Sugoi & Yokunai

We need to keep medicine evidence-based.  Instead of ideology-based, as in the past few years.

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Here's a good example.  The science is NOT settled.  "the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination".  Exactly, but many view climate science like it's a done deal.

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Everybody's striking.  Nurses, Powell's bookstore, railroad workers, postal workers, now teachers (again).  Everybody just wants more money, because everything costs more in the Biden economy.  It'll be a sad day when Powell's has to sell out to a larger owner, as Legacy Health had to.  Plus ça change. 

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Why do we need another lockdown?  That only made sense when a pathogen is known to be contained in one very small area.  Not so with these new variants, which are not even that deadly.  And we know that asymptomatic is rare.  It's just the government again, wanting people to show external signs of fealty.

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Impressive!  Camo tent and A/C!

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Maui residents are waking up.

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"Portland 911 calls for naked people running in and out of traffic has become a daily occurrence."  Portland is beyond hope now.

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The U.S. government has an official UFO website now.  Cool.

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The boiling frog of digital freedom.  Makes you wonder if totalitarianism is the natural order of things, and eventually mankind tends to this over time.

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Amazon is selling mushroom foraging books written by A.I. that advises unsafe practices, such as tasting a mushroom for identification.  It's actually OK to taste a very tiny piece of a mushroom as long as you spit it out.  But do this only to test a suspicion that requires taste confirmation, such as the peppery taste of a peppry bolete (Chalciporus piperatus).  I would not do this with some like Inocybe pudica or Galerina autumnalis, for example, which are deadly poisonous without any reason you'd want to taste it for ID.

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No surprise. Lahaina residents are indeed getting unsolicited land offers.

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Something I've noticed.  The numbers of traffic fatalities in Washington state has increased markedly.  It seems that with every trip I make to Seattle, I come across a car crash somewhere.  I rarely saw this years ago.  Now it's fairly commonplace.  Why?

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Portlanders should consider this.  When the police weren't there to help, residents of New Forest village took matters into their own hands.  Now they don't need police.  Portland dwellers need their own police, their own ambulance service and their own justice system.  Because the one the city operates isn't working.

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One of biggest scandal reveals in Canada, and it barely gets a mention in the media.  Remember the Kamloops Indian School scandal that CNN published in 2021?  Much outrage was generated.  Well the area was finally excavated, and there were no bodies in the ground.  It was all just hype.  Think CNN will cover this?

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The Polish Festival and Occidental Oktoberfest are back.  Sadly, the risks are just too high for me.  Not going. 

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The COVID song and dance is returning.  This time, the risk of contracting the EG.6 and BA.2.86 variants is higher in the vaxxed, according to the CDC.  

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Increasing commercial surveillance.  Someone else has noticed that more companies are encouraging use of their own mobile phone apps.  What better way of tracking your consumption and habits?  Like the Internet in general, it was all innocent in the beginning.  Having an app was fun and cool.  Now it's creepy and dangerous.

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Organic Maps.  This is really cool.  I'll be spending time with this, seeing if it can replace Gaia Maps or Caltopo Maps for hiking and outdoors activities.  It's free and you don't need a subscription.  Wow!

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Animated Knots.  This will come in handy, I'm sure.

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King County to surpass fentanyl death toll.  Way to go, Seattle.  Keep on doing that DEI, climate change, anti-racist, tax-the-rich strategy that you do. 

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The last of the fungus.  The economy built around the Cordyceps fungus constitutes a tenth of Tibet's GDP.  And it's being harvested to extinction.  Read this - fascinating writing.

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Killed by Google.  All the apps, services and hardware Google created or bought out, then later killed.  One person in a forum said that the difference between Microsoft and Google is that when you try to connect to someone a few years later at Microsoft regarding a project, that person is still there. 

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University of Minnesota Medical School researchers discover a way to formulate oral amphotericin.  This is great because for some diseases, you need amphotericin, which sometimes goes by the nickname "Shake and Bake" because it induces the shakes and a high fever.  The oral formulation was found to be "non-toxic". 

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How A.I. will destroy us.  This article is probably true.  We will see demoralization as A.I. can generate higher quality stuff than humans (provided someone knows how to generate it), and A.I. threatens to lessen actual human interaction (not a universal thing, but I can see it happening to some degree).  So why do we continue to develop this potentially harmful technology?  "Short-term profits."  Spot-on.  Who wouldn't pursue near-term monetary gains.  Down the chute we go.

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Although ChatGPT can pass medical knowledge assessment tests and can sound more empathetic than some humans, it seems that it won't yet replace human physicians. The A.I. app Babylon couldn't make a go of it, and is shutting down.  But what led to its demise?  Sure it lost some contracts, but was it just bad timing?  Something else?  Perhaps replicating the skills of a real physician is more than A.I. can achieve just yet. We'll see if its buyer, eMed, succeeds.

