Discedere decisis = "depart from what is decided." We need to stop calling radical Judges "conservative." True conservatism preserves stability and respects Stare decisis. We now have radical Judges making rulings that would have shocked Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley. Conservative? NOPE!

Just saw an ad for a T-shirt "ALL plants are edible. Some more than once."

When I was younger, I gave blood regularly. After my cancer was detected in 2023 I needed and got a transfusion. I cannot give blood now. If you can, please give: there's a national shortage. www.kcci.com/article/wauk...

Empty shelves at LifeServe as summer blood shortage worsens

A nationwide blood donation shortage almost postponed chemotherapy for 4-year-old Liv Freund, who is undergoing leukemia treatment at Blank Children's Hospital.

kcci.com

Deep dive into one of RFK Jr's falsehoods: insidemedicine.substack.com/p/one-graph-... jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

One graph to shut RFK Jr. up.

The best argument against his nonsense is data. Here it is...

insidemedicine.substack.com

In mid-July, Mexico issued a travel advisory to its citizens regarding explosive diarrhea when visiting the United States. We are officially a “shit hole” country. #DemVoice1 #ProudBlue #Pinks www.newsweek.com/mexico-warns...

Mexico warns of diarrhea risk when visiting US

Health officials issued a travel advisory following a spike of over 1,600 parasitic infections across 34 U.S. states.

newsweek.com

"So look, I can believe there's a world in which smart tariffs are smart. I'm not sure it's true, but I could believe it exists. x

Tariffs, Take Three: The Dumbest Round Yet

YouTube video by Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

youtu.be

Trump's BS about the R̶e̶f̶l̶e̶c̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ Deflecting Pool ended when one of his courtroom lackeys ran into reality: the Court wanted evidence & the evidence didn't support Trump's narrative.

Inside the Oval Office Showdown Between Trump and Jeanine Pirro (Gift Article)

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told President Trump that his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, had misled him with a self-serving cover story for his own mistakes.

nytimes.com

Today is our 35th Wedding Anniversary. We vowed "...in sickness and in health.." 11 years ago we celebrated our anniversary in Greece. Today, just quiet time at home in Iowa as I recover from surgery.

RFK spewed lie after lie. Dana Bush called him out for the lies. He lost his temper and yelled at her. I helped put five antiviral drugs on the market during the two decades when my main job was studying Infectious Diseases. Almost every word RFK says here is a lie. youtu.be/MPP5exb-2rw?...

JUST IN: Sparks Fly When RFK Jr. Is Pressed On Vaccines, Pandemic Prevention During CNN Interview

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News

youtu.be

From the Amsterdam Pride Parade: inflatable figures of Putin and Trump kissing each other.

Good reference article on the seven known human Coronaviruses (three cause severe diseases; four mostly cause common colds): pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Human Coronavirus-229E, -OC43, -NL63, and -HKU1 (Coronaviridae)

Seven human coronaviruses (HCoVs) have been so far identified, namely HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63, HCoV-HKU1, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory synd...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

TWO somewhat overlapping sets of people have a right to an opinion of Dr. Fauci: 1. Those who knew what words like "Coronavirus" and "Antigen" meant in 2019. 2. Those who treated COVID patients. Opinions of those in neither group are pure noise at best.

ICE often claims its agents kill only when they fear for their lives. But that's not a reasonable fear: no ICE officer has ever died violently while doing immigration enforcement on US soil. Ever. ttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/ice-homeland-security-job-danger

No deportation officer has been killed in the line of duty since ICE’s creation

Only one person working job that today would be called ‘deportation officer’ has died from act of violence, Guardian review shows

theguardian.com

When I see a weird banner ad, instead of clicking it I open an incognito browser tab and keyword search. Just now I was VERY glad I do that: the ad was for a tool used to maintain AR-15 guns. So if I had clicked on that, I would soon see many ads for firearm-related items. I've never owned a gun!

Search for Victor Marx. He's the GOP candidate for Governor of Colorado. His biography reads like a caricature of today's GOP. Truly bizarre.

"Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark." — NY Times

One of the saddest sentences I've seen this week, from NY Times: "And conversations about gender parity are less common these days than ones about who could be the left’s Joe Rogan."

JD Vance can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but he might make all the people believe he considers them to be fools.—Me, riffing on something Abe Lincoln probably did not say. On the famous line attributed to Lincoln, see:

A friend who works in Medicine On The Rez points out that Native Americans are particularly vulnerable to wildfire and other climate change risks for many geographical and structural reasons.

I find the whole ruckus over how Haley Stevens talks rather silly. How somebody talks is much less important than what they do. But regarding her accent, I grew up on the other side of Lake Michigan, in Milwaukee's North Shore suburbs, & it's clear that she just sounds like Great Lakes suburbia.

A very important paper on the deeply flawed policy-driven evidence-making that attempts to overturn evidence-based policymaking: Randomized clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to study non-specific effects on rare mortality: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Randomized clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to study non-specific effects on rare mortality

We write to the editorial team regarding the recently published paper “Randomized clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines: Do adenovirus-vector vaccines have beneficial non-specific effects?”1 by Benn et...

cell.com

From NY Times article about Josh Turek's campaign for IA Governor: people riding bicycles in the annual RAGBRAI ride across the State. Turek, a world class wheelchair athlete, is hand-pedaling to meet voters. Note the rolling hills in the image: Iowa isn't quite as flat as you might think!

Myths about Puritans & Pilgrims. I didn't know most of this! www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Sena...

Everybody, especially those who are immunocompromised as I am, should start regularly checking data.wastewaterscan.org data from sites near you.

WastewaterSCAN Dashboard

WastewaterSCAN Data Dashboard tracks infectious diseases across the US via wastewater surveillance.

data.wastewaterscan.org

AI: more "Alien Intelligence" than "Artificial Intelligence" because it is not really simulating an actual human brain.