The weight loss miracle drugs that you have to take forever?

I don't know, but I would have thought that a "miracle drug" for weight loss isn't that big a miracle if it has unpleasant side effects and you're likely to put the weight back on pretty quickly if you stop taking it.  From the New York Times:

Weight-loss drugs like Wegovy require a lifetime commitment. Stop taking them, and you’ll almost always gain back the weight you lost.

But many patients don’t want to hear that. Dr. Padmaja Akkireddy, an endocrinologist at Nebraska Medicine, estimated that more than half of her patients don’t want to stay on a weight-loss drug long term. And data shows that most Americans quit the drugs within a year of starting them.

Even Oprah Winfrey said that she stopped taking a weight-loss drug “cold turkey” for a year, then gained back 20 pounds. “I tried to beat the medication,” she told People magazine. It was then that she realized “It’s going to be a lifetime thing,” she told the magazine.

Many people have to stop taking the drugs because they can no longer afford them. Others grow tired of side effects like fatigue, nausea and constipation. Some just don’t want to rely on a drug forever. 

Medical authorities at the highest level have pushed that misconception. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for one, has said weight-loss drugs can allow people to “reset,” suggesting they are a temporary bridge, not a long-term tool.

But research has repeatedly shown that most people need to stay on the drugs to maintain weight loss or other health benefits. This month, the latest big study to demonstrate people regain weight showed that the average person who used weight-loss drugs returned to their starting weight around a year and a half after stopping them.

People who go off the medications typically follow a pattern: When the medication wears off, food cravings and appetite can surge back. And, as with any diet regimen, when people lose a lot of weight quickly, their metabolism slows down, raising the risk they will regain weight.  

Democrats and Greenland

There has been some gnashing of teeth on social media of polling that indicates that, despite mayhem in America, Democrat's favourability polling is quite low - lower than Republicans!:

 

But - surely that reflects dissatisfaction within Democrat voters with the loss of obvious and strong leadership in the party.  (It is really surprising that no one has risen from within Congress to be the obvious charismatic face of the party, above the current oldsters who feel worn out.)

So, what's more important is actual voting intention, and that looks better:

 

And polling on Greenland is not looking good at all:

WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Just 17% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's efforts to acquire Greenland, and substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans oppose using military force to annex the island, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

The two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, showed widespread concerns over Trump's threats to NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, which has been a Danish territory for centuries.

So, why don't the Democrats organise themselves to announce this:   "There is no point in Donald Trump forcing a takeover of Greenland militarily.   Such a step would be repulsive to the vast majority of the American public, and the world.   Democrats, on regaining power, would immediately repudiate it, and completely reverse the move.   So why waste your time even threatening it.  Act in accordance with the will of the American people and international law, and simply negotiate if you want additional bases or facilities on Greenland.  That has always been the sensible way to address any security concerns."   

 

Scott Adams meets his maker

I did a search on the side bar for my past posts on Scott Adams, who died today, and was surprised at the number that I had written about him, especially from around the time of his alt.right (as we used to call it) conversion.

I had earlier posts in which I noted enjoyment from, and interest in, some of his blog entries (the links to which are now dead - unlike this blog which will last until the heat death of the universe - provided enough readers contribute to the Opinion Dominion Foundation, which will be devoted to that task, as well as creating a robotic reincarnation of me that will continue tapping away on a keyboard.)   

But man, it's hard to think of another minor celebrity who seemed relatively likeable at first, but became so cringe-ily, casually offensive and so readily dislikeable.   It's funny how my posts of around 2016, when he was giving ridiculous assessments of Trump vs Clinton, speculate that perhaps it was all a giant troll:  that he was going to claim it was his outstanding powers of persuasion* that conned everyone into thinking he had gone all ga-ga for Trump.  Of course not, he would say.  Ha ha....ha.

But no, it was not to be.  And he just went on to become of more and more ludicrous opinion (and, basically, full of himself) as time went on.    Remember this?: 

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams made a fearful prediction about the 2020 presidential election on Twitter on Wednesday, telling his Republican followers that if Joe Biden is elected to the White House, “there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year.”

