Edition #1149

Thursday. And now on to the general elections in a few months. I am reminded of the long-worn quote regarding snatching defeat out of the mouth of victory.

“The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.” British author William Butler, quoted in The Washington Post. Lessons to be learned here.

Not like grazing in the grass, which is a gas, baby, can you dig it? No. And if you don’t get the reference, just chalk it up to an aging boomer letting loose. So to get into the real item here, we have all seen our dogs, or those of others, scrape their hind legs on the ground after a good poop or pee, kicking up dirt and grass back towards their completed task. And how many of us, aside from being a bit bemused, have really wondered what that behavior was all about? Well, I have and always assumed it was some attempt to cover their tracks, to hide from potential predators or rivals. But, according to this article, I could not have been more wrong. Rather than cover its scent, these actions were meant to extend their scent, to apply their scent to the grass, dirt, and leaves that it kicked out as far as they could. “I was here and all that you can smell is me and mine!” At least that is what the researchers would have us believe. And in the interest of journalistic integrity, I did pass this by my dog, Nugget, who did not seem all that interested in revealing any canine secrets. And I can respect that.

Does anyone really think that Blanche’s written withdrawal of Trump’s two billion dollar slush fund is meaningful? Does anyone believe that this is anything different from a potential Supreme Court Justice answering that they respect precedent in deflecting the fact that they would overturn the precedent in question as soon as given the chance, as a means of giving cover for a Senator voting to confirm? Even if Blanche’s intent is to refuse to resurrect that specific deal, is there any reason to believe that Trump will not insist that at least something similar takes its place and that Blanche would follow through on Trump’s wishes when that happens? Our elected officials believe that their constituents are just dupes who will believe anything and not hold them accountable. Maybe they are right, but if you want to understand why Congress has an approval rating of fifteen percent…

I didn’t know about this app, but apparently you can have an app on your phone, Android phones only, I think, where if you enter a certain code, it will automatically delete everything on your phone. The old Mission Impossible “this message will self-destruct in five seconds…good luck Jim.” Well, one such user is now being charged with destruction of evidence and obstruction for using this capability. The gentleman was asked for his phone upon encountering US Customs officials when entering the country. When asked for the code to open the phone, he gave the self-destruct code, and the rest, as they say, was intrigue. The accused argues that the search was illegal and based on his activism against Atlanta’s plans to build a police training center, but I do believe that he is in some hot water. Under the law, it is illegal to destroy evidence to keep the government from seizing it before, during, or after a search. Maybe the question will be whether anything relevant was actually destroyed, if it can be determined exactly what was destroyed, but he clearly intended to keep Customs officials from seeing what was on the phone. So, in this case, I fear that the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of the mission.

Or advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which are a kind of buildup on the tissues that make up our bodies over time. Kind of like the process of cooking, as our bodies do the low-temperature broil, this process and the AGEs that result are what make tissues sticky and cause inflammation. Knowing the damage that this process does and its impact on how we age, there has been a ton of research on how to try to prevent this “rust” from forming in the first place. The idea was that if we could prevent it, then many of the ailments that accompany aging could be eliminated. But that research has not gone anywhere. But now, a new approach has been taken that is showing some promise. Instead of preventing AGEs from forming, scientists created an enzyme that can clean AGEs off of tissue. Once cleaned, the tissues resume a more youthful form. The key to their thinking was looking at what happens to the body after death. The entire body’s soft tissue will decompose, including AGEs. So they looked at the specific mechanism that naturally breaks down AGEs. They had an AI program that narrowed down over fifty thousand potential enzymes to a few and then engineered them to successfully eliminate AGEs on seventy-year-old human skin, making it act like a thirty-year-old’s. Before you get too excited, this research is all still in its infancy with a long road ahead before any approved use on living humans. But still, pretty cool and exciting stuff. And how many cosmetic surgeons will be out of work? How many cosmetic companies will go bankrupt? And more importantly, who cares?

I will not dwell here, because this is of no surprise, but the outbreak of measles in the United States continues to rise. Our current administration and its Health Secretary did not start the idiocy associated with the antivaxx movement, but they are growing it on steroids with the possibility of additional outbreaks in the future. In fact, if you remember from last year, RFK Jr. stated that he would have a report by September 2025 about the “link” between vaccinations and autism or environmental sources and autism. Well, so far, aside from changing the Federal recommendations without any scientific backup, here we are a year later with no evidence to support the antivaxx accusations…because there is no such evidence. And no other than Trump is livid with the fact that RFK has been unable to support Trump’s delusional insistence that autism is caused by vaccines. He is putting tons of pressure on RFK, and I would not be surprised if it comes down to RFK not being extreme or conspiratorial enough for the job, joining a long and growing list of loyalists who were just not loyal enough.

The rescue is in trouble. A few weeks back I wrote about a unique mission to prevent an old but still useful satellite from deorbiting and burning up in our atmosphere. The probe, Link, was sent up on relatively short notice and expected to rendezvous with the SWIFT satellite, observe it for a few weeks before determining how best to grab it and push it into a higher orbit. But a week or so into its mission, Link began to spin out of control for some reason. A few of its gyroscopes may be faulty. Its rotation is not fast, and so there is some hope that they can get some new instructions to it and salvage the mission. And since I read this a week or so ago and have not heard anything further yet, I may be out of date on this, but if I hear more, I will let you know, whether you want to know or not. It is who I am.

As we all know, Trump insists on only hiring the best of the best. He is a genius at everything, and his staffing of agencies is beyond reproach. And that is why the continent of Africa is currently busy changing boundaries and names of territories to comply with the map that US agencies recently displayed at a conference regarding efforts to eradicate AIDS in Africa. Or maybe it was to spread AIDS in Africa. Hard to tell with these clowns. In any case, the map that the US officials brought with them and displayed in their presentation misrepresented the known names and locations of every country identified. So the only explanation that I can think of, aside from someone asking an AI program to do a job and then not even looking at the final work, is that with the likes of Hegseth, Patel, Blanche, Mullin, RFK, JD, as well as the former Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard, the leaders of African countries just don’t know where they actually are. Right? Our highly qualified folk could not be at fault, no way.

The world just keeps getting more and more confusing. While certainly the road was bumpy along the way, the direction of it all was in the direction of more progress across the world, more openness, more liberalism (in the political science sense), which enhanced the world’s population in general. We now are living in a world in which all of that is being reversed. I fear dark days ahead, regardless of which side comes out on top, because rational thought is losing out to ideological purity. Strengthen your bubble…and stay healthy and be good to each other.

Me.