News bits: Putin murders Navalny; Republican opposition to DJT completely collapses

Everyone should be reporting that Putin has murdered Putin critic Aleksei A. Navalny. What they are reporting is Russian authorities say the Putin critic died in prison. Died in prison is another evil, lie and insult to the world by the corrupt, murdering thug dictator Putin. The Hill reported that Navalny was fine when seen in public in a court room the day before Putin had him murdered. As far as I can tell, Navalney's death has not yet been confirmed, so maybe there is a faint hope he is still alive and Putin is just playing cruel, cynical propaganda games.

Note, Putin is a guy that Trump praises and wants to be like. Trump and Putin are far worse than merely disgusting.

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The NYT writes a truly terrifying analysis about DJT completely taking over GOP leadership power. No one in the GOP leadership is standing up to him or his kleptocratic dictatorship agenda any more. He is now dictating that the party will degenerate into a corrupt, authoritarian monster (full article here not behind paywall): 

Trump Fully Devours the Republican Establishment 

Long a dominant force over the party’s institutions, he is now moving to fully eradicate their independence and remake them in his own image

Donald J. Trump is stamping out the final flashes of independence inside Republican institutions with astonishing speed, demonstrating that his power continues to expand over the new party establishment he has created.

At the Republican National Committee, he is moving to replace longtime supporters with allies even more closely bound to him, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

In the House, Republicans are more compliant than ever. Most vividly, Speaker Mike Johnson — ostensibly the party’s top-ranking official — backtracked on an endorsement in a crucial Senate race because Mr. Trump disagreed. On Thursday, Mr. Johnson’s candidate ended his campaign less than one week after opening it.

The displays of obedience emerging in recent weeks remove any lingering doubt that the Republican Party is aligned to advance the interests of one man, signaling that a sweep of victories from Mr. Trump and his allies in November could also mean replacing checks and balances in Washington with his wishes and whims.  

At multiple points during the past two years, the former president floated the possibility of canceling the primary process during discussions with Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations. (And that is why DJT forced McDaniel out of her Repub Party position)

Again, the MSM is freaking, stunningly clueless. What DJT and his cadres of corrupt thugs and raging ideologues want to do if he gets back in power is not in question. It does not mean they could (or might, or may perhaps) replace checks and balances. They absolutely will replace whatever little is left of checks and balances. Who or what is going to stop them? The USSC? Nope. The Dem Party? Hell no. Disgruntled voters? Nope. Jesus? Nope. Heck, Jesus is working for DJT, not against him.

Do not forget Project 2025. It is deadly serious about killing democracy and establishing some form of a kleptocratic dictatorship (corrupt autocracy, corrupt plutocracy, and/or corrupt Christofascist theocracy). 

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections!

Got it? I hope so.

Paul Dans has been involved in the creation of Project 2025, an authoritarian battle plan for the next Republican president, as part of his work at the Heritage Foundation. This project includes a nearly 1,000-page plan that outlines changes for nearly every agency across the government, with a focus on various policy areas such as climate, energy, and government restructuring

News bits: Today's reddit feed

 As usual, five mixed-bag items were in the reddit feed this morning. This one is juicier than most so I’ll just show all of ’em.

The New Republic reported that on of the judges in a Trump case finally grew a pair and ordered the case to proceed without Trump's usual delays. As one would expect, Trump was really pissed:

Finally, a Judge Steps Up and Denies a Trump Trial Delay Bid

On Thursday, Trump headed to New York for a court hearing on his hush-money case. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ignored his requests for a delay and determined the trial would start on March 25, when jury selection will begin, and last approximately six weeks.

He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Trump’s legal team tried to protest the decision to go to trial, citing the legal load attached to so many disparate criminal trials for one individual.

“We have been faced with compressed and expedited schedules in every one of those trials,” Todd Blanche, an attorney also representing Trump in his classified documents case, told the judge. “We—meaning myself, the firm and President Trump—have been put into an impossible position.”