“Republicans will be hunted,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet, later adding, “Police will stand down.” 

Or his views with which you can imagine permanent race-baiter Elon Musk nodding quietly to:

Over the past week, the hugely successful cartoonist Scott Adams experienced a swift downfall over inflammatory remarks on his YouTube show. The artist referred to Black Americans as a “hate group” and suggested that white Americans should “get the hell away from Black people” and avoid helping them. In response, his “Dilbert” comic was canceled by nearly every newspaper that carried it, including Newsday. Adams was then dropped by his syndicate and his book publisher. 

But of course, his sucking up big time to Trump made him a hero to MAGA, who are outraged now that normal people are remembering what a jerk Adams became.  

Gee, just what 'til Trump leaves this mortal coil... 

*  His carry on about how he was a trained hypnotist and this gave his incredible powers of understanding of politics and people and virtually everything was one of his most wanky repeat themes. 

Update:   some conservative, religious types on Twitter are saying that they don't care for his death bed "acceptance of Christ"; and whatever the theological argument about whether such a mantra can be effective, the fact that he was doing it performatively is, at the very least, somewhat cringe-worthy.    

But it did remind me of my "salvation polypill" post, which, if he was smart, he should have read and then taken all options for potential salvation! 

The hotel manager who invented an alien genre

Well, let's get away from the American descent into fascism for a minute, and note that Erich Von Daniken, who presumably made a squillion dollars from inventing a whole genre of amateur speculation about aliens in history, has died.

Here's the lengthy New York Times story about him.   I mean, I suppose he gives hope to anyone who thinks their crackpot theories might make them very rich:

When Erich was 17, his father pulled him out of the Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit secondary school in Fribourg, Switzerland, and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier. Erich never returned to school of any kind, but the biblical passages that the Jesuits forced him to translate from Latin and Greek into German propelled him to a larger examination of the world’s religions and mythologies. That deities across cultures so often revealed themselves to humans from the sky, he said, led him to formulate his astronaut-god theory. (He later acknowledged that others had proposed similar theories first.)

He wrote the manuscript for what became “Chariots of the Gods” while managing the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. At the hotel’s bar one day, he met the editor of a Swiss science magazine, who introduced Mr. von Däniken to an executive at Econ-Verlag, a Swiss publishing house. Econ-Verlag agreed to print 6,000 copies of what was originally titled “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft,” or “Memories of the Future,” but only after hiring Wilhelm Roggersdorf, who had edited the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to rework much of it. 

By December 1968, the book was a best seller in Germany. An English translation appeared the next year.

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.

 I think the book and his ideas only became popular in the rest of the world after this:

In 1973, NBC aired a documentary based on Mr. von Däniken’s theories, and more than a quarter-million copies of “Chariots” sold in two days. 

I guess that is the documentary I have a vague memory of watching as a 13 or 14 year old on Australian TV.  (Or was there a movie release of a documentary?  I can't remember.)   Whatever I saw, I remember it was big was on the spooky music and atmosphere.

But, I was never convinced.  It wasn't long that the pushback from actual experts was out, within a year or two, and I felt justified in my original cautious approach.   

I am sure I have mentioned this before*, but I do remember being a little creeped out by another "aliens and religion are connected" idea, which struck closer to my Catholicism.  There was a book in my high school library about the "miracle of the sun" at Fatima in 1917 which pointed out that some descriptions of what people said they saw sounded awfully like a disk shaped object in the sky putting itself between the people on the ground and the sun.   Of course, this was 40 years before disk shaped UFOs became something in the popular imagination.   (It is also before the vastness of the universe was even understood.)

I can't find details of that book through Perplexity.  It notes that there was a book from Portuguese authors in the 1990s on the same topic, but it can't find a whole book about it from the 1970's.  But I am sure it was a high school library book I found - and therefore I am sure it was from well before the 1990's.

Perplexity does point out that famous UFO researched Jacques Vallee was the first to claim it was a UFO event as part of his 1970's books.   But I have never read them, and I am 100% sure that it was a book entirely devoted to the Fatima miracle.

