There is no reasoning with such people

One of the things that really makes me furious is when adults make decisions that endanger the lives of their children. Adults who decide to not take vaccines or other precautions that might save their lives are still behaving irresponsibly because they are posing a risk to others by being possible transmitters and lowering the heard immunity for a disease, but at least they are also risking their own lives for their beliefs, however misguided they may be.

But what is unconscionable is when they risk the health and lives of the children in their care, such as this family.
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The dangers posed when academics go outside their area of expertise

People who are highly credentialed academically tend to have their views given a great deal of weight because of the perception that they are generally smart and knowledgeable. While it is true that their training gives them some specific technical and analytical skills, it does not make them general experts. But the deference with which their views are treated can go to their heads and result in them pontificating on matters in which they do not have any real expertise but just enough knowledge to speak with confidence. This seems more likely to happen when the topics are those that have high visibility and broad, multidisciplinary elements. Academics who have strong views on it can be tempted to throw their hats into the debate even if they are not really that knowledgeable.

This seems to be the case with RFK Jr’s appointment of Retsef Levi to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. Levi’s academic background is in operations research, which is a niche theoretical field that applies very advanced mathematics and statistics to complex systems. Much of the work involves simulations and modeling and its practitioners look for real-world situations to which to apply them. Since the systems can vary considerably, sometimes you will find the operations researchers housed in business and management schools (as is the case with Levi at MIT) and sometimes in engineering schools (as is the case at Princeton University).
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FBI interviewed woman who claimed sexual encounter with Trump as a minor

On March 6, 2026, PBS reported on the latest release of files from the Epstein files that includes transcripts of interviews with a young woman who said that she was assaulted by Trump in the 1980s when she was 13-15 years of age. These transcripts were not released initially but came out only after multiple news outlets noticed that they were missing.

The transcripts are of interviews conducted by FBI agents, first with a woman who said a friend had contacted her to say that, as girl of 13-15, she had had abusive sexual encounters with Epstein, Trump, and other men about 35 years ago in New Jersey. This woman contacted the FBI National Threat Operations Center (NTOC). The FBI then interviewed the friend in question on 08/07/2019 who gave graphic details of the sexual abuse she had suffered as a young girl at the hands of sexual encounters with Trump, Epstein, and other men, and they interviewed her again on 08/20/2019 where she provided more details. She said that years later, she and her mother had been blackmailed and received threatening phone calls and attempts to run her off the road
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Scientists who rejected Epstein

A lot of attention has been focused on the hundreds of scientists who are mentioned in the files of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’, especially those who became part of his circle of friends. Many of those who are now compromised were well-known and well-funded so why did they not say no? Science magazine has an article about three who were approached and declined. It is interesting to see the extent Epstein would go to recruit scientists who became well-known, either because they gave a TED talk or appeared on TV or wrote popular books. He would first have an intermediary approach them, sometimes repeatedly, and then follow up with personal appeals.

When first approached, cancer researcher David Agus went online and learned something about him, and some of his colleagues also warned him to keep his distance. But he was repeatedly asked by Epstein over a period of seven years and kept putting him off by saying that he was too busy. He said that he did not want to outright say no because of fears of upsetting someone who seemed powerful.
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Terrible jobs numbers

One major measure of the state of the US workforce is the monthly jobs numbers put out on the first Friday of each month by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, giving the number of jobs created in the previous month as well as the unemployment rate. This initial data is based on survey results reported by employers and is thus rough. In the next two months, the numbers are revised based on more thorough collection of data and then after the end of the year, a final report is published

When the report for August 2025 showed terrible numbers, Trump fired the commissioner of the bureau alleging (without evidence of course) that this career professional was cooking the books to make him look bad. Since then the jobs numbers have fluctuated, as they often do, but the report for February that was published on Friday again show a gloomy picture..
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Behind the scenes of Blazing Saddles (1974)

This is a very funny Mel Brooks film, a parody of westerns that was also a biting satire of racism. The plot involves a newly appointed Black sheriff to a small town, who is immediately met with prejudice. Since it is by Brooks, it of course has anachronisms and silliness running all through it.

There are so many clips that could be shown but here are just three that stand out in my mind.

I enjoyed seeing some of the the actors and the people behind the scenes of the film reminisce about it.

Good riddance to Kristi Noem

Kristi Noem has been fired from her cabinet position as head of the department of homeland security, capping a turbulent time that saw her treating the office as one to provide her with all manner of perks like a luxury jet to allow her to jet set all over the place for photo ops where she could strut around in a cowboy hat, and purportedly using it to enable an affair with a White House advisor. Th jet had a private boudoir with a queen size bed, even though she said it was meant to transport detainees out of the country.

The luxury executive jet sought by the DHS for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet-level travel includes a bedroom with a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen televisions, and a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
…

Whitehouse asked, “So it is being refurbished. What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom and accommodations like this?”

Even some Republicans were calling for her ouster and that may have been the trigger for Trump to dump her.
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I am also in the Epstein files

To be named in the Epstein files is now a mark of shame, carrying with it a presumption that one is tainted by association with him and may have engaged in some truly odious practices.

(Non Sequitur)

Like the character in the cartoon, I would have thought that there was no way that my name would appear in the Epstein files but I was surprised to find that it actually does. How I discovered this was that there are many scientists and other well known academics mentioned in the news reports about the Epstein files so I went to the department of justice website that has a searchable database of the files released so far to check on names at random. It quickly got boring searching for well-known names, so on a whim I entered my own name and was stunned when it returned that my name was in this file.
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The grooming of Virginia Roberts Giuffre

The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
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