Posted on behalf of the author, RC Weakley: At this point hysteresis is all that is holding the US dollar as the global reserve currency. That has been the case since Nixon. What we have done since then has only dug us into a deeper hole when events finally happen that will throw the dirt […]
In 2020, I enrolled in the Moderna clinical trial of their mRNA vaccine. I got the first jab in August 2020, and it turns out I was in the vaccine arm of the trial, not the placebo arm. I’ve now had seven vaccinations, as the vaccine has been updated. I contracted COVID once. Of course, […]
My parents retired to rural upstate NY, where they lived happily for 20 years. But naturally, as they aged, their health declined. At one point, my mom had a pulmonary embolism, and landed in a community hospital in Bennington VT, about 30 miles away. She got the care she needed, but when she was later […]
I have two dental implants, the first of which was done nearly ten years ago. They were both done after a tooth broke and the dentist told me he couldn’t save the tooth. I could have just left the hole, but elected to fill it with an implant, which was done in each case by […]
I’m reading every now and then about the future of robot assisted medicine. Robots have long replaced humans in routine, repetitive tasks like auto assembly, but surgery seems like a bespoke activity beyond the reach of robots. Not so. A few years ago, I had mesh hernia repair surgery. The procedure was robotic-assisted laparoscopy. There […]
When alcoholic beverages were illegal in America, drinking didn’t stop. Alcohol smuggling just became lucrative for criminal gangs. Drugs like cocaine and heroin have been illegal for decades. Consumption of cocaine and heroin didn’t stop; smuggling of these drugs just became lucrative for criminal gangs. Making undocumented migration illegal and militarizing the Mexican border didn’t […]
When I was growing up, fluoridation of water was regarded as a commie plot by the John Birch Society wingnuts. Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of Americans (including my wife and I) have lived with fluoridated water without evidence of harm. I see where RFK, Jr is predicting that the second Trump Administration will recommend against […]
Agriculture requires photosynthesis to make food. However, the photosynthetic mechanism is slow, inefficient and requires a lot of resources. A recent paper describes an electro-agriculture technology that combines carbon dioxide electrolysis with biological systems to boost the efficiency of food production. If implemented at scale, such a system could reduce agricultural land use in the […]
Here’s House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need […]
Republicans have long objected to the ACA, and Trump tried several times to have it overturned; he’s claimed he’ll replace it with something better, but in eight years, he’s never come up with even a rudiment of a proposal. And here’s Speaker Johnson at a campaign stop yesterday: “No Obamacare?” an attendee asked Johnson, referring […]