This isn't an important topic, but its curious that such a book would be lost to AI....     

  

*  Now that I have checked, I mention it about once every decade or so! 

American shooting

Of course, we have all seen the video of the terrible killing of mother Good in Minnesota yesterday.  Of course, the online discourse mostly (but not entirely) follows political allegiance - to a really distressing degree, actually, starting at the top.

If everyone else has an opinion, I may as well put mine up:

a.    while the view of the shooter/killer was partially blocked, yeah, the lack of movement to his feet indicates that if he was touched by the car, it must have been the slightest glance.  I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't touched at all;

b.    the feet position in fact suggests that, if there was any chance of being hit at all, he only had to take one modest side step to be obviously clear of even a touch from the car; 

c.    when he fired again into her window from the side, it was at that time perfectly clear he was in no danger.  Especially if one of those bullets hit her, I don't see how that could be an act that carries no consequence;

d.    MAGA types have been putting up the blurry video (taken at great distance) of what happened from the front, and I suspect that some versions have been altered, as one version makes it look like the ICE person is actually pushed some distance by the car, which is entirely inconsistent with the clear video from the rear.   Either that or its a different incident, possibly; 

e.     It truly speaks to the fascist inclinations of MAGA supporters, and Vance and cos-playing ICE-Barbie Noem that they leapt to call her a "domestic terrorist" who intended to (or in the case of Trump, did) run over the ICE guy.   Trump is an idiot.  Vance is an appalling person.  Noem needs to go back to shooting dogs.  Basically, anyone who works for Trump is a terrible person.  (Speaking of which, Lindsay Graham could not possibly debase himself further if he tried.)

 We are all well aware that juries can be a soft touch to anyone (especially police) claiming to be "in fear of their life" and killing in alleged self defence.  But, if authorities decide to not press any prosecution to let a jury decide, when (I suspect) the majority of the country thinks he deserves punishment, it is going to cause further unrest.   (Comments on liberal videos and sites - and mainstream media - are running very strongly, in large numbers, against ICE and MAGA's pre-emptive exoneration.)

Update:

What a great online response from a Democrat:

 

Update:   The later video from the shooter's phone was immediately interpreted by MAGA types as proving the officer was justified, and many think it shows he was hit by the car.  In fact, it does not show he was touched by the car at all - you just can't tell.  The counter narrative is that it indicates that the shooting was triggered by liberal, non compliant, women mildly taunting him.  That does seems plausible, given the insult he gave after killing her, and his callous looking walk away from the scene.

Update 2:   Stephen Miller and his fascist fellows at the White House are itching to call protests against ICE operations an insurrection, no doubt as setting up the background for possible use of the Insurrection Act at some point in future, and it seems little remarked on that the officer White House spokesperson used it in a tweet in relation to this killing:

 And finally:   it is very difficult to interpret the reaction in comments to stories on the MSM, and on X and Bluesky, as indicating anything other than Vance, Trump and all their lackeys having shot themselves in the foot by their awful pre-emptive siding with the ICE officer.   It is not washing with most of the public. 

 

 

Philippe has a point

 

And this more recently....

This is exactly what we are seeing.

Fascists in the White House

What if infinity isn't real?

I thought that this video by Sabine was one of the more interesting ones in recent months, as I had not heard before of the idea that the current problems with the incomplete understanding of physics is being caused by the concept of infinity being taken too seriously, so to speak.    

 

I see that this idea has been discussed not so long ago at Scientific American, and other places.

I do find it an intuitively pleasing idea - given that infinity is so counter-intuitive in so many ways.   

A quick list of things I don't understand at the moment

*   Why are so many people sticking their nose into the question of a Federal Royal Commission into the Bondi shootings (and anti-Semitism)?   Royal Commissions are far from magical solutions to problems, and its simply obvious that there was going to be protests and a rise in anti-Israeli sentiment amongst all Muslim populations as the Gaza campaign rolled on and rolled, leaving the country reduced to rubble.  (And yes, Hamas both started it and could have ended it much, much earlier:  but there was no doubt that thousands of civilians were killed in the political crossfire.)   I think that Robert Richter makes some obvious sense:

When more than 130 of Australia’s most senior legal minds affixed their names to a call for a royal commission into antisemitism following the Bondi terror attack, one absence rippled quietly through the profession.

