Idiocracy

Dec. 9th, 2024 08:37 pm
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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


Few years ago, people thought that idiocracy would be the result of leftist tendencies in the society. Well, that hypothesis is being disproved right in front of our own eyes.
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FDA approved Airpods2 as hearing aids for people with mild to medium hearing loss. https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-airpods-pro-hearing-aid-features-af0f2714

As soon as it rolls out the software update this fall, Apple will instantly make the AirPods Pro 2 into a medical device, essentially turning every pair of the company’s top-selling headphones into over-the-counter hearing aids.
...
75% of people with hearing loss let it go untreated, according to the Apple Hearing Study, a project run with the University of Michigan. In case you don’t trust medical statistics from a trillion-dollar company trying to sell you something, the audiologists I consulted told me that number sounded right.


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I had a really strange meditation experience this morning. In the beginning, it was nice and deep, but after some time it got way deeper than usual. At some point, I felt so much internal warmth that I thought my whole body was going to explode. So I bailed out into reality as soon as I could. I wonder what it was.
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Throughout Alabama, there is widespread shock, anger and confusion over how to proceed after the state Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people, a potentially far-reaching decision that could upend women’s reproductive health care in a state that already has one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-BB1iCkls


"extra uterine children"
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/02/21/embryos-people-alabama
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Musk's drug use is becoming an issue that might end up in courts. Remarkably, Larry Ellison offered Musk a detox on his island but didn't succeed in convincing the addict. It's not going to end well.


https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-tesla-money-drugs-board-61af9ac4
https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e1
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In the end an edifice of knowledge was erected that nobody had really foreseen or intended. Indeed, it stood in opposition to the anticipations and intentions of the individuals who had helped build it. For Wassermann and his co-workers shared a fate in common with Columbus. They were searching for their own "India" and were convinced that they were on the right course, but they unexpectedly discovered a new "America.
...
What they achieved was not even their goal. They wanted evidence for an antigen or an amboceptor. Instead, they fulfilled the ancient wish of the collective: the demonstration of syphilitic blood.

--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
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Дакоты предполагают существование четырех душ. Есть душа тела, которая умирает вместе с ним. Далее есть дух, кото- рый всегда остается при теле или пребывает в его близости. Далее есть душа, ответственная за поступки тела и отправляющаяся по одним, — на юг, по другим — на запад. И, наконец, четвертая всегда остается в пучке волос мертвеца, который родственники сохраняют, пока не представится случай бросить его в страну врага, где эта душа начинает бродить в качестве привидения, насылающего смерть и болезнь (Levy-Bruhl 65).

...душа или одна из душ, вышедшая из мертвеца, сама становится причиной смерти других. Другими словами, одна из душ объективируется, становится самостоятельным страшным существом, теряет связь со своим хозяином, и она-то и вызывает смерть.
...
...душа мыслится как самостоятельное существо, могущее жить вне человека. Для этого даже не всегда нужно умереть. И живой человек может иметь душу или одну из душ вне себя. Это так называемая внешняя душа, bush soul. Обладателем такой души является Кощей.

Умершим, существовавшим в силу объективистического момента. визации души как самостоятельные существа, приписывались два сильнейших инстинкта: голод и половой голод. На первых порах на первом месте стоит голод. Смерть-пожирательница древнее других видов смерти.

В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.
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Imagine a world where we have a cure for melanoma. Would people spend more time on the beach? Would the sunscreen industry go bankrupt?
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I wonder how she puts her left leg like that. It seems physically impossible to bend it sideways even if you are Elvis.



https://foto-history.livejournal.com/18509639.html

upd. I guess it's something like that:

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Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v1.full.pdf
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This is an interesting fairy tale about a physician (and his father) who made a deal with Death, but tried to cheat it. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/033.txt

He led him forth into a forest, and showed him a herb which grew there, and said, now you shall receive your godfather's present. I make you a celebrated physician. When you are called to a patient, I will always appear to you. If I stand by the head of the sick man, you may say with
confidence that you will make him well again, and if you give him of this herb he will recover, but if I stand by the patient's feet, he is mine, and you must say that all remedies are in
vain, and that no physician in the world could save him. But beware of using the herb against my will, or it might fare ill with you.


I guess, the moral of the story is that in a deal like that you gain a superior capability, but surrender your free will to use it.
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“I like to use a different metaphor: a garden.
...
On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and pleasure. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care.
And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves.”

--- Emily Nagoski. “Come As You Are.”

I remember few years ago professor Searle told us that a language to talk about sex for normal people did not exist yet. He said we had a choice between either a cold medical jargon or an obscenity-laced fraternity speak; therefore, he claimed a quality conversation about sex was practically impossible.

This book shows that over the last decade such language has been created. Now, it's possible to see how sex ed can succeed, starting with the current generation of parents and educators.
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Endings increased participants’ preference for familiarity even when it meant sacrificing other desirable attributes (e.g., exciting stimulation). Together, these findings advance and bridge research on hedonic preferences, time and timing, and the motivational effects of change. Variety may be the “spice of life,” but familiarity may be the spice of life’s endings.

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000321
via https://alev-biz.livejournal.com/5369631.html (in Russian)


e * e = e.
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I've decided to include the lyrics of The Sound of Silence into my medication practice.

Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
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После пяти лет экспериментов, моя техника медитации стала стабильной и надежной. Из 50-минутной сессии получается 44-45 минут "глубокого сна", который регистрируется by the sleep tracker, как на картинке.

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In retrospect [and additional insight from TPoF] it's more clear what the COVID vaccine community had not done to convince the public about the benefits of vaccination.

In line with the expectations and demands of the period, the prize would go to whoever explained not contagion but variation in con­tagiousness in terms of environmental circumstances.
...
...since their problem was to reconcile contagions and morbid spontaneity. As soon as Pasteur, using anthrax, reproduced in the laboratory the influence of the environment on the virulence of a microbe, all the power of the hygienist movement shifted and became belief in the laboratory of the Rue d'Ulm.

--- Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France, 1993.

Up till now we don't know what causes the variation in COVID-19 outcomes. Of course, there are hints developed through limited studies, but no clear causal link has been established yet. We should've had volunteer human trials, after all.
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Japan will allow a limited number of barbarians to visit the islands under strict supervision:
Foreign tourists visiting Japan will be required to wear masks, take out private medical insurance and be chaperoned throughout their stay, the government said on Tuesday, as it plans a gradual opening from two years of COVID-19 restrictions.

Only visitors on package tours will be allowed in during the first phase of reopening, from June 10, the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) said, adding that travel agency guides accompanying visitors will have to ensure they wear their masks.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14639542
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In all, an estimated 2,600 people have been wounded or killed in school shootings since 1970, including children, teachers and other school employees, according to the database. Last week’s massacre in Uvalde added 19 elementary-school students and two teachers to the list.

More than 240,000 U.S. students experienced a school shooting between 1999 and 2019.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/school-shooting-survivors-lives-forever-altered-11654179525

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