TacoButtPlug

Abstract

A well-functioning society requires well-functioning institutions that ensure prosperity, fair distribution of wealth, social participation, security, and informative media. Such institutions are built on a foundation of trust. However, while trust is essential for economic success and good governance, interconnected mechanisms inherent in weakly governed market economies tend to undermine the very trust on which such success depends. These mechanisms include the intrinsic tendency for inequality to grow, media to boost perceived unfairness, and self-interest to gain rewards at the expense of others. These mechanisms, if left unchecked, allow wealth concentration to result in state capture where institutions facilitate further wealth concentration instead of the promoting the common good. As a result, people may become alienated and untrusting of fellow citizens and of institutions. Several democracies now experience such dynamics, the United States being a prime example. We discuss ways in which well-functioning democracies can design institutions to help avoid this social trap, and the much harder challenge of escaping the trap once in it. Successful cases such as the ability of Scandinavian democracies to maintain high-trust, and the US progressive era in the early 20th century provide instructive examples.

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So great how this is paywalled, right? >_<

Monday, April 14, 2025 (Halifax) _ A new study suggests that decriminalization in British Columbia led to a substantial decrease in criminal justice involvement among people who use drugs, without leading to significant increases or decreases in rates of hospitalization or death due to opioids and stimulants.

Researchers from Dalhousie University and the Bruyère Health Research Institute in Ottawa used publicly available data on all drug hospitalizations and deaths, and police-reported drug incidents in Canada to evaluate changes in health and criminal justice outcomes in the first year after decriminalization. The study compared changes in B.C. versus the rest of Canada over the two years pre-decriminalization and the first year of decriminalization.

"Our findings showed a substantial and immediate reduction in criminal justice involvement among people who use drugs after decriminalization — an important shift that suggests the policy is working as intended," said report author Adrienne Gaudreault, a medical student at Dalhousie. "This aligns with the goal of moving away from a criminal justice response to substance use."

Human eyelashes are good for more than just catching dust and looking pretty: As researchers report in Science Advances, they also actively fling water droplets away from the #eyes, helping to keep vision clear when we swim, sweat, and cry (or shower)

Abstract

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration represent major sources of human suffering, yet factors influencing disease severity remain poorly understood. Sex has been implicated as one modifying factor. Here, we show that female sex is a risk factor for worsened outcomes in a model of retinal degeneration and that this susceptibility is caused by the presence of female-specific sex hormones. The adverse effect of female sex hormones was specific to diseased retinal neurons, and depletion of these hormones ameliorated this phenotypic effect, while reintroduction worsened rates of disease in females. Transcriptional analysis of retinas showed significant differences between genes involved in pyroptosis, inflammatory responses, and endoplasmic reticulum stress–induced apoptosis between males and females with retinal degeneration. These findings provide crucial insights into the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and how sex hormones can affect disease severity. These findings have far-reaching implications for clinical trial design and the use of hormonal therapy in females with certain neurodegenerative disorders.

HOUSTON, United States

Federal charges have been filed against a New Mexico man accused of going on an arson spree in that state which destroyed a Tesla dealership and the Republican Party headquarters.

Jamison Wagner, 40, is accused of setting ablaze a Tesla showroom in Albuquerque and the Republican Party of New Mexico (RPNM) headquarters in February and March.

Wagner was arrested April 12 after investigators linked surveillance footage of both locations to him, with his white Hyundai vehicle being identified at the scenes. They confiscated evidence from his home, including materials for homemade incendiary devices using glass containers and flammable liquid which were used to ignite the fires.

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Sorry for the double post. My VPN is a cunt.

Financially motivated by salaries now, but what’s next?

For now, North Korean technical workers are focused on attaining employment, doing those jobs, and sending the money they earn back to Pyongyang.

North Korean technical workers generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the North Korean regime, according to Unit 42.

"A lab company providing services to some Planned Parenthood centers disclosed a data breach on Friday impacting about 1.6 million people.

Laboratory Services Cooperative (LSC) said it initially discovered the cyberattack on October 27 and began an investigation that was completed in February.

The stolen data includes medical information like dates of service, diagnosis, treatments, lab results, treatment locations and the details of the care provided alongside personal information like health insurance numbers, bank account details, payment cards, Social Security numbers, IDs and more. "

Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.

Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.

Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.

Paul Offit: Thank you.

JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.

https://archive.ph/JYIE8

A spider species eat their siblings as soon as they die but tolerate each other when they are alive, suggesting a mysterious signal helps them to determine when to dine on a nest mate

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is suspending a quality-control program for its food-testing laboratories as a result of staff cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The proficiency testing program of the FDA’s Food Emergency Response Network is designed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the agency’s network of about 170 labs that test food for pathogens and contaminants to prevent food-borne illness.

The firing and departure of as many as 20,000 HHS employees has upended public health research and disrupted the agency’s work on areas like bird flu and drug reviews. Donald Trump hopes to slash as much as $40bn from HHS.

In a recent interview with Contemporary OB/GYN, Susanna Mitro, PhD, research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, discussed a study evaluating trends of uterine fibroid diagnosis across racial and ethnic subgroups.

The study used a large and diverse sample of nearly 2 million patients, and findings revealed significant disparities in fibroid diagnoses among racial and ethnic groups. Notably, diagnosis rates were approximately 3-fold higher for Black patients compared to White patients, a trend supported by prior research. Among Asian subgroups, South Asian patients had a 71% higher diagnosis rate, East Asian patients 47% higher, and Southeast Asian patients 29% higher than White patients.

Last Tuesday afternoon, just six days after Mark Zuckerberg’s third meeting with Donald Trump this year, the Meta CEO’s key antagonists in the federal government arrived in the Oval Office.

The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement.

Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta. The social media giant has pushed the president to settle a lawsuit that began in his first term, and continued through the Biden years, which seeks to force the company to divest Instagram and Whatsapp. (The FTC is an independent agency, but both Meta and many of its foes have prepared for Trump to shape the handling of the lawsuit.)