8 June 2025

CAR-T cell therapy may cure refractory myeloma in about a third of cases. This is the CARTITUDE-1 trial. Very nice. CAR-T cell therapy has come a long way. Dr. Carl June, still hasn't gotten a Nobel prize for this.

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GenZ is becoming a generation of slackers. That's the old term for NEETs. 
“I’m just focusing on the present because the future is depressing.” Hustling, girlbossing, or “work hard, play harder” just doesn’t quite have the same grip on Gen Z as it did on millennials starting out.  

...many Gen Zers are eyeing up easygoing jobs that don’t require regular overtime, antisocial working hours, or substantial responsibilities like managing a large team.
Others are avoiding office jobs: The hottest roles right now among Gen Z grads are in teaching, where low pay is balanced with weeks of vacation. 

At the same time as unemployment among the youth is rising, their mental health is in decline.
Until recently, being the director of an NSAID-funded NGO was a cool job. Or a homeless agency in Portland.

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Portland Mayor Keith Wilson still pledges to end homelessness by this year.  By blanketing the city with crappy tiny homes in "safe villages" all over, no doubt. Portland is clearly in a doom loop. So much white flight going on, taking their wealth with them.
And more workers in Oregon are part-timers now. There just isn't enough money to support full-timers and probably not enough business anyway.

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7 June 2025

I'm interested to see what Apple's WWDC 2025 will reveal. A new look/theme for sure. But I don't expect much in the AI department. I doubt Siri will improve, unfortunately. Unlike most geeks in the Bay Area, I don't want my phone to automatically book reservations at my favorite restaurant and schedule cab service to pick me up. Or make plane reservations and reserve a rental car. I just want Siri to tell me where the nearest location of a place is. As it is, it doesn't do that automatically based on where I am. It makes mistakes.

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College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life. What a sad world we live in now. We'd rather interact virtually instead of in real life. And some college kids feel that they have to block people from trying to interact in real life.

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Meta is invading your privacy in a new way. Bottom line: Don't use Meta and Yandex apps. Don't use an Android phone. Don't use the Chrome browser. Better yet, just stay off Meta/Facebook period.
Update (10 June 2025): Good explanation of the exploit here.

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Japanese scientists have invented a plastic that dissolves in sea water.  One might cause a lot of mischief with this. Just sayin'.
Update: here's a better article.
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MIT scientists again. With a new kind of magnetism. It's called p-wave magnetism. Unlike Harvard or Columbia, MIT actually does useful stuff.

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Another report touting the life-extending benefits of metformin. This has been shown before, and it's nice to see that the effects have been confirmed.

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There's a way to deliver gene therapy through the airway into the lungs.  The agent is called AAV.CPP.16. It may be a useful way to deliver therapy for interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, among other things.

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Seattle is so crappy that next year's Microsoft Build developer conference will not be held in Seattle.  After this year's attendees complained about urban decay, open-air drug use, and numerous tents lining the streets. Seattlites have become accustomed to all that crap and filth, but that doesn't mean the rest of the country has to put up with it, too.  Now you all know what living in a Blue City is like.

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I've often wondered about this. Remember when schools used Apple computers and software. Then suddenly they switched to Google products. Now our kids are under surveillance. There is a hidden privacy crisis in education technology. But of course, the people in charge of purchasing are not likely tech-savvy, and don't know enough to select the best products. All those Chromebooks using Google Docs. Not good. 

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6 June 2025

Silicon Valley Is Starting to Pick Sides in Musk and Trump’s Breakup. Yesterday's acrimony between Trump and Elon was unfortunate and revealing. Many predicted this would happen some day. I think that the event has made Trump realize that he cannot put all the nation's eggs in the Elon basket. The U.S. needs to revitalize NASA and develop its own satellite Internet system. We cannot be subject to the whims of an unpredictable guy like Elon. This is now a matter of national security.

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A man on a NY subway was caught using ChatGPT as an online girlfriend.  He was foolish to do so in public, and to use a public chat system. But the availability of online companionship is alluring, no doubt. Reading the commentary is revealing.

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What do you do with a kid who loves math? The author says there are three ways: math olympiad training, standard curriculum but faster, or do it your own way. Although the latter is the least stressful, I'm not sure you advance as far that way. There's so much to learn, and most kids won't realize this, and proceed at a slow pace. The ideal way would be to do the standard curriculum but faster, and be able to stop and take a break when you want to. This is like exercise. Math Olympiad training is like martial arts. (Martial Math, I like to say.)

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What Apple is predicted to reveal at the upcoming WWDC.  Not much stuff that I would actually use. We still won't have Tony Stark's phone. Looks like the overall "look" will change. We'll see.

