The shape of things to come. Will human surgeons be out of a job?
"This advancement moves us from robots that can execute specific surgical tasks to robots that truly understand surgical procedures." Axel Krieger, Johns Hopkins medical roboticist.
Truly understand?
MAHA goes back a long way. Some of us are old enough to remember John F. Kennedy's stirring call to national fitness. It made a difference in our lives. If only Uncle Jack could see his nephew Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. teamed up with four distinguished medical doctors, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, and Mehmet Oz.
True (conservative) diversity and true (conservative) inclusion! And no 'equity' in sight. Merit, excellence, achievement.
Three of the doctors mentioned, health heretics in the dismal, dark, and demented days of Joey B's admin, are now health czars.
You may enjoy watching the forcible removal of some leftist reprobates who attempted to disrupt an RFK, Jr. hearing. A little schadenfreude never hurt anybody.
There is an over-the-counter product called BOOST OXYGEN. I bought me a can for around 18 semolians the other day and took it on a strenuous hike. I self-administered the recommended 3-5 snorts after topping out at a saddle, but noticed only a slight, barely perceptible positive effect. Similarly with later tests. I wanted a positive effect, so I might have felt what I wanted to feel. Interim conclusion: not worth the money. Later in the day it seemed to make no difference to my online bullet and blitz chess.
I'll continue the tests and see if my SpO2 (peripheral oxygen saturation) as measured by a portable pulse oximeter is improved. It is already at 97-98%.
Exercise maxim: No day without (exercise induced) oxygen debt!
On the wall: "By his stripes you shall be made whole." Isaiah 53:5
Curious. I had the good sense not to query the sweet young receptionist about the inscription: Is bloodletting practiced here?
I caught a preview this morning at 5:15 from the mountain bike. A great caffeine-fueled ride from 5:15-6:43. It's cooling down in the Zone. Wore a shirt for a change. The strenuous life is best by test. It doesn't matter how old you are. Get out there and bust your hump for an hour or two every day. Brother Jackass will be glad you did. He'll be exploding with energy afterwards.
Supermoon tonight.
I first heard this when I was ten. This morning's moonset set it off one more once in the old man's head. "Without music, life would be a mistake." (Nietzsche). And it doesn't matter whether it's an old doo-wop number or The Ride of the Valkyries.
You may remember it from Apocalypse Now.
It might even be Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Arguments contra.
Top o' the Stack.
Substack latest.
Top o' the Stack.
Well, why not?
Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."
Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.
The Left destroys everything it touches, and it touches everything. Problem is, few physicians, comfortable and lazy as they are in their tony suburbs, have the civil courage to speak out against this nonsense.
At the doctor's office the sawbones' assistant takes your 'vitals.' She checks whether your blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and O2 uptake are 'within range.' None of this would be necessary if you were not a mortal man on the way to death. But the young assistant is not interested in trading witticisms with an old man, so you refrain from remarking that she is about to take your 'mortals.'
Nothing is safe from politicization by leftists. And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you? You geezers in particular need to wake up. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy.
Over at Instapundit:
NYC – Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill). Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th. Jewish patients beware.
Did you throw away your useless made-in-China COVID face masks? Yes? Too bad. They now have a use in places like New York City.
If someone is firing a shotgun at you it would be futile to take cover behind a chain link fence. But if you are being pelted by baseballs, the fence would prove barrier enough.
Smoky places unsought are the problem; those sought not so much.
It is still deliciously cool, mornings, this Sonoran spring in the Zone, but the summer will soon be upon us. And so my regimen changes. I leave for my desert mountain bike ride earlier and earlier. This morning I was out from 5:11 to 6:37. First light is now around 5:00. The idea is to get to the Easternmost point of my loop before Old Sol is up and in my eyes. Ideally, he peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridgeline just as I am turning Southwest.
The true Zone Man follows the sun.
Will I buy an e-bike? Eventually, after I can no longer respectably crank my Trek 930 over hill and dale, road and trail.
As for what Thoreau calls "the philosopher's drink," I double the early-morning hydration this time of year: no less than two 12 oz glasses of water right after arisal, and only then to coffee, that synaptic lubricant par excellence without which morning would be a mistake.
I exaggerate slightly and your mileage may vary.
There is at least one. His name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I recommend his A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals (Skyhorse Publishing, 2022). It is mercifully short, x + 110 pages long, and well worth your time. It is extremely well-documented. The text itself runs to x + 87 pp. with 239 endnotes, most of them with hyperlink info. Here is something I didn't know:
At the outset of the pandemic, most of the world's leading news organizations — BBC, Reuters, AP, AFD, CBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, Washington Post, Financial Times, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Twitter, and others — organized themselves into a collusive antidemocratic and anticompetitive cartel known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) — pledged to squelch and censor all reports about government COVID countermeasures that challenged official proclamations. (p. 52 f; endnote 153 points us to the BBC, December 10, 2020.)
I don't believe that there is any chance that RFK Jr. will 'pull a Tulsi' and quit the Democrat Party, although he should. He won't because he's a Kennedy, and I am guessing that he already has enough trouble with his extended family. (See here.) Like many old-time Dems, he fancies he will wrest the leadership of his party away from the 'woke'-left totalitarians who now control it. If that's what he thinks, he's fooling himself.
The irony is that RFK fils, despite his speech impediment and lack of charisma, has a better chance of beating either Trump or DeSantis in 2024 than any other Dem I can think of.
While poking around for a reliable, powerful, bicycle tire pump to keep my mid-sized mountain bike tires up to around 65 psi, I found the following. Comments enabled for anyone who has a pump to recommend. The reviewer is recommending this device.
Reviewed in Canada on July 15, 2019