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How to use ChatGPT to teach you Spanish.  This tells you what prompts to use to let ChatGPT correct your mistakes and act as a private tutor.  This is s great example of what A.I. can do to help humans.

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Why DeFi won't go mainstream.  DeFi is banking without regulations.  Why would you do it?

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We also advocate for the suspension of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines and lipid-nanoparticle carrier matrices, and other vaccines based on mRNA or viral-vectorDNA technology. A safer course is to use vaccines with well-tested recombinant protein, attenuated or inactivated virus technologies, of which there are now many for vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2.

BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines.

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Be careful when you eat at a Beaverton restaurant.  You might get an asshole charge.

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Money down the drain.  Washington state let the inexperienced and incompetent Washington State Lived Experience Coalition whose only qualification seems to be "lived experience", run the homeless shelter agency.  $3 million gone and nothing to show for it.

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Are meetings a thing of the past?  So at Google, A.I. can attend meetings for you and ask questions as your proxy.  Then it summarizes the gist of the meeting for you. 

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I'd forgotten that there was a Great Lahaina Fire of 1919.  There were screw-ups then, just as there are screw-ups now.

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Guess what state cannabis use disorder is most prevalent?  I don't think people know what they're getting into.

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Hubris syndrome.  That's what they're calling acquired narcissistic personality disorder.  Yes, and COVID-19 seems to bring it out.  So many mini-dictators came to the fore.  It gives them a thick skin and resilience.  With power, they don't care what you think.

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Forever chemicals.  Researchers found that PFAS ("forever chemicals") are linked to obesity, maybe more so than dietary factors. Well, Koreans were found to have high levels of PFAS.  And now Korean Airlines has decided that it needs to start weighing Korean passengers.  Where's that stuff coming from? 

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Could it be this easy?  Recent research with tetrataenite, such as found in certain meteorites, it may be possible to mass-produce this iron-nickel-phosphorus alloy with magnetic properties similar to that of rare earth magnets. 

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Yikes, not a good time to be in the tech sector market.

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We just need a little optimism.  Portland Central City Task Force says that the key to bringing Portland back is to have more optimism. 

“By nearly every measure, compared to 2020, things are better,” McMillan said. And I think one of the opening messages in our kickoff was our intent is to come alongside the good work that’s already happening at the city, at the county and elsewhere and to help. And this is very much a collaborative partnership in the work that we’re doing, and we think that theme in terms of the work itself is going to be very important.”  He also says there needs to be optimism for the future of Portland.

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Trump was right.  This video needs to go viral.

An article in JAMA decries doctors that "spread misinformation".  Even criticizing physicians who said that the virus originated from Wuhan because they didn't accept the narrative at the time that it didn't.  Imagine – doctors who think for themselves!  Criticized!  And more blame for doctors who pointed out that the ones getting sick are the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated.  Just because there are more vaccinated folks.  Not realizing that the vaccine is supposed to prevent this.  Or that doctors expressed "reliance on natural immunity".  Horrors!  

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Fat regulates cognition.  It seem there is a connection.  Yup, obesity is associated with cognitive decline.

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Lee Cataluna is not enamoured by Honolulu's Skyline monorail.  Yeah, it looks ugly.  Democrats really love their mass transit, don't they.  Wherever they are in power.  You can bet there will be a proposal for something.

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Biden's NLRB is making it easier for workers' unions to run the show.  No need for pesky elections if there is a belief that a majority supports unionizing. 

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Youngman said nurses would be responsible, under OHSU’s proposal, for patting down and disarming patients, while ONA wants those tasks to be handled by trained security staff only.

OHSU denies that they said this, but who knows?  And once the merger takes place, I suspect the nurses will have much less leverage in making demands.

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Lahaina, two weeks later.  Not much has changed. 

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Huh? You get a diagnosis of cancer, and now your choices might be to take a severe financial hit, or die soon.  Liz Weston suggests a honest discussion with the doctor about how much treatment will extend life.  The truth is, the doctor can't really know with the desired accuracy.  There are too many variables, and all the doctor can do is look at the literature and see what was reported, and make a best guess.  But there may be other treatments that the doctor is not aware of, including clinical trials.  Sometimes people do better than you would expect.  But sometimes, just looking at numbers and deciding to forego therapy is deeply unsettling.  And when you see insurance companies (and their executive) make obscene amounts of money, it is easy to wonder why money is going towards their mansions and expensive cars instead of giving you a shot at a longer life.  While pooling risk can be a way to defray the cost of treatment to an individual facing huge expenses, one must recognize that it is a middle-man entity, which controls the physician-patient interaction.  We need consumer-owned policies, not employer-owned policies, and more competition.

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Some thoughts about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki.  Most of Miyazaki's films are about capturing the essence of life in Japan, a land steeped in mysticism, and how it interacts with the issues of more modern life. 

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