TRUST THE EXPERTS, THEY’LL DO THE RIGHT THING: House investigation finds FDA, drug firm Biogen ignored internal concerns for Alzheimer’s drug.
Archive for 2022
December 29, 2022
LONGEVITY: Could Getting Rid of Old Cells Help People Live Disease-Free for Longer?
I take quercetin partly for this reason. Does it work? I mean, I seem to be aging pretty well, but who knows?
I BELIEVE THAT XANTHAN GUM IS IN A LOT OF THINGS: “Researchers in Japan have linked xanthan gum-based fluid thickener to lower blood sugar after eating, which could help patients with heart disease or Type 2 diabetes, according to a new study. The study, conducted by researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University, found xanthan gum — which is used in several foods including fluid thickeners to prevent choking in patients — helped to increase insulin response, improve fat metabolism and have positive effects on the gut microbiome. . . . The study also found gut microbial composition was also altered after drinking thickened liquid, causing an increase in the numbers of two “good” intestinal bacteria which produce short-chain fatty acids that protect intestinal and pancreatic cell responsible for insulin secretion.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Airlines Insist Flights Aren’t Being Canceled, They’re Being Held Accountable.
FASTER, PLEASE: Stem cell transplant may slow progression of multiple sclerosis.
HOLIDAY DEAL: TurboTax Deluxe 2022 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return. #CommissionEarned
MARK JUDGE: America needs a rock ‘n’ roll rebellion against woke censors.
In Transformer, Doonan, a gay man, celebrates how, in the glory days of rock ‘n’ roll, anyone could sing about anything. As Doonan writes: “The astonishing thing about glam rock — the style and the music — was its aggressive heterosexuality.” As critic Dave Hickey pointed out at the time, “The world of Hollywood is filled with gay people trying to act straight while the world of rock’n’roll is filled with straight people trying to act gay.”
Now, of course, you can’t have any “appropriation” that allows an artist to explore a new style. In an absurd and sad 2018 article, Washington Post pop critic Chris Richards argued that musicians should self-censor themselves in deference to prevailing political orthodoxies. Richards describes a band that so loved a record by an R&B artist that they wanted to cover it. They finally decided not to: “A band of white indie rockers performing the songs of a black R & B singer? No way. It would be seen as cultural appropriation.”
Fortunately, these white rockers never got the memo:
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Biden Has Multi-Trillion Dollar Spending Bill Flown to Caribbean Vacation So He Can Sign It.
As John Nolte likes to say, Democrats sure got it good.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Why Did You Stop Going to the Movies? “Hollywood, Inc. rallied to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020. Now, they’re stuck with an 80-year-old leader with no clue how to steer the economy out of the ditch. That’s dramatically impacting Hollywood as a whole, and even streaming services are crunching some serious numbers of late. It’s also forcing potential movie goers to make some tough choices. Food … or film tickets?”
FLASHBACK: 1993 SPORTS CAR COMPARISON TEST. I think we have sport utes with better handling and certainly better acceleration now.
OK, I’VE HAD JUST ABOUT A-FRICKIN-NOUGH. The New York Times gives us “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs.” Every single paragraph in this is a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I know it’s behind a paywall, but if you can read it, you should, because this is the voice of the establishment.
The ethical universe, according to Signal, is simple: The privacy of individuals must be respected above all else, come what may. If terrorists or child abusers or other criminals use the app, or one like it, to coordinate activities or share child sexual abuse imagery behind impenetrable closed doors, that’s a shame — but privacy is all that matters.
One should always worry when a person or an organization places one value above all. The moral fabric of our world is complex. It’s nuanced. Sensitivity to moral nuance is difficult, but unwavering support of one principle to rule them all is morally dangerous.
The way Signal wields the word “surveillance” reflects its coarsegrained understanding of morality. To the company, surveillance covers everything from a server holding encrypted data that no one looks at to a law enforcement agent reading data after obtaining a warrant to East Germany randomly tapping citizens’ phones. One cannot think carefully about the value of privacy — including its relative importance to other values in particular contexts — with such a broad brush.
What’s more, the company’s proposition that if anyone has access to data, then many unauthorized people probably will have access to that data is false. This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors.
If you’re not either laughing your ass off or cocking your shotgun after reading that last part, you are probably reading the wrong blog.
READER FAVORITE: Klipsch Heritage Wireless The One II Tabletop Stereo Walnut. #CommissionEarned We use this stereo everyday, highly recommended.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Can You Run .223 And 5.56 NATO Interchangeably?
HAPPY NEW YEAR. NOW DO YOUR TAXES. TurboTax Deluxe 2022 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return, PC/Mac Download.
HOW PETER JACKSON BROKE UP THE BEATLES AND USED AI TO MAKE REVOLVER BETTER THAN EVER:
Beginning with Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles recorded most of their instruments and vocals to separate tracks. So for [Giles] Martin, boosting the volume of a guitar or organ from Abbey Road or “The White Album” was probably as simple as moving a fader. But on earlier albums, the band often combined a few sounds to the same track. The effect was to lock multiple voices or instruments in place together, leaving no easy way for future remixers to tweak just one by itself.
Non-audiophiles may ask: Who cares? The original Revolver sounded good enough to top lists of the greatest albums ever made. Did it really need the overhaul?
Arguably, yes. For all the Beatles’ genius, they never imagined a day when their music would mainly be played through earbuds. The stereo versions of their early albums were mixed for novelty, with extreme separation between sounds in the right and left speakers, sometimes to the point of lopsidedness. (The Beatles themselves preferred the mono mixes, which are harder to find these days.) “Taxman” was a notorious offender, with bass, drums, and rhythm guitar on one side, and for much of the song, just tambourine and cowbell on the other. It’s been reported to cause dizziness in headphone listeners. For 56 years, there was no way to separate those instruments and rearrange them across the stereo field.