But Judge Merchan wasn’t having any of it, quickly sidestepping Team Trump’s further attempts to delay the trial.

“You don’t have a trial date in Georgia. You don’t have a trial date in Florida,” he retorted. [That is because DJT has been doing more than everything possible to slow the lawsuits down 😊]

Trump has already started his habitual mudslinging against the court and the trial itself, claiming over the last year that Merchan, who has acknowledged a $15 donation to President Joe Biden, is a Trump-hating judge appointed by a Democrat—even though all the judges in his trials have been randomly selected. Meanwhile, Trump has whined on TruthSocial [LiesAntisocial, actually] that going to court for his alleged misdeeds counts as “election interference.”  

The dates for Trump’s three other indictments are not yet on the books. His January 6 election interference trial, which was originally slated for March 4, was postponed while the Supreme Court reviews appeals on Trump’s presidential immunity claim.

Hm, 34 felonies. Speaking as an attorney, 🤨 , that’s a lot of felonies! 

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Joe.My.God. reports about how the morally rotted, Christofascist hate group One Million Moms sees the Jesus Gets Me ads that aired on the superbowl. Trigger alert: It is what you would expect:

Via email from hate group leader Monica Cole:

As Christians, One Million Moms’ biggest concern during Super Bowl LVIII was the incomplete and misguided “Foot Washing” ad from the He Gets Us movement. The commercial was partially true, as it showed the love of Jesus and how we can serve and love one another even with our differences.

Unfortunately, the movement’s “Foot Washing” ad missed the mark, because it never shared the Gospel so a person might put their faith in Jesus Christ in order to receive salvation. The ad missed the most important part of the Gospel – the truth that Jesus loved us so much that He died for us to save us from our sins.

Sharing only part of the truth can be extremely misleading, especially to those who are unsaved. It is also disturbing that the He Gets Us website describes Jesus as a mere storyteller instead of a Savior.

Cole makes a great point. Fabulous, actually. Sharing only part of the truth can be extremely misleading. By golly, that hits the nail on the head.

If only Christian hate groups out there would adhere to that undeniably true point, the world would be a noticeably better place. For example, cruel Christian zealots could apply it to their own Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Those faux medical service places are there to knowingly mislead, manipulate and lie to young pregnant women. The point is to get them to have babies they do not want. 

Obviously, if politically active Christian nationalists had to stop lying and partial truth telling, the whole morally rotted, authoritarian (theocratic) wealth and power movement would collapse and go away. 

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Gizmodo reports about a huge breakthrough by a team of German physicists in producing a stable time crystal:

A team of physicists in Germany managed to create a time crystal that demonstrably lasts 40 minutes—10 million times longer than other known crystals—and could persist for even longer.

Time crystals are structures whose lowest-energy states have highly ordered patterns (periodicity) in space and time. Time crystals were predicted to also have their properties suddenly change at a given time, even without some external factors inducing such a change.

In this way, time crystals break time-translation symmetry—the idea that a chunk of stable matter will not change (without external factors) if you drag it to a different point in time. Time crystals change on a metaphysical whim, regardless of when they are. You can read all about time crystals here, for a better understanding of what they are and why they’re useful.

The recent team of physicists managed to make a time crystal that lasted superlatively long: 40 minutes. The crystal is made of indium gallium arsenide, or a combination of indium atoms and gallium arsenide, a semiconductor. Their research was published last week in Nature Physics. 

The new time crystal is in an electron-nuclear spin system. The team excited the material with polarized laser light, polarizing the spins of the nuclei in the system. This caused the indium gallium arsenide to produce oscilations, rendering it “equivalent to a time crystal,” according to a TU Dortmund University release.

Yup, that is what it looks like (I think)

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CNN reports that special Counsel David Weiss has had former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov arrested and charged with lying about Biden’s business dealings. Smirnov was a key witness for the morally rotted authoritarian House Republicans in their cynical, baseless witch hunt to smear and attack Joe Biden. CNN writes:

Special counsel David Weiss charged a former FBI informant with lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in business dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, undercutting a major aspect of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president.

