timelets

President-elect Donald Trump’s top political appointees want you to buy supplements.
Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Trump’s pick for surgeon general, sells her own line of vitamins. Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recommended pills on Truth Social in February that he said could “rid your body of the harms” from Covid-19 vaccines.
Mehmet Oz, the TV personality whom Trump named to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, promotes supplements sold by online retailer iHerb. He has advertised multivitamins, supplements for “brain power” and fish- oil pills that he said “probably slowed” the progression of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.

If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates consumer products including drugs, medical devices, vaccines, dietary supplements and most food.

Supplement-industry groups said they were compiling a wish list to share with people close to Kennedy. They want supplements to be covered by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the federal food-benefits program, as well as so-called FSAs and HSAs, tax-exempt savings accounts used to pay for medical expenses. They also want to change FDA rules that supplements can’t contain an ingredient considered a drug or being investigated as one.
The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association, said it wants new rules that would compel supplement manufacturers to register products with the FDA. “FDA is flying blind,” said Steve Mister, the group’s president.

WSJ, Dec 9, 2025

https://www.wsj.com/health/trump-cabinet-picks-supplements-3fbbbca1

The development of computerized simulations and techniques for real-time imaging at microscopic scales provides a partial solution to the problem of visu- alizing such n-dimensional entities, by providing, in effect, 4D projections of them. With these techniques, the scientist or any other viewer of the imagery is removed from the production of the representation, however, which negatively affects the quality of insight and inference.

Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

“There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process.

The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.”
...
That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

This portion of Chelmsford was renamed Low- ell after Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817), an American businessman who improved American spinning and weaving machines and founded the first mill in America where raw cotton was processed and converted into cloth in the same building. Lowell, Massachusetts, is significant to the history of American industrialization because the town was entirely based around mill life. The mills employed primarily female workers, who lived in local boarding houses, shopped at company stores, and engaged in company-approved leisure-time activities, making Lowell the first company town.
...
By 1836, Lowell was the home to over 17,000 people, most of whom were female mill workers. Work began at 5:00 a.m. and ended at 7:00 p.m., with two breaks lasting a half hour each. In 1834, the company announced it would cut wages. Women workers took to the streets in protest. Though the strike did not raise wages, it did provide female workers with strike experience. In 1836, owners once again announced that wages would be cut. Also, workers would pay housing and meals, which had previously been par- tially paid for by the factory, in full.


--- Welch R & Lamphier P.A., Technical Innovation in America. 2019.

Among the many innovations which Lycurgus made, the first and most important was his institution of a senate, or Council of Elders, which, as Plato says, by being blended with the "feverish" government of the kings, and by having an equal vote with them in matters of the highest importance, brought safety and due moderation into counsels of state. For before this the civil polity was veering and unsteady, inclining at one time to follow the kings towards tyranny, and at another to follow the multitude towards democracy; but now, by making the power of the senate a sort of ballast for the ship of state and putting her on a steady keel, it achieved the safest and the most orderly arrangement, since the twenty-eight senators always took the side of the kings when it was a question of curbing democracy, and, on the other hand, always strengthened the people to withstand the encroachments of tyranny.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Lycurgus*.html

In an interview with the Press Association news agency, Mr Holland-Kaye [the CEO of Heathrow] said: "It's just physically impossible to socially distance with any volume of passengers in an airport."

He said a "better solution" is needed to make air travel safe. "The constraint is not about how many people you can fit on a plane, it will be how many people you can get through an airport safely."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52504183