https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-19/beware-of-buying-young-people-s-blood-to-prevent-aging-fda-says

«Taking a young person’s plasma and infusing it into an older person to ward off aging — a therapy that’s fascinated some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley — has no proven clinical benefit, the Food and Drug Administration said.

….

The idea of infusing young blood to fight aging has attracted technology entrepreneurs like billionaire Peter Thiel and was lampooned in a 2017 episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” Thiel’s reported interest was sparked by a company called Ambrosia, which has locations in five states across the U.S. and sells one liter of blood plasma from donors between the ages of 16 and 25 for $8,000, according to its website.

Ambrosia’s website was updated Tuesday to say it has “ceased patient treatments” in compliance with the FDA’s advisory.»

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-covington-suit/teen-in-lincoln-memorial-protest-sues-washington-post-for-250-million-idUSKCN1Q82SW

Purely coincidence. No agenda here at all.

«The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kentucky by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann, 16, seeks $250 million in damages, the amount that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the world’s richest person, paid for the Post in 2013.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/us/barriss-swatting-wichita.html

I think maybe he has a disorder, but also, his phone privileges should be revoked.

«Court records show that he called in bomb threats to high schools across the country in 2015. That October, Mr. Barriss was arrested and sentenced to two years in a California jail for a threat directed at a local ABC station in Glendale, Calif.

When he was released in August 2017, he slipped into the same pattern of behavior, the court documents say. Over a three-month period beginning in late September 2017, he made more than 30 swatting calls….»

I do hope Weld runs, so when Sanders decides to run as an independent because he didn’t win the primary and splits the liberal vote, we’ll wind up with a sane Republican in the White House.

https://thenib.com/are-we-on-the-stupidest-possible-timeline

Sharp humor. 🙂

https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/2019/02/16/insectageddon-is-a-great-story-but-what-are-the-facts/

Happy to find out that insectageddon ain’t quite all that.

I still like the backyard garden of native plant species, though.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/17/florida-sixth-grader-charged-with-misdemeanor-after-refusing-recite-pledge-allegiance/

«“This is a prime example of the over-policing of Black students in school.”»

Yup.

«But the substitute teacher was not aware that students are not required to recite the pledge, the school district said,»

This is beside the point. Conflict w/kids is inevitable; handling the conflict WITHOUT bringing in the justice system really is the school’s responsibility.* This isn’t a failure on the part of the sub; it’s a failure on the part of the school system.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/could-congress-block-trumps-emergency-declaration/

«What happens if Trump vetoes the resolution?

In the Senate, 67 votes would be needed to override his veto, meaning 20 Republicans would need to break with the president. As noted above, there are more than 20 Senate Republicans wary of this move. So it’s at least theoretically possible that the dam could break; the fissures run deeper than the typical issues on which only a handful of Republicans like Collins and Murkowski are considering a vote against the president. But not liking the emergency declaration and voting for a resolution that will stop it — and stoking Trump’s anger as many Republicans are gearing up for primaries in 2020 — are totally different things. It’s also not clear if McConnell is required to even hold a vote on the veto override.

The bill would also have to achieve a two-thirds majority in the House, which wouldn’t be easy. FiveThirtyEight has not done a formal whip count in the lower chamber. A two-thirds majority would require 288 votes — so 53 Republicans would have to join all the Democrats. Most Republicans in competitive districts lost in 2018, which means there are relatively few GOP representatives left who have to worry about electoral pressure. Earlier this year, amid the government shutdown, for instance, a bloc of about a dozen Republicans broke with Trump to back some Democratic measures to fund the government without wall money. So it’s not like all 197 House Republicans are Trump loyalists. But a dozen is a long way from the 53 GOP votes in the House to override his veto.»

https://twitter.com/elliott_downing/status/994358894074912768?s=17

Love me some Twitter noir.

Elliott Downing (@elliott_downing) Tweeted:

“What’s in our pit, Pooh?” Piglet whispered. “Is it a Heffalump?”
Pooh peered down at the drifter’s broken body. “I’m afraid not, Piglet.”
“We’re going to be in trouble now, aren’t we?” said Piglet.
Pooh lay a hand on his friend’s arm. “Not if we fill in this pit before morning.”

https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it

I get the feeling this was written in the 1997-98 time frame, so, during the Clinton era? Feels pretty prescient.

«The conditions that threaten to undermine our sense of nationhood, bound up in the debate over slavery and manifested in intense sectional conflict during the pre-Civil War era, are today both more complex and diffuse. Some of today’s conditions are part of the tragic legacy of slavery–a racial climate marked too often by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding and a condition of desperate poverty within our inner cities that has left many young people so alienated that any standard definition of citizenship becomes meaningless. More commonly, but in the long run perhaps just as alarming, tens of millions of Americans have been turned-off by the corrupting effects of money on the political system. Bombarded with negative advertising about their candidates, they express their feelings of alienation by staying home on election day.

If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.»