“Drain the Swamp”, “Anti-elite”, “America First”, “Fighting for Main Street, not Wall Street”.

No more Freedom of Navigation? Some other countries might object to that. I hope all you MAGA folks are happy with yourselves.

There are serious differences between the two parties. Democrats withdraw support from a fellow democrat when credibly accused of sexual misconduct. But a GOP president who has been credibly accused of pedophilia can even start a serious war and the GOP refuses to check him.

I noted the other day that a page at CDC dot gov had a questionable source MBFC rating.

The Trump admin talks about the Iran war, and it appears to have been quite real, but it is the people and their laws which seem to be constantly in the Admin’s sights. The people are getting one “bombshell” news item after another where long-settled law is under attack (in this case medical records privacy). Has the Executive Branch been taken over by a hostile economic power, either a foreign government or a corporate syndicate of some kind?

JH Kellogg was a physician, so his view came with that stamp of medical authority.

That probably goes back to JH Kellogg and his Seventh Day Adventist religion, and possibly back to the Puritans.

I can’t wait for the GOP to get their electoral whomping in the next few elections. They needed to think of the good of the country instead of their republican political club.

I wanted to highlight a couple paragraphs:

Usually, a complaint from a state or business triggers lengthy reviews before a God Squad hearing. But in this case, the fate of imperiled whales, sea turtles and other at-risk species was in the hands of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, who invoked “national security” for the exemption, the first such rationale given since the 1973 passage of the Endangered Species Act.

“When development in the gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country,” Hegseth said at the meeting. “Recent hostile action by the Iranian terror regime highlights yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative.”

Laws are for little people.

In the facilities shut down, what happens with the patients? They can’t just up and walk out like healthy folks.

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What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.

Honestly I think this read-more tactic has gone too far. Install a word counter and start paying attention to how many words are in news articles. I have been doing that, we have a large number of articles around the 5000 word length, with some significantly more. This opinion piece is over 3100 words, shorter than many articles posted. Assuming a 250 words-per-minute reading speed, this article takes 12 minutes to read. We can easily spend the entire day reading the top news stories in their entireties. In the old days, news items almost always had a lede summarizing the article. Today, many stories keep you reading by not having a lede. When we are reading, we do not have time for activities such as going out and holding up a First Amendment grievance sign, or writing a grievance letter to our legislators. We can all too easily get caught up in stories about Ms. Leavitts supposedly-unflattering double-chin photo, a manufactured controversy, simply as a method of wasting our reading time to stories of little importance to our civics-assigned task of being informed citizens.

Money in politics is a topic that’s been discussed ever since I was old enough to read newspapers, 50+ years…

Search says open carry is illegal in Washington DC.

When I grew up in the 1970s, after Woodstock, Christian private schools were very clear that nobody ever had sex. Look at Mary. Immaculate conception.

I suspect it was a reaction to the Hippies of the 1960s and their free love flower children generation. My my how the pendulum swings.

Does Wilhoit’s law apply to Islamic Theocracy?

Frank Wilhoit said, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

I do a lot of recipe-ingredient research on AI, and it’ll steer me wrong more often than I’d like. Fortunately, I know enough to be persistent and questioning. I would not take medical advice from it, though I’d use it for supplemental research.

Morrin concluded that the AI chatbot could “miss clear indicators of risk or deterioration” and respond inappropriately to people in mental health crises, though he added that it could “improve access to general support, resources, and psycho-education”.

Trump seems to want complete press fealty, like a king.

When Thanksgiving became Insultgiving!