Entropy retweeted
🚨 BOBBY LEE TRIED TO OPEN UP ABOUT A CHILDHOOD TRAUMA… AND ANDREW SANTINO COULDN’T GET THROUGH THE FIRST SENTENCE. 💀
This might be one of the most chaotic moments in Bad Friends history.
Bobby started sharing a serious account of being sexually abused when he was nine.
But Andrew was so caught off guard by the sudden change in conversation that he struggled to keep a straight face.
Bobby immediately warned him:
“I’m gonna say it again, and if you smile, I’m gonna leave.”
They tried restarting.
Again.
And again. 😭
Every time Andrew thought he was ready, Bobby added another unexpected detail.
First, it was “brutally.”
Then came “every day for a summer.”
Andrew completely lost his composure.
“You can’t throw shit in there!”
Bobby eventually agreed to stop introducing new details so Andrew could prepare himself.
The absurdity wasn’t the trauma itself. It was watching two comedians repeatedly fail to navigate an incredibly serious conversation.
Have you ever laughed at the worst possible moment simply because you didn’t know how to react?
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Entropy retweeted
Kids today complain when the Wi-Fi takes 3 seconds to connect.
We used to sit through an entire robot mating ritual just to check our email.
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Entropy retweeted
When you finally calm down and realize you may have overreacted a little
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Entropy retweeted
Why did Rome fall?
There were lots of reasons…disease…barbarian invaders.
But also a reason modern societies should worry about: entitlement spending!
Yes, really.
“Rome could conquer the world,” explains historian @johanknorberg, “but they couldn’t do entitlement reform.”
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Entropy retweeted
Abdul El-Sayed Needed Babysitters When He Was Health Director
Because he isn't a real doctor, Detroit and Wayne County both had to hire actual doctors to make health decisions
By Charlie LeDuff @Charlieleduff
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is not a doctor.
That’s not me saying that, it’s the State of Michigan.
Even so, El-Sayed got paid like a doctor, pretended to be a doctor, and broke state law doing so.
As executive director of the Detroit Health Department and then of the Wayne County Health Department, El-Sayed was prohibited from making medical decisions because he was not and is not a licensed to practice medicine in Michigan (or anywhere else for that matter.)
The state allows non-doctors like El-Sayed to be the chief bureaucrat of a local health department, but only if there is a chief medical officer to make actual health decisions.
And so, El-Sayed in his short tenures in both Detroit and Wayne County was babysat by two qualified female physicians, and at least one was paid much less than El-Sayed. (Normally the actual doctor earns approximately 30% more than the bureaucrat.)
So while El-Sayed plays physician in campaign commercials, the women were doing the actual work.
As it happens, El-Sayed was not even qualified to be chief bureaucrat.
Again, according to state law, the director of a health department must have an advanced degree in medicine or public health AND at least three years experience in health administration.
El-Sayed did not have the required admin experience, but this is Wayne County, where the law is optional for machine hacks like “Dr.” Phoney El-Baloney.
Under El-Sayed, the chief medical officer for Detroit in 2016 was Dr. Joneigh Khaldun.
El-Sayed went on to run for governor and lost. He then became a TV doctor for CNN as a Covid expert and got almost everything wrong.
Dr. Khaldun went on to become the chief medical executive for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—and, like El-Sayed, she got almost everything wrong about Covid, including school closings and commingling infected people in the state’s nursing homes.
El-Sayed resurfaced in 2023 in Wayne County. Still, he had no certification. No residency. No patients. Insufficient medical experience to satisfy state law.
Minor details in the Wayne County Machine. El-Sayed got the job, but still couldn’t make medical decisions or supply health care for 150 children locked in the juvenile jail. Still, he was paid an eye-popping $279,000 a year by the time he left to run for Senate last year. (A few days following his announcement, the county machine granted him a $72,000 “consulting contract.”)
As El-Sayed played doctor, the actual chief medical officer, Dr. Avani Sheth, was paid $235,000, or nearly 20% less than El-Sayed.
Interestingly, El-Sayed’s successor as executive director of the county health department is paid $180,000—a $99,000 pay cut for the position.
El-Sayed claims on his social media posts to despise financial misogyny. But El-Sayed doesn’t seem to mind it when it’s posted to his bank ledger.
What to call him?
Fake doctor?
Paper doctor?
Unlicensed physician?
Call El-Sayed whatever you want, just know he can’t make house calls.
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Entropy retweeted
THIS IS BIG!
The Cancer Cells That Changed Their Minds
A KAIST team just reversed cancer without killing a single cell — and the method may matter more than the result.
For a century, oncology has had exactly one strategy: find the cancer and destroy it.
Chemotherapy poisons it. Radiation burns it. Surgery cuts it out. Immunotherapy teaches the body to hunt it. Every weapon differs in precision, but not in philosophy. The tumor is an enemy. You win by killing.
Now a team at South Korea's KAIST has proposed a heresy: *what if the tumor doesn't need to die?*
In a study led by Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, published in Advanced Science ("Control of Cellular Differentiation Trajectories for Cancer Reversion," DOI 10.1002/advs.202402132), researchers took colon cancer cells and — without poisoning, irradiating, or cutting them — turned them back into normal cells.
Not dead. Not damaged. Just normal again.
The tumors, grown in mice, shrank dramatically. The surrounding tissue was left intact, because there was never an attack to survive.
This is early research — cell lines and animal models, no human trials, real obstacles still unsolved. But the conceptual break is the story. For the first time, cancer treatment has a second verb. Not just destroy. Also: convert.
The digital twin of a cell
The KAIST team's insight begins with a redefinition of what cancer is.