Robert Richter, KC – one of the country’s most prominent criminal defence silks – was conspicuously not among them. ...

His concern extends beyond legal doctrine. He warns that a royal commission explicitly framed around antisemitism risks inflaming community tensions – echoing the comments from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about it being a potential platform for hate speech.

“If there is to be a royal commission … and I don’t think we need one,” he said,“it will go for years, and its definitions will be argued about endlessly.” 

In Richter’s view, the key institutional failures exposed by the Bondi attack are already apparent.
“The tragedy at Bondi was the result of a stuff-up by ASIO in not red-flagging the man for overseas travel or anything of the kind, red-flagging his father,” he said. “It was a complete stuff-up by a combination of ASIO, the federal police, NSW Police and border control. We don’t need a royal commission for that.” 

 *  Why do millions of people go see the Avatar movies, yet it is widely acknowledged that the movies don't feel like they have any cultural significance?   Everyone seems to agree that the films don't matter much to anyone - unlike the way other series at their peak do (Star Wars, and the Marvel movies, are the obvious examples.)   

*  Why do so many Republicans refuse to say that it is a very bad thing that Trump publicises nonsense conspiracies that clearly risk encouraging more deranged people to seek violent vengeance for imaginary actions of Democrats?   It is appalling behaviour by a guy who most of the world would be happy to see kidnapped by, say, Canada.  Who cares what the charges are?  Just make them up.

Commentary of note on Venezuela

The New York Times had a very critical editorial out very quickly.  

Here's a gift link to it.

In this topsy turvy world, a long tweet Marjorie Taylor Green put out (although I feel certain she would not have written it herself) basically repeated all of the points made by the NYT!  

The best contribution of the Washington Post was an article explaining the history behind the claim that Venezuela had "stolen" American oil, land and assets.  As you might expect, there is a mountain of nuance to note about that claim.  Or to put it another way:  it's a gross exaggeration and self serving take on what happened.  Here's the gift link.

Over at CNA, I thought this part of their article "Was the US capture of Venezula's President lawful" was exactly on point:

Experts in international law said the Trump administration had muddled the legal issues by claiming the operation was both a targeted law enforcement mission and the potential prelude to long-term control of Venezuela by the US.

"You cannot say this was a law enforcement operation and then turn ‍around and say now we need to run the country," said Jeremy Paul, a professor at Northeastern University specialising in constitutional law. 

"It just doesn't make any sense." 

Meanwhile, it's been a bit weird watching the European leaders hold back from criticising Trump.   I know no one wants to praise Maduro, but I still don't see the point of holding back on criticism of Trumpian tactics, which have including killing a 100 or so people on boats on the high seas as a form of extra judicial execution.

Anyway, one of the odd things that I haven't seen anyone say yet is that if a group of Muslims managed to somehow kidnap Netanyahu for a trial at the ICJ, Trump's action could well be cited as a precedent.   

 

GPS jamming explained

Well, this is a topic that doesn't get much attention, and sounds like a real worry for civilian aviation in particular:  the ease and frequency of blocking GPS, as explained at the Washington Post.

Huge if true

I see that X continues to be the home for every type of conspiracy and "secret knowledge" nutters you can imagine:

Happy "low expectations for 2026" (and a look back)

Perhaps that's the right way to start the year?   Just trust that if the world doesn't have a nuclear exchange in 2026, it'll be a "good" year?   

I mean, there is the possibility that good things could happen this year:  Republican "centrists" (yeah, I know) being sufficiently chastised by Democrat wins in mid term elections to actually start opposing Trump and his worst minions?   China might have its leadership replaced by someone not so devoted to forcing re-unification with Taiwan?   Putin might fall off the perch - although I have no idea whether there is any potential successor who is likely to be more moderate.  (Well, same can be said about China.)    