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OHSU has one candidate for the President's position, since the other candidate decided to withdraw.  He's a Harvard man, and worked for Biden, so he's got those going against him 😁. Maybe he'll bring an East Coast work ethic to Oregon. I wonder why a guy like this would want to leave a good position and take on a struggling Oregon hospital. Does he love challenges that much? I also wonder why the other person dropped out. I guess Dr. Elnahal will get the job by default.

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Are you upset at the word "oriental"? I'm not. Who cares?

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Make power-hungry data centers pay for their own power. Sounds reasonable to me. Why shouldn't they?

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Parking in downtown Portland is going to increase from $2.20 to $3.60. More fees and taxes, despite getting less for your money.
Portland Metro told the City Council that they can't just raise taxes without voter approval. And Steve Novick just laughs. "Voter approval?? We don't need no steenkin' voter approval."  Or something like that.

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How's' Obamacare working out for you?  More Oregonians are skipping medical care because of costs.  
Someone wisely said that for healthcare, there is affordability, quality and availability.  But you can only pick two.  I agree. 
The ACA prioritized availability and thought affordability and that quality would remain the same. Alas, over time, quality deteriorated.
Before the ACA, insurance companies were seeing the high costs, which they didn't like. But with Obamacare, they are happier because less people are using the system, because it's no longer affordable. And they can deny care, because they are now the gatekeepers, not the doctors or the hospitals.

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5 June 2025

A potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease?  This agent, 15-PGDH, was discovered from studies looking at the blood-brain barrier, and is not dependent on amyloid abnormalities. It seems to be safe in mouse models. Existing approved treatments for Alzheimer's disease shrink the brain, which is not a desirable outcome, especially for dementia. Hopefully this one won't.
Another paper found that abnormalities in amyloid-β 42 peptide (Aβ42) and tau protein may affect systemic processes, affecting sensory neurons in general, and promoting accelerated aging. 

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MIT researchers have developed a membrane that can separate different species of crude oil components, potentially making distillation obsolete.

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Portland is the laughingstock of the country.  The City Council spent money on consultants to function as a council. Like why did you run for office in the first place if you don't have a clue.  I knew this would be a problem. Portland's governance is so large that nobody does anything effectively and no one takes ownership of a problem. So nothing gets done.
And now we are seeing women giving birth on the streets. A city in decline. People live like wild animals in the city now.
Also, the Rose Festival might finally end. We can't have nice things anymore. But taxes will still increase. Because Dems still need money. 
Khanh Pham and Lisa Reynolds are not done doing damage. Now they want to scrap private insurance and mandate universal healthcare. Very bad move, initiated by the "healthcare is a right" faction. Which it is not.

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Really?  In Hawaii, political memes and satire are illegal. Hawaii is becoming like the UK. 

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4 June 2025

Korean researchers were able to construct a device that allowed non-invasive mechanical stimulation of cerebral lymphatics that drain the CSF in mice to accelerated clearance of CSF waste. This was felt to be beneficial in aged mice in whom this process was decreased. Paper here.

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Human-generated memes are still funnier.

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Review of the different kinds of plastics. Watch out this summer when you leave your car out in the sun. PAH plasticizers leech out into the air, which you breathe when you step inside.

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What makes brains age? 
This study demonstrates that brain aging follows a specific progression, with the first stage occurring in middle age and coinciding with increased insulin resistance. Moreover, we show that brain areas that age fastest are also those most vulnerable to neuronal insulin resistance. Importantly, we find that administering ketones, which can fuel neurons while bypassing insulin resistance, reverses brain aging effects. However, this intervention is only effective when provided early enough for neurons to remain viable. 
Yes, but what kinds of ketones?
Ketones, whether produced endogenously through fasting or low-carbohydrate/high-fat diets or administered exogenously as a supplement, have been shown to improve age-related cognitive decline and to restore insulin-resistance-induced deficits in axonal conduction velocity. Moreover, ketones may improve neural functioning even at baseline, strengthening signaling for neurons without being compromised by insulin resistance and across the brain for younger individuals in their 20s and 30s. This increased metabolic efficiency under ketosis is consistent with effects reported for other organs, such as the heart.
So acetone, acetoacetate and β hydroxybutyrate, then? Or eat just enough to experience occasional mild ketosis.

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This guy is done with the Firefox browser for many reasons, such as their management, their vision, or lack thereof, and that they might not have a future. But then he switces to Opera, which I don't think is robust enough for me. The support for plug-ins is far less than for Firefox. I use LibreWolf, and find it suitable, and the best of the Firefox spin-offs. I've tried others but always drift back to Gecko-based browsers.

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How to fall behind in the age of AI. Keeping up takes effort.

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Using answer engines instead of search engines. Which ones are best, and best practices.

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Sadly this is true. Having a High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius. A genius brain works differently, and many people can't process information normally. The only ones who were geniuses, yet normal, were Albert Einstein, the Hungarian "martians" and Richard Feynman.