Alexander Smirnov, 43, is facing charges in connection with lying to the FBI and creating false records. He was arrested Thursday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, after his arrival in the US from overseas, and will make his initial appearance in federal court Thursday afternoon.

The indictment alleges that Smirnov’s story to the FBI “was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”

Congressional Republicans have championed Smirnov’s now-discredited allegations for roughly a year, though not by name. They fought with the FBI to obtain memos about what Smirnov told investigators and publicly released the materials over the FBI’s objections. The congressional Republicans repeatedly praised Smirnov as “credible” and put his uncorroborated claims front-and-center in their impeachment inquiry into the president.

While announcing the impeachment inquiry, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said “a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family.” The FBI is now using some of the same memos that congressional Republicans released as part of their indictment against Smirnov. 

“For months we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” said Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, in a statement to CNN.

“We were right and the air is out of their balloon. This is just another instance of Chairmen Comer and Jordan peddling falsehoods based on dishonest, uncredible allegations and witnesses,” he added.

Those darned sneaky liar Russkis and those darned sneaky liar Repubs. When those two morally rotted garbage heaps hook up, one can be sure that nasty business is afoot.

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Finally, a Bloomberg opinion opines, and this bit is very, very important (the most important of today’s five bits):

As six Republicans on the US Supreme Court increasingly arrogate to their bloc the power to make national law, frustration in blue states is mounting.

Just one day before a sympathetic Supreme Court heard the case of an insurrectionist who wants to be president, the highest state court in Hawaii declared that it really, truly, is sick and tired of the Supreme Court’s nonsense. In a unanimous decision handed down Feb. 7, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that it has no obligation to treat the high court in the nation’s capital with deference; it couldn’t even summon basic respect. The state court reached that end point, fittingly, in a case concerning what it derisively called “the Second Amendment’s brand-new right to bear arms in public for self-defense.”

That brand-new right was created by the US Supreme Court in 2022, courtesy of Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen . Thomas’ opinion was based, in turn, on the brand-new individual right to gun possession created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2008 decision in Heller v District of Columbia, a mere 219 years after the constitution came into effect.

“Conventional interpretive modalities and Hawaiʻi’s historical tradition of firearm regulation rule out an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Hawaiʻi Constitution,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins.“In Hawaiʻi, there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.”

Let that sink in for a minute. State courts breaking away from the USSC was a major development on the road to the April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865 American civil war. This is evidence of the Union dissolving in a deadly serious way. I did not expect it to come from a blue state, but here it is folks. And if Hawaii can do this, just think what catastrophic hell and corruption (yes, I really do mean huge corruption) red states like Texas, Florida and Georgia are going to unleash.

News chunks: Christian nationalist internal divisions; Pollution industry propaganda tactics shift

I do not engage much about what Christianity means or what a real Christian is compared to faux Christians. To me, one cannot rationally discuss or argue about things that are mostly or completely matters of faith, including religion and its dogmas. It’s completely or almost completely subjective. Newsweek writes about an example of this subjectivity from the “Jesus Gets You” TV ads that a Christian billionaire ran during the superbowl (edited lightly):

Christian Super Bowl Commercial Outrages Conservatives

Some conservatives felt like the advertisement justified certain sins.

The commercial, funded by the organization "He Gets Us" showed images of several people, including a woman outside a family planning clinic and a person attending a protest, having their feet washed, a reference to the story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. The commercial ends with the phrase, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”

The images are meant to symbolize “how we should treat one another,” while the commercial is meant to call themes of “love and unity” and “love your neighbor” ahead of a deeply divided election, according to the organization in a press release, which says its goal is to “remind everyone, including ourselves, that Jesus' teachings are a warm embrace, not a cold shoulder.” 

Still, the commercial was met with an icy reception from many conservatives and religious leaders on social media.

