NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Peptoid nanosheets assemble by different design rule.
Archive for 2016
August 5, 2016
ESPN BECAME AIR AMERICA GRADUALLY, BUT PEOPLE HAVE NOTICED: ESPN Loses 4 Million Subscribers In Past Year.
QUERCETIN UPDATE: I’ve talked about quercetin before, but the Insta-Daughter started taking Quercetin and reports that within a few days her sinuses were vastly improved. This wasn’t the result of my urging, but a recommendation from her ENT doctor.
UPDATE: I should note that she takes it (the linked brand) twice a day and says that makes a difference; I’ve always just taken it once a day. Plus, note lots of similar experiences in the comments.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Hamilton College Caught Lying About ‘Heartfelt Student Demand’ for New ‘Diversity’ Requirement.
FASTER, PLEASE: Arthritis Drug May Have Benefits Against Alzheimer’s.
A drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis may have benefits against Alzheimer’s disease, researchers report.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease believed to be driven in part by tumor necrosis factor, or T.N.F., a protein that promotes inflammation. Drugs that block T.N.F., including an injectable drug called etanercept, have been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis for many years.
T.N.F. is also elevated in the cerebrospinal fluid of Alzheimer’s patients.
Researchers identified 41,109 men and women with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and 325 with both rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. In people over 65, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease was more than twice as high in people with rheumatoid arthritis as in those without it. The study is in CNS Drugs.
But unlike patients treated with five other rheumatoid arthritis drugs, those who had been treated with etanercept showed a significantly reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
I hope it works.
BLUE LIVES MATTER LEGISLATION IN NEW YORK STATE: It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Louisiana has similar legislation that went into effect August 1. I think the whole concept of hate crimes is phony. Crimes are crimes. However, the American Left managed to scream long enough to get hate crime legislation passed. So this legislation is short-term blow back with long-term roots. All lives matter — and no decent person ever said black lives don’t matter.
JONATHAN RAUCH: How American Politics Went Insane.
What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.
Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.
Read the whole thing.
The insanity is merely a symptom of a deeper illness: That our constitutional republic has become popular democracy, now entering the inevitable end-phase of a positive feedback loop.
UNEXPECTEDLY! “College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink,” the New York Times reports, with an actual sighting of the U-word:
Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.
Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.
Yes, who on earth could have seen this coming?
AN ARMY OF MARY SUES: “If, as Glenn Reynolds put it, the Internet has unleashed an ‘Army of Davids,’ it is also unleashing an army of Mary Sues,” Robert Tracinski writes at Real Clear Future:
For those who don’t know, “Mary Sue” is a term that originally referred to a particularly bad kind of fan fiction. It originated with a 1974 parody of Star Trek fan fiction in which the heroine, Lieutenant Mary Sue, is a rather obvious stand-in for the author, who is seeking to live vicariously through her overly idealized alter ego. Since then, the term has come to be a stand-in for fan fiction as such.
It also indicates some of the mixed feelings fans of a franchise have toward its amateur fan fiction, and it gives you an idea why movie studios and publishers who own copyrights worth billions of dollars might not want to give fan fiction full rein.
Which leads us to the next step: surprise, surprise, a promise made by a Hollywood producer turns out not to be true. The Axanar lawsuit has not been dropped, and in late June Paramount ignored a set of guidelines proposed by makers of fan films and published its own set of guidelines that will put the medium in a pretty small box. To avoid a lawsuit from Paramount, a fan production must be no more than 15 minutes long; have a budget no bigger than $50,000; have no paid professional actors or crew and no one who has ever worked on an official Star Trek production; no merchandising, not even the little perks usually given out for crowdfunding efforts (and what is a crowdfunded project without a T-shirt?); and all costumes from the franchise must be official Paramount merchandise. This can only be viewed as an attempt to ensure that no fan films with decent production quality or and kind of ambitious scope can be produced.
Earlier: THE FAN TRAP: Axanar, The $1 Million Star Trek Fan Film CBS Wants to Stop (from Reason TV):
DIEORAMA: Hold These Tiny Crime Scenes in the Palm of Your Hand.
Creepy, but I can’t stop looking.
TO BE FAIR, JACK IN THE BOX IS IN THE BUSINESS OF EXCHANGING MONEY FOR GOODS AND SERVICES: Jack in the Box Employee Fired for Giving Free Tacos to Veteran.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR WHAT WE CHOOSE TO COMMIT JIHAD AGAINST TOGETHER: Did an Undercover FBI Agent Seems to Have Directly Encouraged Garland, TX Jihadist Shooter to Attack “Draw Mohammad” Rally?
THE END OF KEMALIST TURKEY: Turkish ruling party purges US-based cleric’s followers.
The Anadolu Agency says the Justice and Development Party, founded by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, issued a circular Friday asking members to “immediately start efforts to purge those linked to the (Gulenmovement) or who gave support to the reprehensible coup.” It also called on local branches to avoid “agitation and gossip” during the purges.
The government has branded Gulen’s movement a terrorist organization and has launched a sweeping crackdown on its alleged followers since the attempted coup.
It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.
HOW TO HACK ISIS.
NOW LET’S HEAR ABOUT HILLARY’S: Clinton video questions Trump’s ties to Putin.
It would be nice if we had at least one major-party nominee who wasn’t controlled by Putin.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: True The Vote Wins In DC Circuit.
The WaPo tried to blame simple incompetence back in June. But the DC Circuit says that “there is no factual history of such discriminatory acquisition of taxpayer information prior to the events giving rise to these cases.” It also says that it i “plain to the Inspector General, the district court, and this court that the IRS cannot defend its discriminatory conduct on the merits.”
The targeted the Tea Party movement because it threatened to bring runaway government under control. And a lot of GOP leaders were okay with that, because the Tea Party movement threatened to bring runaway government under control.
Walter Olson has been tweeting some thoughts.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: ‘Clinton Cash’ Exposes the Clintons’ Past – and the Obamas’ Future.
THEIR VIEW OF GOVERNMENT IS LARGE; IT CONTAINS MULTITUDES. Liberal hypocrisy: “It’s wrong to have gender separate washrooms for Canadians — but it’s OK to have gender apartheid swimming pools” for Muslims?
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND: Support for Germany’s Merkel plunges after attacks.
The survey for public broadcaster ARD showed support for Merkel down 12 points from her July rating to 47 percent. This marked her second-lowest score since she was re-elected in 2013. In April last year, before the migrant crisis erupted she enjoyed backing of 75 percent.
Merkel’s open-door refugee policy has come under attack from critics after five attacks in Germany since July 18 have left 15 people dead, including four assailants, and dozens injured.
Two of the attackers had links to Islamist militancy, officials say.
Support for one of Merkel’s fiercest critics, Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, who has called for restrictions on immigration to increase security, jumped 11 points to 44 percent.
Over a million migrants have entered Germany in the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
Merkel repeated her claim that Germany could manage to successfully integrate the influx of refugees last week and vowed not to change her refugee policy.
She’s been a total disaster.
WORDS, JUST WORDS: 2015 Flashback: State Claimed No ‘Big Suitcase Full of Cash’ in Iran Deal.
To be fair, technically they were right: “Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.” No suitcases were harmed in the making of our humiliation by the mullahs.
I’m old enough to remember when a similar arrangement with Iran was considered quite a big deal by the DNC-MSM.
RON RADOSH: Do We Really Want Donald Trump’s Hand on the Nuclear Button?
I dunno — ala, OBL’s “strong horse” theory, ISIS might genuinely fear someone they perceive as crazier than they are.