Look, the new Steven Spielberg film might be his best in a long time?   (The trailer worries me a bit - it features Catholic nuns a few times, and few American movies seems to depict them realistically.   And it does  seem to be rather X Files-ish looking.  On the other hand, we never have had a decent film that runs with the Jacques Vallee take about how the UFO phenomena is  much more closely tied to paranormal mysteries than to alien visitation, and my impression is that this is what the movie is about.   Or birds and deer not being real, perhaps?)

Anyway, you all know I like "big picture" takes on history that help put things in an interesting new  perspective.   There's a good one in the New York Times today by an American historian who considers the situation in the US during the so-called Gilded Age (at the latter part of the 19th century) and now.  He brings up lots of points that I would not consider common knowledge, and analyses change in the country in more of a "zeitgeist-y" way that seems fairly novel, and above a simple Left/Right political view.  

Go read it all, but here is a taste:

In the last decades of the 1800s, horses left millions of pounds of manure on Manhattan’s streets every day. Life expectancy sank to its lowest levels in U.S. history, and politics reached new heights of violence.

By the early 1900s, Americans were living longer than ever. Elections grew so peaceful that some worried about “apathy in political circles.” And gardeners in a cleaned-up New York were complaining that “well-rotted manure is becoming quite scarce.”

Something changed between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gilded Age ended. Wouldn’t it be useful today — trapped deep in what many call a second Gilded Age — to understand the forces that produced and then restrained a similar era in our past?....

If you track political polarization, income inequality, social distrust and many other metrics over the past 150 years, you get a U-shaped curve, charting the ways our nation went from a chaotic splintering in the 19th century to a rigid new order in the 20th to our disrupted present. It looks like a great national seesawing, as we toggled between eras of release and eras of restraint....

This section has some facts I was not familiar with: 

In one Wisconsin county, 89 percent of the teenage males present in 1860 were gone by 1870, and 90 percent of those present in 1870 were gone 10 years later. They clumped in new places. Chicago had 200 residents in 1832 and one million by 1890. Newcomers flooded in. From 1850 to 1914, one-quarter of Europe’s work force emigrated to the Americas.

At its best, these disruptions meant new prosperity and new freedoms. From 1860 to 1890, national wealth quintupled, and political turnout peaked. Gilded Age society often felt bold and innovative, blossoming with utopian visions, spiffy technologies and inventive cocktails.  

But it came with a heartbreaking recklessness. America laid more railroad track than anywhere else in the world, but corporations rarely bothered to ensure safety on their lines. Nearly 200,000 people died in train accidents from 1885 to 1900 alone.

In politics, power changed hands in the most corrupt, most violent elections in our history. In 40 years Americans witnessed the assassinations of three presidents and multiple governors, members of Congress, mayors and election officials, plus ethnic riots and racial terrorism from Manhattan to Memphis and beyond.

The very meaning of authority changed. Gilded Age leaders seized power, then wielded it to the hilt. Unlike traditional aristocrats, raised as caretakers of what they’d inherited, the new tycoons created and destroyed “without restraints of culture,” as Demarest Lloyd put it. America’s forgettable presidents were an exception, but the party bosses who ran things behind the scenes followed similar rules, employing dirty tricks and open crimes. 

His basic argument in the rest of the piece is the decision to exercise "restraint" (or "limits") in the 20th century.   He paints this as a movement that doesn't fit into a simple Left/Right viewpoint, and to a degree, argues it was cultural:

People began to talk about a new style: American cool. Employers, parenting experts and fashion columnists instructed Americans to control their emotions, in contrast to the Victorian love of bold passions. Instead of baroque sentences packed with complex clauses and grandiloquent vocabulary, people began to speak in a shorter, terser style. Literature, art and fashion shifted to a clean, stripped-down, modern aesthetic. 

Anyway, it's an interesting take, I think.   

  

 

A quote for the new year

This is from the end of one of those no specific author, philosophically inclined, YouTube channel video about Blaise Pascal, and I certainly hope it's not AI generated!:

"History is a constant re-invention of hope and meaning in all forms - mythological, technological, philosophical.  We keep questioning, answering, building, destroying. Questioning, answering, building, destroying.  We can't help ourselves from helping ourselves."