“The ‘he gets us’ feet ad about Jesus seems to imply that Jesus was cool with all kinds of sinful behavior. He wasn’t. He didn’t go hangout with prostitutes or any other sinner because he accepted the choices they made, he did it to inspire them to change,” Robby Starbuck, a music video director and former congressional candidate, posted to X.

“The ‘He Gets Us’ commercial might seem harmless to some, but it’s obviously part of a psyop to trick Christians into thinking Jesus is fine with sin & apostasy. It’s the opposite of what our world needs right now,” pastor Ryan Visconti wrote.

Andrew T. Walker, a Southern Seminary theology professor, posted that the commercial “framed evangelism with a leftward tinge, communicating the respectability of certain sins over others in our culture.”  

“Some Christians hated the @HeGetsUs ad because they think it’s an insult to show us humbling ourselves to serve people with whom we disagree. Or they think serving = affirming sin. Reread the Sermon on the Mount. The culture war taught you to focus on fighting them, not Jesus,” posted Justin Giboney, an attorney who co-hosts The Church Politics Podcast.

See the vast difference in how Christian nationalists see their own freaking religion? Also, see how the haters view their version of Christianity through a pure politics lens? I am not going to engage with any of that bickering.

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In what seems to be a shift in dark free speech tactics by the pro-pollution economic sector, plastics companies are going on the attack by cynically shifting blame for plastics pollution from themselves to consumers. The WaPo writes:

The plastics industry would like a word with your kids

School campuses are a new battleground in an increasingly bitter brawl over plastic’s impact on the environment

Wearing a lab coat, Eve Vitale asked a chemistry class at Warren Mott High School if anyone had heard anything bad about plastics. Hands shot up. It doesn’t degrade, said one student. It hurts the environment, said another.

But “that’s not really the plastic’s fault,” said Vitale, chief executive of the Society of Plastics Engineers Foundation, a group of industry professionals. “That’s the fault of humanity.” After warning what a “mess” it would be in supermarkets and hospitals without plastics, Vitale instructed that the plastic pollution crisis could be addressed through stepped up personal responsibility, product innovation and improvements in recycling.  

School campuses are a new battleground in an increasingly bitter brawl over plastics, as groups like Vitale’s seek to improve the reputation of a material that has become infamous as an environmental menace. The efforts are partially funded by companies involved in or dependent on fossil fuel production, through donations and conference sponsorships. Plastics manufacturing involves large amounts of oil and natural gas. Some of these companies see plastics as an opportunity to continue growing as demand for gasoline and diesel dissipates amid the rise of electric vehicles.

As usual, it is always about the money and the power needed to get it. Here, the polluters seek power by polluting children’s minds with the cynical argument that plastics pollution is the consumer’s fault. The plastics makers say they have nothing to do with it. What an outrageous, cynical lie. 

Decades ago, right from the get-go, the plastics makers knew their products were an environmental disaster. Nonetheless, they told us plastics were recyclable, thereby coaxing consumers into accepting them as harmless. 

Symbols of deceit - ~90% of plastics aren't recyclable, 

so the recycling myth is 100% a lie

I posted about this topic in 2020, citing this 5 minute NPR interview (and also here about cynical industry tactics) .

Besides shifting to blaming consumers, the industry also says part of the solution could come from “product innovation” and “improvements in recycling.” What a load of insulting crap. Improvements in recycling have been needed for decades, but we are still in the same place we always were, i.e., over 90% of plastic has never been recycled. The polluters citing unspecified product innovation is cynical, insulting, meaningless nonsense. Single use plastic is single use plastic. You use it once, toss it, can’t recycle or burn it, so it pollutes the environment. 

The situation is simple. Polluting the environment with plastic makes lots of money. Polluters want to keep polluting for money. Period. 