The conventional view treats cancer as a pile of broken machinery: mutations accumulate, checkpoints fail, cells proliferate. Cho's group looked at the same evidence and saw something different — a trajectory. During oncogenesis, they observed, normal cells don't just break. They regress, sliding backward along the differentiation path they followed when they matured. A colon cell becomes, in effect, a confused stem cell: immature, proliferative, lost.
If cancer is a wrong turn on a developmental road, then the treatment question changes. You don't blow up the road. You build a map and find the turn.
That map is what the team calls a digital twin — a complete computational model of the gene network governing a cell's differentiation. Using data from 4,252 intestinal cells, they reconstructed a network of 522 interacting components, capturing how genes regulate one another as a cell matures or degrades.
Then they did the audacious thing: they asked the simulation which levers, flipped together, would push a cancer cell back down the road toward normalcy.
The answer came through a system they built called BENEIN (Boolean Network Inference and Control), which models gene interactions as logical relationships and systematically tests which interventions redirect the network's state. The simulation pointed to three master regulators — the genes MYB, HDAC2, and FOXA2 — acting together as the switch that holds the cancerous state in place.
Turn all three off simultaneously, the model predicted, and the cell would stop proliferating and differentiate into something resembling a normal intestinal cell.
They tested it, and it worked.
In three colon cancer cell lines, suppressing MYB, HDAC2, and FOXA2 together strongly induced differentiation into normal-like cells. The cancer cells began expressing markers of healthy intestinal tissue. Proliferation collapsed — not because the cells died, but because they grew up.
In animal models, tumors formed from the reprogrammed cells were dramatically smaller than controls, and under the microscope they looked far more like normal tissue. The signature achievement, and the one that would matter most to any patient reading this: there was no collateral damage. Nothing was poisoned, burned, or irradiated. The healthy tissue never came under fire, because there was no fire.
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Community note
The KAIST 2024 study showed that inhibiting MYB, HDAC2 and FOXA2 induced differentiation in colon cancer cells to a normal-like state in cell and mouse experiments. No human trials have been done. The before-and-after scan is not from this research.
doi.org/10.1002/advs.2… eurekalert.org/news-releases/
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Entropy retweeted
Mamdani was asked to define socialism and pulls a sleight of hand..
The reality is socialism redistributes wealth, it generally does not create it. It needs a capitalist host to suck from resources from.
And defining it as “the government makes sure you have everything you need to live a dignified life”, is not the definition..
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Entropy retweeted
"Canada is doing whatever they need to do to protect their country. Why is there a problem when the US decides to do it?"
"Because we are so much smaller."
- A panelist when asked why it's a problem when the US protects its own industries, when Canada has protected its own.
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It’s mostly fraud. It’s such a big problem
NEW: RFK Jr. says Medicare spending on wound care patches exploded from $200 million in 2019 to $14 billion last year: "It's all stolen."
Bad actors billed Medicare billions by slapping the most expensive skin grafts on elderly and dying patients who didn't need them.
"The doctors who prescribed them would get 6% of the sales cost. And so, they were incentivized to prescribe more expensive products. In Europe, they spend 35 cents a cubic inch. We were spending $135, and that went up to $2,000 a cubic inch."
"So 2019, we were paying $200 million. Last year we spent 14 billion. All stolen. It's all stolen. And we were on track to spend 23 billion this year."
"We put an end to it, and we now have driven that cost down to somewhere around a billion dollars."
In one Arizona case, the owners of two wound care companies pleaded guilty to more than $1.2 billion in fraudulent claims. Medicare paid over $1 million per patient for grafts slapped on elderly patients who didn't need them, many of them dying in hospice.
In June, DOJ charged 11 more defendants over more than $2 billion in allograft claims, including a company accused of issuing sham invoices to inflate what Medicare paid.
It feels like every week I learn a new way people were ripping off taxpayers for billions.
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Ford needs a real leader again.
Ford borrowed $23.5 billion in late 2006 and pledged nearly everything it owned, down to the blue oval.
Nothing had gone wrong yet. No crash, no bailout.
Two years later GM and Chrysler went to Washington for money. Ford sat beside them and took none.
Alan Mulally had been running Boeing's commercial airplanes a month earlier. He walked into the twelfth floor in Dearborn in September 2006, looked out at the Rouge plant, and asked the finance people where things stood. Ford was projected to lose $17 billion that year.
Every brand was losing money. Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Volvo, Ford itself.
Then he mortgaged the name on the building.
Four years on he went back to Stanford and taught the whole thing as a case study, with the students playing him. The 27 minute cut attached to this post is that session. He gives them the situation, takes their answers on a card, then reads back what Ford did.
Watch him reach the financing line, about twelve minutes in.
The financing answer goes on his card as a home improvement loan. Minutes later he reads it back as the real plan. 500 banks, $23.5 billion. Bankers don't want your assets, he says, they want you to be successful.
At the loss rate his own finance people forecast, $23.5 billion was sixteen months of money.
Collateral is cheap only while nobody needs it. The assets a bank waves through in a quiet quarter are untouchable once the news turns.
Everyone remembers Ford as the Detroit company that refused a bailout. It refused nothing. It had taken a bigger one two years early, from banks that still took the call.
You do it backwards. You wait for the bad quarter, then go asking with it in hand.
Somewhere a company is closing the best quarter it has had in years. Hardly anyone in that room is calling a bank.
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Entropy retweeted
Rest in peace, Dennis Haskins, aka Mr. Belding from Saved by the Bell.
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Watch Starship Flight 14 x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMP…
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Entropy retweeted
With Max Scherzer potentially throwing his last pitch today, nobody from the Detroit Tigers 2014 rotation remains in the league
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