 Sounds about right?

A much needed column (and post)

All reasonable people are upset about the recent, current state of the world, but I see that Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times has taken on the brave taste of trying to partially remedy that in his column  In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up.   (It's a gift link - go read the whole thing.)

Here's how he opens:

This is the season when I customarily argue that the year just ending has been the best in human history.

So I dutifully sat at my laptop and tried to write something along the lines of: Sure, democracy is eroding, politics are toxic, wars are raging, America is losing allies, the planet is burning, and young people will never afford homes. But other than that …

I’ve done these “best year ever” columns annually, irritating Eeyores. But now I just can’t. The year 2025 was a setback for humanity — and unfortunately, the United States is a reason for the retreat. 

He nonetheless goes on to point out the ways in which, despite the dire setbacks of 2025, there are reasons to be hopeful of more progress in certain areas.  Some examples:

A starting point is to gain perspective and acknowledge that in the arc of human history, we’re still in good shape. While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000.

It also seems likely that the positive trajectories will resume after slippage in 2025 and 2026. The Gates Foundation forecasts that while the trend of declining child deaths will be slowed, deaths will at least drop in the coming years. Similarly, the share of children stunted by malnutrition will most likely be lower in 2030 than it is now, the foundation suggests, but perhaps not as low as if aid funding had been sustained.

Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 percent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school — and those educated women transform families, economies and societies. 

 And further down:

Another area that inspires me with its progress is clean energy. Climate change is still an enormous challenge, but energy economics have turned upside down and now offer a path forward — if we are willing to take it. My old college buddy Bill McKibben, who perhaps has done more than anyone else to raise alarms about climate change and who often as a result sounded rather bleak, is now surprisingly upbeat.

In his terrific new book, “Here Comes the Sun,” about the revolution of solar energy, Bill acknowledges all the challenges, but adds, “We’re also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history — something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity.”

It took 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in 1954 to install the first terawatt of solar power on the planet, in 2022. It took two years to get the second.

This is because solar is increasingly cheap and simple — balcony solar systems are common in parts of Europe — and because batteries are making immense strides. Remember the line in “The Graduate” about the bright future to be found in “one word,” “plastics”? Today that one word might be “batteries.” 

This reminds me, I never linked to this recent article in Science magazine, which you should be able to read for free: 

Turning point
Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline—a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy

The topic is clear from the title, and it gives the tiniest bit of reason for optimism.  But the challenge is still enormous, as shown on this illustration in the article:

 

This is a test

So, I starting using the new Lenovo tablet, and yeah, it's impressive.  The matte screen looks good, and the colours and screen resolution are great for a cheapo device.  I haven't tried reading on it much yet, but that will come.

One of blogging apps doesn't want to work on it, though. So I'm trying the Blogger app itself, which I think many people hate.

Let's add a screenshot..

Yes, this seems...less than ideal.  

Oh.  It published ok.  But there was no adjusting the image size within the app.  

From the garden...

It's hard to believe that the universe will ever see greater, unwarranted, grovelling endorsement of narcissism than that which surrounds Trump

New battleships: President Trump announced on Monday that the Navy would build two new “Trump Class” battleships, with the eventual goal of acquiring 25. The announcement by Mr. Trump was the latest example of the president rebranding an aspect of the federal government in his image. The Navy secretary, John Phelan, called the vessels “just one piece of the president’s golden fleet that we’re going to build.” 

(From the Washington Post.)

 (From the New York Times.)

Let's rush towards Christmas (and 70) with more depressing news!

I was only vaguely aware of estimates of dementia according to age, but this Nature article puts some more certainty to it:

Nearly one in ten people over the age of 70 have Alzheimer’s disease dementia, shows a first-of-its-kind study that paired blood-based markers and clinical assessments to study the disease in Norway¹.

That prevalence is in line with previous estimates for some other white populations². But there were also unexpected differences, including higher disease rates than anticipated in individuals older than 85...

The study, published today in Nature, shows that blood-based tools can improve epidemiological estimates of neurodegenerative disease.