News bits & chunk: The latest impeachment; Regarding high drug costs; Predicting the future

The New Republic reports about why cynical, morally rotted authoritarian House Republicans impeached Mayorkas:

On Tuesday, Republican Representative French Hill announced the party’s bald-faced political motivations for impeaching Mayorkas. .... “We need to shut the border.… The president could take executive action to do it today—doesn’t need more money. It needs action, and this is what’s disappointing to people, and that’s why Mayorkas is gonna pay this public relations price by being impeached for the first time since 1876,” Hill said. Notably absent from Hill’s explanation was any description of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Mayorkas.

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We all know this, but it bears repeating. Ars Technica reports about a report about outrageous drug prices in America:

Big Pharma spends billions more on executives 

and stockholders than on R&D

Senate report points to greed and "patent thickets" as key reasons for high prices

When big pharmaceutical companies are confronted over their exorbitant pricing of prescription drugs in the US, they often retreat to two well-worn arguments: One, that the high drug prices cover costs of researching and developing new drugs, a risky and expensive endeavor, and two, that middle managers—pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), to be specific—are actually the ones price gouging Americans.

Both of these arguments faced substantial blows in a hearing Thursday held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In fact, pharmaceutical companies are spending billions of dollars more on lavish executive compensation, dividends, and stock buyouts than they spend on research and development (R&D) for new drugs, Sanders pointed out. “In other words, these companies are spending more to enrich their own stockholders and CEOs than they are in finding new cures and new treatments,” he said.  

A report this month by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that in 2022, US prices across all brand-name and generic drugs were nearly three times as high as prices in 33 other wealthy countries. That means that for every dollar paid in other countries for prescription drugs, Americans paid $2.78. And that gap is widening over time.  

The powerful pharmaceutical trade group PhRMA, published a blog post before the hearing saying that comparing US drug prices to prices in other countries “hurts patients.” The group argued that Americans have broader, faster access to drugs than people in other countries.

Right, comparing US drug prices to those in other countries hurts patients. Just like it is not time to discuss gun safety laws right after another school massacre with an AR-15 freshly bought by a known enraged freak who should not be allowed to own a gun. Got it. 

 

Bernie raging against the machine

(the machine ignores him, then giggles and raises prices)

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An article Vox published discusses the art and science of predicting future events. It really is a combination of art and science and most “experts” (pundits, academics, corporations, lobbyists, etc.) are so bad at it that statistical analysis of their prognostications, show they are barely better than random guessing. Just a squeak better. 

Vox writes about a group of extraordinary human prognosticator freaks calling themselves the Samotsvety group. Samotsvety was the name of a Russian rock group of 50 years ago. I posted about this prediction phenomenon before, e.g., here and here. 

People with extraordinary ability to predict future events were called Superforecasters. The Samotsvety group, a recent phenomenon, are the best of the best Superforecasters. My guess is that maybe about 1 in 10 million people have this talent, whether they know it or not. My estimate is that probably about 1 in 10,000 to 100,000 people have regular Superforecaster-level talent. These Samotsvety people are truly extraordinary. Dylan Matthews at Vox writes:

How a ragtag band of internet friends became the 

best at forecasting world events

I wanted to hang out with Samotsvety for a bit because they were the best of the best, and thus a good crew to learn from.

They count among their fans Jason Matheny, now CEO of the RAND Corporation, a think tank that’s long worked on developing better predictive methods. Before he was at RAND, Matheny funded foundational work on forecasting as an official at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government organization that invests in technologies that might help the US intelligence community. “I’ve admired their work,” Matheny said of Samotsvety. “Not only their impressive accuracy, but also their commitment to scoring their own accuracy” — meaning they grade themselves so they can know when they fail and need to do better. That, he said, “is really rare institutionally.”

A common measure of forecasting ability is the relative Brier score, a number that aggregates the result of every prediction for which an outcome is now known, and then compares each forecaster to the median forecaster. A score of 0 means you’re average; a positive score means worse than average while negative means better than average. In 2021, the last full year Samotsvety participated, their score in the Infer tournament was -2.43, compared to -1.039 for the next-best team. They were more than twice as good as the nearest competition.

