Almanac saying otherwise, meteoroligists say it's going to be a warm and dry winter this season for much of the northern United States, especially the Pacific NW. 

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How would room-temperature semiconductors change science?

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But supposed getting vaxxed was an independent factor unrelated to illness.  Like whether or not you like jazz. 
Then if 40% of the population likes jazz, then you would expect 40% of all deaths to be in jazz lovers, right? 
It's an independent factor, so proportional.  Makes sense.

Now, what if 81.5% of the population were vaxxed, yet 96.7% of deaths were in the vaxxed.  What if 18.5% of the population were unvaxxed, and yet only 3.3% of deaths were in the unvaxxed? 
What if 78.7% were 2-vaxxed, yet 96.0% of deaths were in the 2-vaxxed?
What if 65.0% were 3-vaxxed, yet 91.5% of deaths were in the 3-vaxxed?
You would conclude that being vaxxed was somehow a bad thing, right?

So why is the media silent about this?  Instead, they're gearing us up for the next vaccine rollout.

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Another one bites the dust.

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