But then Peter Jackson took up the case. A few years ago, the Lord of the Rings director was hired to sift through 60 hours of unused footage from the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be and cut it into his own movie — 2021’s Get Back. Large sections of that footage had been marked as unusable because the band’s conversations were drowned out on the mono audio tapes by the sound of their instruments: John, Paul, and George had deliberately hidden their sensitive discussions from the original doc crew by noodling on their guitars. Jackson asked the engineers at his production company, WingNut Films, to see what they could salvage, and so they developed their own machine-learning “de-mixing” software capable of splitting up interlocked sounds. It worked so well decoupling music from speech on the Let It Be audio tapes that Get Back, which had been planned as a two-hour film, grew into an eight-hour TV miniseries (a hit for Disney+ last fall and, by some estimations, the best rock documentary ever).
Martin wondered if Jackson’s software could also be used to isolate the sounds on the Beatles’ early studio albums. Could it ever! And so now we have a remixed Revolver, a “Taxman” that won’t make anybody sick, and, presumably, boxed-set remixes of the band’s other six albums on the way for the 2023-2028 holiday seasons. At last, the most valuable music catalogue in history will be AirPod compliant.
Hopefully Jackson’s technology will eventually filter down to the prosumer level, as the currently available demix technology is still filled with plenty of noticeable audio artifacts: How to Rebuild a Recorded Song When You’ve Lost the Multitracks.
MAYBE GETTING RID OF THE ROLLING BLACKOUTS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA, TOO: Massive Electric Semi Truck Subsidies.
WAS BUTTIGIEG ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH FOR SOUTHWEST AIRLINES’ HOLIDAY IMPLOSION?
Now, the question that will be most interesting to those who follow politics is: How much of this is Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s fault? And it’s not just Republicans asking this question. David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, argues that Buttigieg was asleep at the switch . . . not all that unlike the time the ports on the West Coast got snarled and the nation’s freight-rail system came to the brink of halting:
Southwest Airlines stranding thousands of Americans during the holiday season is not some unexpected crisis nor the normal consequence of inclement weather — and federal officials are not powerless bystanders. Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down.
The warnings came just before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on national television insisting travel would improve by the holidays, and before Southwest executives — flush with cash from a government bailout — announced new dividend payouts to shareholders, while paying themselves millions of dollars.
Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service.
Back in September, I noted that Buttigieg played a surprisingly minor role in the Biden administration’s efforts to avert the threat of a freight-rail strike, taking a back seat to Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. Looking over Buttigieg’s schedule and public events, it seemed like Buttigieg was treating his job like a de facto presidential campaign. (In mid September, the Hill wrote, “Some Democrats are speculating about what a second Buttigieg run could look like.”)
One of Buttigieg’s campaign-esque stops last fall was on James Corden’s Late Late Show, where he pledged to the host, “I think it’s going to get better by the holidays. We’re really pressing the airlines to deliver better service. So many people have been delayed, been canceled – it’s happened to me! Several times, this summer! And the fact is, they need to be ready to service the tickets they’re selling.”
As Bush said to “Brownie,” “Heck of a job!”
Pete’s got his private jets to fly. Why should he care about how you’re going to get home?
IF YOU’D SUGGESTED THIS TWO YEARS AGO YOU’D HAVE BEEN CALLED A PURVEYOR OF MISINFORMATION: Off-Patent Liver Disease Drug Could Stop COVID-19 and Protect Against Future Variants.
THEY DID NOTHING WRONG: Pentagon not planning to reinstate 8,000+ fired troops who refused COVID vax, says report.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You wonder, given the state of today’s military, how many would even want to go back.
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED MET WITH BIG SHORT AUTHOR MICHAEL LEWIS DURING HOUSE ARREST: REPORT.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is working with a popular journalist to turn the story of his crypto exchange’s rise and fall into a bestseller.
Bankman-Fried was visited by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short, last Friday, according to the New York Post. Lewis spent several hours at SBF’s parents’ home, where he had been forced to live after paying a $250 million bail last week. Lewis has been in talks with Bankman-Fried for over six months, including discussions before the crypto mogul’s business collapse. These meetings are occurring as SBF is held on bail and faces trial over charges of fraud.
Bankman-Fried’s discussions were revealed in a letter from Lewis’s publishing agency, which had pitched a book on Bankman-Fried in the last year and his success as an investor. SBF’s rise to fame was “more than sufficient for a signature Michael Lewis book,” Lewis’s publicists argued.
Soon to be a major motion picture! Hollywood FTX Frenzy As Michael Lewis Reveals He Spent Six Months With Founder.
Related: In between visits with Lewis, “Martin Shkreli Offers Sam Bankman-Fried Blunt Prison Advice.” “If convicted, SBF could spend several decades behind bars. Now, Martin Shkreli, who also did time behind bars, wants to help him out. ‘Sam isn’t exactly going to be somebody that fits into prison. My advice for him includes shaving his head. My advice for him includes deepening his voice,’ the man known as ‘Pharma Bro’ said during a conversation with Laura Shin. Shkreli also believes the fact SBF is ‘effeminate’ and lacks knowledge of ‘criminal culture’ is going to be a problem for the former crypto mogul. One suggestion from Shkreli? Listen to a lot of rap music ASAP.”
I’M GONNA HAVE TO GO WITH HIPPO MCHIPPOFACE: Virginia zoo seeks public’s help to name pygmy hippo baby.
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: DHS Dropped the Ball on Background Checks for Gun Sales.