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Kipling's The Buddha at Kamakura poem has he same poetic rhythm as Cassilda's Song, doesn't it?

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3 June 2025

The 5-year disease-free survival was 80.3% in the exercise group and 73.9% in the health-education group. 
The 8-year overall survival was 90.3% in the exercise group and 83.2% in the health-education group. 
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Bill Gates will give the majority of his wealth to Africa. It's your money, Bill, but giving that much money to a continent that's unprepared to receive all that wealth can do a lot of harm.

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Russia will get to deploy new laser-based weapons from China, sooner than Ukraine will get to do so in 2027. War is now like Star Trek.

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Repetitive negative thinking leads to cognitive decline. Or it could be that susceptibility to cognitive decline develops in a brain that is unable to deal with negative influences which lead to negative thinking. Developing resilience needs to be taught in childhood.

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A daily cup of coffee helps you live longer and healthier. Something fairly easy to do.

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Why couldn't we have done something like this? The Chinese have found a way to re-vitalize spent lithium batteries, using a solution of lithium trifluoromethanesulfinate (LiSO2CF3).  This solution was discovered using AI technology.

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If these were the NSF grants that were cut by DOGE, I fully agree. 
“authentic inquiries into science through embodied learning approaches can provide rich opportunities for sense-making through kinesthetic experience, embodied imagining, and the representation of physics concepts for Black and Latinx teens when learning approaches focused on dance and dance-making.”
Whuut??

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Doom loop. A redditor describes why he/she left Seattle core.  The city is basically gone. It's telling that the post was removed from the lefty r/Seattle and was therefore posted on the more centrist-leaning r/SeattleWA.  Censorship is such a typical left-wing thing to do, isn't it?

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2 June 2025

Lots of chatter around this abstract  linking long-distance running to advanced colonic adenomas. Really? All this time, people have been running, and only NOW there's an association? This abstract is just hypothesis-generating and just needs to be confirmed elsewhere as well as doing more in depth investigation.

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Scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO) and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) used groundbreaking adaptive optics to capture sharpest ever photos and videos of the Sun’s corona. These are truly amazing.

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StackOverflow didn't die just because of AI. The author thinks the change in moderator policy killed it. But I think AI certainly accelerated its demise. I haven't used StackOverflow nearly as much as before. Code assistants do the job much more quickly – and after all, they were trained on StackOverflow.  Once StackOverflow loses its usefulness, AI code assistants will be trained on GitHub repos.

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Wow! Google quietly released an app that lets you download and run AI models locally. It's only for Android phones for now, but an iOS app is supposedly coming out soon.

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This writer warns not to fire your human employees just yet, or you'll join the 55% Regret Club.  That's 55% of companies that replaced humans with AI now admit they made wrong decisions about those layoffs. LLMs aren't that good just yet.

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I saw this article about how the GLP-1 receptor agonists drugs have a troublesome side-effect of making you lose bone and muscle mass. That came from an article that was actually published November 2024.  But the muscle mass loss has been known even before, and if you use semaglutide and tirzepatide judiciously, when you are morbidly obese, then the benefits outweigh the risks. But if you use it as a means to be skinny, then it's more harmful than beneficial. I've read that some recommend getting infusions of bimagrumab to counter the muscle loss. Really? Taking an expensive drug to counter the side-effects of another expensive drug, for a non-life threatening condition? Makes no sense to me. The muscle/fat loss ratio is more favorable with tirzepatide than semaglutide, so I'd take that instead. 

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Depo-Provera predisposes to getting meningiomas. Makes sense, since the drug treatment for meningiomas is mifepristone, am anti-progestogen.  But Pfizer allegedly knew about it, and apparently didn't say anything to warn people.

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“... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech. ... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech.”
This may make LLM companies pull back a bit on public releases.

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I'm glad that there are other people like me who cannot play without music in front of me.

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Boy, imagine having to learn Japanese Braille.

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There are time cells in your brain, that are responsible for keeping track of encoding events in temporal order, and recall them in sequential order. Yeah, they're located in the hippocampus. How did these things evolve? 

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Times have changed. No one goes to happy hour anymore. Things are too depressing now. “The happy hours curdled as they turned more into layoff drinks.” 😕

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1 June 2025

Moderna's low-dose COVID vax got approved by the FDA.  I wanted to learn more about this new Moderna vax, referred to as mRNA-1283.  Guess what?  There's no published peer-reviewed data on it! 
Yup, Moderna just supposedly sent their internal data to the FDA, and that was good enough.

