Nacirema The Island

 There are about three prevailing theories for what causes war and conflict. The number one is poverty; number two is the cost of reproduction; and number three is an overproduction of elites competing for the same number of jobs.  For the final ones, there are too many undergraduate educated young adults, MBA's, lawyers, and PhD's all fighting for the same limited amount of elite positions.  All of these can overlap. A good example is the current situation in the United States. People became poor during the Great Recession and the coronavirus lockdowns, the cost of education, healthcare, and housing have delayed the age of marriage which has reduced reproductive outcomes such as births, and there are too many lawyers and PhD's fighting for the same jobs such as adjunct professors, government jobs, and law office interns. This is why we have so many mass shootings, protests, riots, and events such as the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. Young men cannot provide the...

A long time ago, about one hundred years ago, modern medicine was just taking off. Handwashing was being forcefully introduced by Igor Semmelwetz to Austrian doctors who didn't like the fact that he was a Jew. Louise Pasteur and Robert Koch had only just proven germ theory. X-rays had just been discovered as well. Gregor Mendel died in anonymity, but then was rediscovered. We knew very little about the human body but we were making progress. And so the age old apothecary, or the druggist, or what we now call the pharmacist, had to change as well. This is the transition period between "your mom makes you chew willow bark for pain" to "you use medically prescribed aspirin in a tablet." With all the new innovations, but with all the folk remedies still around, and the new global transportation network, pharmacies wanted to stay ahead of the game. This was the era that radium was painted on watch faces. And children's toys because it glows. So don't get ...

Something interesting happened recently: Can we use apps like Sickweather to predict public health problems in the future? Here is your location for reference. What do you think?

Today on LinkedIN I learned the three most interesting facts since joining that website two or three years ago. 1. Our economy is looking like the Roaring Twenties . Income inequality is high, but the real fear is the declining population due to rising education rates (and the corresponding drop in replacement rates) will cause a housing bubble pop. This will be like 2008 but much much worse. 2. We can vaccinate mice against Lyme disease so that the ticks have less Lyme disease to spread when they bite you. We feed them MnM like kibble so that they can get the vaccine into their body without having to hunt them down and inject them. #vaccineswork https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccinating-mice-may-finally-slow-lyme-disease/ \ 3. Populism is a Modern (read: the last 500 years since Columbus) Affairs. It isn't new! Charles C. Mann is golden. https://www.axios.com/charles-mann-1493-global-world-columbus-created-382e2a9a-71dd-45e6-950c-dae963b0fa60.html ...

Both Brandon Flowers and the Script are commenting on America at large. This is not normal from listening to their music. They state that they usually avoid politics and religion. These are also people who place rather more conservative views on religion in their music than other groups I have heard, and so I wonder if this is a fundamental shift in how they view the world. Land of the Free Divided States of America--the Script

Why do we sell Christmas ornaments in Halloween? Why do we sell Thanksgiving goods in the middle of October? Why do we start campaigning two years before an actual election? This man Marcus K. Dowling, as weird as some of his other thoughts  are , has hit the nail on what the next election will hang on: finding the lowest common denominator such as money and centrist appeal to satisfy America's desire for the bitter infighting we have seen lately in our politics. https://medium.com/@marcuskdowling/the-bull-moose-democrats-will-allow-for-trumps-2020-re-election-a5c0d616729f This is a Bull Moose by the way.

A little late, but I really enjoyed this article. It felt like my values were being represented in Congress again, and in the Republican Party! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romney-the-president-shapes-the-public-character-of-the-nation-trumps-character-falls-short/2019/01/01/37a3c8c2-0d1a-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html