8 September 2023

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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Drug residue is found on public transportation in Seattle and Portland.  Fentanyl was found sometimes, but meth was found all the time.  And in the air downtown, too.
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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7 September 2023

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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6 September 2023

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 creepTeachers 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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5 September 2023

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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An mRNA disasterHere's an interesting set of graphs
There are now many datasets that show that more overall deaths occur in the vaxxed. And the vax proponents have been quick to rebuff this saying "Of course, more deaths occur in vaxxed people because almost everyone is vaxxed, ya idiot?  Geez, math much?"  Or something like that.

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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4 September 2023

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 exampleThe 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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3 September 2023

Maui residents are waking up.


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There comes a point in every person's life when this kind of thinking becomes important.  If you're fortunate, you might be able to have this conversation early in life.  Before you go too far down the path when it doesn't matter anymore.

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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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2 September 2023

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 noticedThe 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 thisWhen 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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1 September 2023

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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Why everyone is leaving Portland.  (It's not the weather.  We've had this weather before.)

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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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31 August 2023

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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Spike protein is dangerous - whether from the SARS-CoV2 or from the vaccine.  Really surprised this got published, because they conclude:
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.
Think anyone will listen?
And I missed this CDC Risk Assessment summary from last week.  It says:
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.
Well that's just great, huh? 

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

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Edit: Well, maybe it isn't quite what I thought it was.  Changing that sugoi to a yokunai.

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Money down the drainWashington 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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30 August 2023

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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