The literature on superforecasting, from Tetlock, Mellers, and others, finds some commonalities between good predictors. One is a tendency to think in numbers. Quantitative reasoning sharpens thinking in this context. “Somewhat likely,” “pretty unlikely,” “I’d be surprised.” These kinds of phrases, on their own, convey some useful information about someone’s confidence in a prediction, but they’re impossible to compare to each other — is “pretty unlikely” more or less doubtful than “I’d be surprised”? Numbers, by contrast, are easy to compare, and they provide a means of accountability. Unsurprisingly, many great forecasters, in Samotsvety and elsewhere, have backgrounds in computer science, economics, math, and other quantitative disciplines.

That leads to another commonality: practice. Forecasting is a lot like any other skill — you get better with practice — so good forecasters forecast a lot, and that in turn makes them better at it. They also update their forecasts a lot. The [China invades] Taiwan numbers I heard from the team at the start of our meeting? They weren’t the same by the end. Part of practicing is adjusting and tweaking constantly.

The article is quite long and discusses all of this and more in greater detail. 

So what?

I post this as just a reminder about how error-prone, most (~99.99% ?) self-professed pundits, opinionators, experts, cable news blowhards, demagogues, kleptocrats, blind, raging ideologues, preachers, politicians and the like are telling us when they bloviate and tell us they know what their ideas will do for our own good in the future. They are usually wrong, often lying, often ignorant or misinformed. That is why it is so rare for such people to track their own success and failure rate. They know they are mostly full of crap or simply bullshitting. They will never track their own professional performance, much less make it public. In fact, our media and political systems tend to reward blowhards who are confident in their usually over-simplified and/or distorted simplified, nuance-free narratives. They are rewarded not because they are right, but because they seem credible, attract attention and/or are convincing. 

And they want us to trust them? Pfft.

Science: Biomarkers for dementia and other diseases; Climate change cognitive biology

Researchers at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK) and Fudan U. (Shanghai, China) have found that abnormal blood plasma levels of four specific proteins out of the 1,463 normally found predicted disease up to 15 years in advance of diagnosis of all forms of dementia. The researchers used AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze plasma proteins from 52,645 normal patients who had blood plasma frozen in 2006 to 2012 and then analyzed 10-15 years later. The AI picked out several proteins that had previously been linked with dementia in small studies to be accurately predictive of dementia. 

The AI analysis in this massive study combined two kinds of data, (1) patient demographics (age, sex, education, genetics) with (2) observation of abnormal plasma levels of either of two proteins alone GFAP (glial fibrillary acidic protein) or GDF15 (growth/differentiation factor 15) and found a tight correlation. Based on the data used in the study, the AI analysis was 89.1% accurate in predicting dementia from all causes, 87.2% accurate in predicting Alzheimer's Disease and 91.2% in predicting vascular dementia.  

The research in published in Nature Aging on Feb.12 (behind a paywall) and Nature Communications here (free access).

If this research is repeated and confirmed, the results from this research are good enough to use a simple blood test for GFAP and/or GDF15 for widespread routine screening to identify patients highly likely to develop dementia years later. Once this this test for dementia is independently confirmed, it would be a major breakthrough that should not take years to integrate into mainstream medicine.

Cancer genus (left), dementia genus (right)

Vertical axis: proteins

Horizontal axis: Groups of diseases and specific kinds of disease 

in the group, e.g., genus = circulatory system disorders, 

species = hypertension, heart failure, etc. 

The two figures above from the research article suggests a couple of interesting things. First, this kind of complex AI-driven analysis can be used to predict other kinds of diseases, cancers in the first figure, all kinds of diseases in the second. The point is that AI can comb through gigantic piles of biological data from tens of thousands of people and pick out meaningful bits of information among all the noise of normal, messy biology. I'm not sure humans alone can do that, but if they can, it is much slower going than what AI can do.

