“the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/trump-vance-morality.html

Of all the weird things in my recent life, one of the weirdest was developing a modicum of respect for David Brooks. I didn’t give enough credit to his chronic concerns about community and values (social capital). He was right, I was wrong.

“Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the [drug] tests”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.YA7T.1z0vkogrzeCV&smid=url-share

Allegedly he actually go tested. I find that hard to believe. Lots of psychedelics and boatloads of ketamine

“He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants.”

He and RFK likely bond over there Scientology-like psych hatred.

Haiti hires Erik (Blackwater) Prince for gang warfare.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/haiti-erik-prince-blackwater-gangs.html

“expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer.”

“U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.”

Biden / UN effort failed. So now it’s foreign mercenaries. Prince is said a bad name in the mercenary industry.

Cognitively impaired dependents of boomers living on streets once mothers die.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/politics/homelessness-baby-boomers.html

“he reveled in sports and neighborhood friends but mostly felt lost in class.”

“Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later.”

As parents of two dependent adults we think of this every day. Our estate planning is the most complex thing we have ever attempted — and we have loads of degrees and expertise and a reasonable estate. Most such dependents live with parents until the parents die.

Shithole country autocrat: Trump family scams and theft grow quickly

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/words-and-phrases-we-can-do-without-41d

“The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join”

Medicaid work requirement: “most people still will be eligible, but will get kicked off because they can’t manage the paperwork”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-we-wrote-in-the-new-york-times

Our son is disabled. The paperwork is obscene. It only makes sense as a way to deny services.

Separately, implementing a work requirement in a non-punitive way would greatly *increase* the cost of Medicaid coverage.

Antivaxx and anti-science MAHA report reviewed: “MAHA is basically anti-psychiatry and wants discourage the use of psychiatric medications even when appropriate”

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-maha-report-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-mostly-the-bad-and-ugly/

The claimed authors have minimal to no expertise and are all known crackpots. I suspect anti-psych bias comes from RFK past evaluations for schizophrenia-like features, esp in his 20s. His delusions are remarkable.

“omits some of the most common causes of chronic disease and death among children, notably car crashes and gunfire, the leading causes of death among young Americans.”

Trump’s mission to “save “white South Africans goes the way I expected.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/21/south-africa-trump-afriforum-white-refugees/

The SA politician who promoted the idea seems appalled by his success: “… With his tail between his legs, Kriel backtracked on his claims of a white genocide. He has gone on to turn down Trump’s offer of asylum, insisting he was a patriotic South African …” Excellent background in this well written article. At first worried and upset SAs now more amused.

“claims of white genocide are a pretext for an administration that is keen to pressure South Africa to withdraw its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice”

“Leather straps hang from the wire and brush the brakeman to get his attention about a bridge or a tunnel”

https://streets.mn/2025/05/23/minneapolis-twenty-ninth-street-railroad-depression-part-one/

Fun history, especially for bike riders of the now Minneapolis Greenway. Before Boston’s big dig there was the Milwaukee Road trench of WW I, with several SCOTUS rulings.

Straps similar to the height chain at garage entrance.

“Mice lacking the enzyme cystathionine γ-lyase — which breaks down other molecules into cysteine — lost 30% of their weight in one week when their diet also lacked food containing cysteine.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01597-9

Creatine supplements used in strength training increase cysteine levels …

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4754151/

Implications for cachexia in malignancy and other disorders?

“[pro tier] ChatGPT effectively maintains a detailed summary of your previous conversations, updating it frequently with new details. The summary then gets injected into the context every time you start a new chat.”

https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/

I very much prefer the Perplexity Spaces approach. This needs to be under user control: it would stop me using CGPT. But for most users it is probably an improvement.

“Has there ever been a consumer product that’s this capable of building up a human-readable profile of its users?”

KrebsOnSecurity 6.3 Tbps DDoS: “… Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content”

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-near-record-6-3-tbps-ddos/

How long will Google do this?

“Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems”

Absurdly cheap: “botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week”

Scott Adams, at the end of his life, learns compassion the very hard way

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/scott-adams-dilbert-prostate-cancer-biden.html

Adams became an enthusiastic MAGA extremist. But now he’s dying of metastatic cancer of the prostate. He may be reevaluating his beliefs.

“Part of Mr. Adams’ sympathy for Mr. Biden seemed to come from his own lived experience with the disease, which he called “intolerable” … “I don’t have good days,” he said. “Every day is a nightmare. And evening is even worse.”

Autoimmune Disease: B-cell reset – “B cell plasmablasts that were the constant source of the “autoantibodies” directed against the patients’ own tissues”

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/autoimmune-disease-transformed

Suddenly a lot of chronic diseases may be cured. Not AFAIK applicable to Rheumatoid Arthritis but Lupus and many less common disorders. Trial results expected over next 1-2 years.

NYT does not terrible job of explaining why experts don’t like early PSA screening.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/health/joe-biden-prostate-cancer-diagnosis-screening.html

Basically it’s a lousy test. High false positive, high false negative, and in 80+ the goal isn’t 20y survival.

“… about half of men have some cancer in their prostate by their 70s or 80s, although most have no symptoms.”

If you find a PSA you have to pay attention to it – even if you don’t want to.

Fascinating story of all the odd places Denisovan fossils have been found it

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01549-3

“… a man bought a lower jawbone from an antique shop in Tainan City in Taiwan. It had been dredged from the Penghu Channel, 20 kilometres offshore. The man donated it to a museum after researchers realized, on the basis of photographs, that it was a hominin bone. When they finally described it in 2015, the researchers noted that its second molar looked distinctly Denisovan”

Paywalled but the free part is still good.

“In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/05/20/federal-workers-trump-mental-health/

“In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.”

1/3 are veterans, often more vulnerable than non-veteran cohorts.