There is published data from a phase 1 study from 2023, which is only powered to study safety, not efficacy. For that, you need a phase 2 study.
A phase 2a study came out only two months ago. All it showed was that the mRNA-1283 could elicit antibodies against receptor-binding and N-terminal domains of SARS-CoV2.
It didn't show survival benefit or any kind of useful protection, which you usually need to see.
A phase 2a study is a small study designed to take a preliminary look at efficacy after you've established a safe dose from a phase I study. It determines whether to proceed to a phase 2b study which is better powered for efficacy determination.

But Moderna released a press statement last year that the new formulation was able to elicit antibody responses in phase 3 study. This hasn't been published for review.
Then in July 2024 they announced release of data showing that it was non-inferior to Spikevax, but when you click for data, it only goes to their investors page.

In a very recent letter to the editor, it was pointed out that the mRNA-1283 data does not really show "vaccine effectiveness" as is generally understood, and that there are methodologic deficiencies in the existing studies. 

So, no transparency. We're supposed to just accept that this is another "safe and effective" vaccine. And the media dutifully promotes it like obedient sheep, without any questions of how this new low-dose vax was tested and shown to be worthy of approval.

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State senator Lisa Reynolds is mulling ethics conflict of interest declaration. Yeah, private clinics get reimbursed less than hospital clinics. That was supposed to be a feature of Obamacare. That's part of the reason why so many private doctor practices shut down and the doctors became employees of hospitals or private equity owned companies. The other reason was 340B pricing. 
So Reynolds wants to "mandate commercial insurers reimburse independent primary care clinics at rates equal to those of clinics owned by hospital systems".  Guess what the insurance companies are likely to do?  They'll lower hospital clinic reimbursements when the contract expires, not raise reimbursements of primary care clinics. It's like the old joke about genies granting wishes. Why is she concerned about this all of a sudden? It's been going on for a long time.

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From Oregon Catalyst - signs of a decaying city.

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"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment. Things may be dire for CS majors. Hope their curriculum had time to incorporate some AI/machine learning. But to be competent, you need an extra 1 to 2 years of education. 

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Gene therapy to treat elevated cholesterol levels? Seems like using a nuclear weapon when a grenade might do. This treatment knocks out the PCSK9 gene permanently. Let's wait for long-term studies shall we? Maybe it would be best for those with sky-high resistant elevations. 

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Yeah, even the Swedes are finding "Wind energy more expensive, less stable and less secure". For now, stick with petroleum-based energy or nuclear power.

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Deepfakes are getting harder to detect. This is going to affect society and what we accept as reality now. Everything will have to be verified.

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48% of Americans have no investments at all. Because so far, federal money has been available in one form or another. Notice that very few people (druggies) really experience problematic poverty?  Even the homeless can live the vagabond life in Portland – with free food coupons, money for drugs, tents, tarps, etc. Everyone seems to make it somehow, on welfare/SNAP, free this and that. Why save and struggle? Instead, smoke weed, get tattoos, spend disposable money on whatever.

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31 May 2025

Creatine supplements can give you a slight edge on athletic performance and memory. But you have to take more than the 3 to 5 mg daily that the NY Times states. It's 3 to 5 grams

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There is proof that Patrick Stewart himself exists in the Star Trek universe. Now, there's a Star Trek nerd.

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Microsoft is moving away from using passwords, and will instead use an authenticator app. This is great, and will solve a lot of problems. 

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Ghostworking, eh?  No wonder those millennials and GenXers can't pay off their student loans.

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10 ways people are using AI in their life.  Finding purpose?

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Oregon battery company warns of layoffs, potential shutdown.  This would be the second battery company. Battery storage is the only way solar and wind technologies will work. If you generate solar and wind energy and can't store it, you have to dump it into the grid, and this will make the utility companies have to cut back to the point where they go out of business. And when there is no sun or wind, they have to ramp up unpredictably. You need batteries.

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30 May 2025

Yesterday's edits disappeared. I don't know what happened. I'll attempt to recreate it.

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Astoria is planning a major Goonies celebration. Brings back memories. I've been there recently, and I can tell things are ramping up for next Thursday. 

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Oregon universities are losing the indirect cost funding that they were expecting. It's so funny – people put in DEI terminology into their grant applications because in the Biden administration, those words were music to the ears of NIH. Now they are poison. 
Portland State’s engineering professor Bob Bass said the words diversity, equity and anti-racism appeared frequently in the titles and descriptions of canceled research programs.
OK now this is offensive:
Those likely took the largest cuts because the programs often expanded access to science learning, targeting underrepresented students, Bass said, in fields that remain overwhelmingly white, Asian and male. 
You think we got to where we are just because of bias? You think maybe it was because research done by white or Asian males might be because of the scientific quality of the work? At the mission-critical end of science, it's too late to be DEI.

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LendingTree thinks that Portland has the worst housing crisis outlook. Yeah, I can see that. It won't improve with the current leadership, including the mayor. All they know how to do is to find ways to dump more money onto existing failures.

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