Second, age, sex, education and genetics constituted the demographic data this research was based on. Future research can include additional factors for each individual patient, e.g, income, race, etc., to see what other individual factors might increase the predictive accuracy of the blood test. The database this research was based on included a lot more demographic factors than the four listed, but AI just picked those four out of the data obtained from patients when they initially donated blood. This research should point to other data that could be obtained from healthy donors for future rounds of analysis to look for even more accurate predictive tests for all kinds of diseases.

The Communications paper comments reflects those possibilities:

Developing a single-domain assay to identify individuals at high risk of future events is a priority for multi-disease and mortality prevention. By training a neural network, we developed a disease/mortality-specific proteomic risk score (ProRS) based on 1461 Olink plasma proteins measured in 52,006 UK Biobank participants. This integrative score markedly stratified the risk for 45 common conditions, including infectious, hematological, endocrine, psychiatric, neurological, sensory, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, cutaneous, musculoskeletal, and genitourinary diseases, cancers, and mortality. The discriminations witnessed high accuracies achieved by ProRS for 10 endpoints (e.g., cancer, dementia, and death), with C-indexes exceeding 0.80 [exceeding 80% accuracy]. .... Our models were internally validated in the UK Biobank; thus, further independent external validations are necessary to confirm our findings before application in clinical settings.

Molecular medicine is getting to be very interesting. 

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Nature Climate Change published a research paper, Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action, about human paralysis in the face of climate change. The paper summarizes the frustrating situation:

Mitigating climate change necessitates global cooperation, yet global data on individuals’ willingness to act remain scarce. In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. Countries facing heightened vulnerability to climate change show a particularly high willingness to contribute. Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act. This perception gap, combined with individuals showing conditionally cooperative behavior, poses challenges to further climate action. Therefore, raising awareness about the broad global support for climate action becomes critically important in promoting a unified response to climate change.

The world’s climate is a global common good and protecting it requires the cooperative effort of individuals across the globe. Consequently, the ‘human factor’ is critical and renders the behavioral science perspective on climate change indispensable for effective climate action. Despite its importance, limited knowledge exists regarding the willingness of the global population to cooperate and act against climate change. To fill this gap, we designed and conducted a globally representative survey in 125 countries, with the aim of examining the potential for successful global climate action. The central question we seek to answer is to what extent are individuals around the globe willing to contribute to the common good, and how do people perceive other people’s willingness to contribute (WTC)?

I interpret this to support my belief that there exists (1) world wide dark free speech, coupled with successful political corruption schemes by interests and entities (human and corporate) that profit from pollution and more climate change, and (2) those have been majors factor that have poisoned the collective human mind about climate change. Those are the single most important factors in contributing to our collective ignorance and paralysis.

The data is summarized below.

We have to (1) learn and trust each other or face very bad climate consequences, and (2) understand who the deadly enemies are here, e.g., the staunchly pro-pollution, radical authoritarian Republican Party, oil, gas and coal Cos. like Exxon-Mobil, the plastics and chemical industries, pro-pollution lobbyists, etc., and call them out for their moral and actual crimes (including legalization of formerly illegal polluting activity).

Senate passes a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel

 

but fate in the House is uncertain

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-aid-congress-senate-5fdcf8cb1964681dcce0f4fe7b9a0f86

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate early Tuesday passed a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, pushing ahead after months of difficult negotiations and amid growing political divisions in the Republican Party over the role of the United States abroad.

The vote came after a small group of Republicans opposed to the $60 billion for Ukraine held the Senate floor through the night, using the final hours of debate to argue that the U.S. should focus on its own problems before sending more money overseas. But 22 Republicans voted with nearly all Democrats to pass the package 70-29, with supporters arguing that abandoning Ukraine could embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and threaten national security across the globe.

Yet the package faces a deeply uncertain future in the House, where hardline Republicans aligned with former President Donald Trump — the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, and a critic of support for Ukraine — oppose the legislation.

Speaker Mike Johnson cast new doubt on the package in a statement Monday evening, making clear that it could be weeks or months before Congress sends the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk — if at all.

Hello Mr. Trump, how should we in the House vote on this bill?