FDR.

Zooey wrote:

I don’t think you can separate Americans from the media stew they grow up in. Their ignorance, apathy, and short attention spans are deliberately cultivated and exploited.

And I don’t think there was a time in American history where that wasn’t true. It may be worse now, but the powers-that-be have been massaging the message since the beginning. Part of it is that many people today realize that things are not always what they are told, but to them the lies are only coming from the group they don’t identify with. They cling to and vehemently defend the propaganda that fits their own word view, and dismiss out of hand any alternatives as fake news.

A good friend of our family recently died of COVID-19 in a nursing home in Philadelphia. He and his wife had been my parent’s best friends since I was in my teens. Our families vacationed together in the Outer Banks every summer. He was a kind and fun-loving man. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s and had been living with his son’s family, but he started experiencing “Korean War” flashbacks accompanied by a lot of screaming. He was frightening his son’s small children, and not knowing what else to do, they put him in a nursing home. I had not seen him in years, but from what I have heard, Alzheimer’s had taken the man I used to know. He no longer existed. What was left was a frightened, tormented, shell of his former self who didn’t know where he was and didn’t recognize anyone around him. Perhaps this is one case where COVID-19 was a blessing.

The new helmet is starting to grow on me…a little

@JoelGHodgson pic.twitter.com/iz9NaBKQz3

— Jessica Ward (@Jessica1187) May 11, 2020

I must say, I’m rather intrigued by this Basil of which you speak.

“Almost Heaven, Westylvania…”

Is your allegiance with the Hatfields or the McCoys?

Zooey wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Organic farming also contributes more to climate change on a per acre basis than conventional farming does.

Why?

“Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming – which would be fantastic if they didn’t also require more land to produce the same amount of food.

Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.

Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account.“

Link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/amp/

I have been intrigued by the idea of “rewilding” my yard for a few years. Lawns are a problem because grass just doesn’t support a lot of insect diversity. The issue is local ordinances surrounding lawn appearance, height, etc.

From what I know of vitamin D, it’s way over-hyped. It’s not the panacea for cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, depression, colds, the flu, etc it’s made out to be.

It is an important biochemical. It does play a role in immunity. It assists calcium in building bone, but increased supplementation does not improve osteoporosis. It does improve beta cell function in the pancreas, but supplementation does not prevent or improve diabetes.

Low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased mortality – but so are high levels.

Most people likely have enough vitamin D and don’t need supplements. You probably get all you need just by eating right and getting outside in the sun.

waterfield wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

The human population has doubled since 1970, the period of time over which wildlife populations have been reduced by half. It took humans 200,000 yrs to reach a population of 1 billion, and then only 200 years to reach nearly 8 billion. The rate of growth is beginning to slow, and eventually we’ll reach a point where births <= deaths, but living on this planet will be pretty miserable for everyone but a select few by then. Different modes of production would impact the environment to different degrees, and the less damaging ones must be pursued, but wherever humans go, we change the environment. It’s unavoidable. That was true even when our population was limited to small bands of hunter gatherers. If we’re going to really stop the continued degradation of the environment, we need to halt population growth.

Overpopulation is a core problem. But how do you even begin to control it without measures that resemble China’s one child per family approach-and even that would have to be adopted world wide.

I don’t know what the answer to that is, W. It’s difficult to overcome the cultural beliefs, and economic/educational inequities that keep this from becoming a priority in the minds of most people. Of course it’s easy to sit on my couch in a country that contains 6% of the world’s population but consumes 25% of its resources and complain about this. People in other parts of the world who lack food security aren’t worried about the world’s dwindling resources due to overpopulation.

I imagine at some point in the future draconian population control measures like China’s will have to be implemented. Hopefully it won’t have to get uglier than that, but I bet it does in some places.

wv wrote:

wv’s video

Overpopulation.

The simple fact is there’s way too many people. There are over 7 billion hairless monkeys flinging feces out there today, and there’ll be 10.5 billion by 2050.

Just about every environmental issue we are dealing with including climate change is rooted in overpopulation, but that isn’t being talked about any more as the video points out.