But exactly how to use these tests remains controversial, warns Jason Karlawish, a geriatrician and co-director of the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Blood-based markers can be helpful for physicians treating people with dementia and for answering research questions, but they aren’t ready to be rolled out widely as health screening tools.

“It is the kind of test that, in the wrong hands, could cause a lot of harm,” says Karlawish, who was not involved in the study.

 Of course, things get worse the older you get:

Around 10% of participants over the age of 70 had dementia and AD pathology, showing both cognitive impairment and high pTau217, they report. Another 10% had mild cognitive impairments and high pTau217. And 10% had high pTau217 but no signs of cognitive impairment, which the authors refer to as preclinical AD.

These findings are broadly in line with expectations, but there were surprises, too.

Some 25% of people aged 85–89 had dementia and AD pathology, up from previous estimates of around 7% for men and 13% for women in this age group in Western Europeans3. And the incidence of preclinical AD in younger individuals was 8% in those aged 70–74, down from a previous estimate of around 22%.

Anders Gustavsson, a member of the team that compiled the earlier estimates, welcomes the latest data. “I’m not surprised that this study gets somewhat different numbers,” says Gustavsson, who is an adviser to the health-economics consultancy Quantify Research in Stockholm.

The discrepancies probably reflect selection bias, says study co-author Anita Lenora Sunde, a physician and dementia researcher at Stavanger University Hospital in Norway. Previous estimates were made by recruiting participants for brain scans, and people with dementia might not have wanted to or been able to participate. 

The article eventually gets cut off at a paywall, just as it notes that the study indicates (as many others seem to) that higher education may have a protective effect.   Good!

 

 

Mostly a problem from the Right

Axios has this good article about a recurring problem, and I will be naughty and post it here in full:

 

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.

• Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

• The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

• But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
• Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

But the frenzy only accelerated from there.

• Popular right-wing figures and large anonymous accounts cast Kharbouch's identity — Palestinian, openly queer and outspoken on Gaza — as inherently suspicious.
• Some accounts even cited amateur "gait analysis" of Kharbouch at a pro-Palestinian protest as supposed evidence that he was the shooter, alleging he was a product of campus extremism.

"The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare," Kharbouch said in a statement. "I woke up Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed toward me online."

• "Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech," he added, before noting that his harassment is "nothing" compared to the plight of Palestinians.
• Kharbouch's lawyers said his web pages were taken down as a "precaution" after "far-right influencers posted hateful vitriol" seeking to connect him to the shooting.

Between the lines: Online sleuths have a long history of misfires, most infamously during the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. But what has changed is the speed of misinformation, and the influence of those spreading it.

• Shaun Maguire, a prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist, claimed Kharbouch was "very likely" the shooter and falsely suggested that the slain MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was Jewish and pro-Israel.
• Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with outsized influence in the Trump administration, continued to claim the shooter was a "Muslim who shouted 'Allahu Akbar'" — even after authorities identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

• Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.

The other side: Not all crowdsourced attention after the Brown shooting was harmful.

• Authorities interviewed the author of a Reddit post that flagged a suspicious man and vehicle on Brown's campus, and garnered information that ultimately "blew this case right open," according to Neronha.

The big picture: In this era of hyper-partisanship, weakened content moderation and incentivized engagement, the Brown episode fits a familiar and troubling pattern.

• Earlier this month, the conservative website The Blaze retracted a story that falsely identifed a former law enforcement officer as the Jan. 6 pipe bomber — based on "gait analysis."
• In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, social platforms were flooded with misinformation — including AI-generated deepfakes — before authorities clarified who was responsible.
• For months, podcaster Candace Owens has promoted unsubstantiated allegations that Turning Point USA staff helped cover up Charlie Kirk's assassination, igniting a MAGA civil war.

The bottom line: Armchair sleuths thrive in the chaos after mass violence, amplified by platforms that reward speed and outrage. But it's innocent people who are left to absorb the fallout when the claims collapse.

As it says, the worst thing about this is how it is nearly always "consequence free" for those whose guesses turn out to be wrong.