Until we face that issue, all the environmental ‘fixes’ being discussed now are only addressing the symptoms, not the cause, and are therefore inherently limited and ultimately doomed to fail.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by nittany ram.

On the Downtown Rams draft coverage they mentioned that when the Rams met with Hopkins during Senior Bowl week, McVay told Hopkins he would be excited to pair him with Higbee.

This pick would imply that Everett is likely gone. No point in having two athletic TEs who can’t block, right?

Link: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/hydroxychloroquine-not-looking-good-for-covid-19/

We have been tracking the story of the hype surrounding hydroxychloroquine over at Science-Based Medicine, but there is a brief follow up I wanted to comment on. The short version of the story so far is that one very bad French study claimed to show dramatic reduction in detected virus in those treated. This study, however, was not only preliminary, it was a horrible study, so much so that the results are uninterpretable. The big problem was that it did not count patients who became too sick or died. That is a classic way to make a treatment look better than it is. The author is also a climate change denier who initially mocked China for taking steps to mitigate Covid-19. He does not exactly have street cred within the scientific community.

But that one horrible study from a sketchy researcher was enough to spark media hype, at least in certain circles, and capture the attention of a president apparently desperate to make this problem go away. Amid the fear of a pandemic, that was a toxic combination. The notion that hydroxychloroquine (with our without the antibiotic, azythromycin) might fight the SARS-Cov2 virus is not implausible. But most things in medicine that are “not implausible” don’t work out. We need high quality clinical science to ultimately tell.

The big question always is – what is the risk vs benefit? Hydroxychloroquine and Azythromycin both have the same potentially deadly side effect, prolonging the QT interval of the heart, which increases the risk for sudden cardiac death. This is a manageable side effect in the right setting, but is potentially serious. This is not a good drug or combination to be taking just on the chance it might help.

The entire episode is a good reason to remind everyone why science-based medicine is so important, the nature of clinical research, and the pitfalls of falling for preliminary data. After that initial terrible study there were two more preliminary studies, the kind that are done to see if there is any potential for the treatment that deserves more rigorous study. An open-label study in China found no benefit from hydroxychloroquine. There was also a French study attempting to replicate the results of the original study, and could not. They also found no benefit from the drug – no reduction in the virus, directly contradicting the original study.

But perhaps most devastating is the most recent study to show results – this was a VA retrospective study comparing patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin, and just usual care. They found no benefit on any measure for those treated with the drugs. However, those treated with the drugs were twice as likely to die:

Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively.

That is a huge red flag, the kind of preliminary finding that could kill the prospects for a new drug. That is exactly the reason that small preliminary studies are done, to make sure the treatment isn’t killing people before doing a larger study. Even these results are not the final word, however. This is a retrospective study, which means subjects were not randomized. It is therefore possible that sicker patients were given the drugs, for example. But we can look at all the preliminary data we have so far and conclude that it’s not looking good for the prospects of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19. Further, this drug has a serious potential side effect that may actually increase the risk of death for those given the treatment.

Certainly, this is not the stage when this drug or combination should be hyped or recommended. It is nothing less than dangerously reckless to do so. Further, hydroxychloroquine is a proven treatment for some autoimmune diseases, like Lupus, and some patients who rely it are finding it difficult to get the drug because demand has spiked due to the hype. It’s pretty much a lose-lose all around.

At this point we do need a double-blind randomized placebo controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 to get some rigorous evidence. One solid negative trial, however, should end it. If the results are promising, then further study should be done. There would be many finer questions about dose, who should get the drug, who should not get it, etc. But at this point the odds are in favor of this treatment not working out, and in fact being harmful. No one should be taking this drug for Covid-19 outside an approved clinical trial.

“This is like a story out of the last days of the Soviet Union,” David Frum wrote on Twitter of the NEJM letter. “This is what it means to be a failed state,” wrote the essayist Umair Haque, echoing him. In the absence of an explanation, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that this is simply mafia government, exerting control for the sake of control, not in spite of but because of the crisis-led demand, and squeezing the American people, as they die in hospital beds and attend — with inadequate protection — to the sick and scared.