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Why People Don’t Take Lifesaving Medications
People are remarkably bad at getting on and sticking with drug regimens—even when those drugs stop AIDS
Why People Don’t Take Lifesaving Medications
People are remarkably bad at getting on and sticking with drug regimens—even when those drugs stop AIDS
Pictured above; Graves, many of which belong to AIDS victims, are seen through a window in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township in 2010.
Ronald Louw was a human-rights lawyer and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the South African province that’s one of the most HIV-affected regions of the world, so he must have known about the dangers of the virus. In April 2005, he was taking care of his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer, when he noticed he had a cough that would not go away. He went to a doctor, who treated him with antibiotics.
Four weeks later, he got even worse, fighting a fever, night sweats, and disorientation, as his friend and fellow activist Zackie Achmat recounted later in a journal article. It was only then that Louw finally went in for an HIV test. He was positive.
A month later, doctors told him his persistent cough was actually tuberculosis—one of the leading causes of death for people with HIV. Three days later, Louw was dead at the age of 46.
“Smart, educated, and surrounded by friends who understand HIV/aids, yet even Louw failed to get tested early,” Achmat wrote later in an op-ed. “He died because he did not get tested early. And, when he discovered his HIV status, his lungs and immune system were destroyed. …
Press briefing starts off with a bang as reporter asks why the American people should trust anything the White House says
- A reporter asked the White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah on Monday whether the administration could be trusted, as some of its recent claims, including denials of personnel changes, have turned out to be inaccurate.
- “Why should we in this room — and more importantly, the American people — trust anything this administration is telling them?” said Zeke Miller of The Associated Press.
- Shah insisted the White House always provided “the most accurate information” available at the time.
There was little beating around the bush during Monday’s White House press briefing.
To start, the Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller asked the deputy press secretary Raj Shah to explain why Americans should believe what the White House says.
Miller brought up a few recent instances in which the White House said things that were quickly determined to be untrue. He mentioned the president’s recent claim before his top lawyer resigned last week that he had full confidence in his attorneys, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ statement denying reports that H.R. McMaster was on his way out as national security adviser.
“Why should we in this room — and more importantly, the American people — trust anything this administration is telling them?” Miller asked.
…
A Cabinet of Conspicuous Corruption
Wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars by several secretaries follows a tone set by the president.
President Trump America’s Shithole meets with his cabinet.
For spring cleaning this year, President Trump is looking at his Cabinet. The Associated Press reported Monday that Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is near to being removed. When Trump fired H.R. McMaster as national-security adviser, that torpedoed a plan to dismiss McMaster, Shulkin, and Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, at once, according to Politico’s Eliana Johnson.
Shulkin and Carson face the same problem: dubious use of taxpayer dollars in their duties as secretaries. They can console themselves knowing that they’re in good company. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have been caught in extravagant expenditures, too. Less heartening is the example of a sixth example, Tom Price, who was unceremoniously forced out as secretary of health and human services in September 2017.
This extravagant spending around public displays of status—call it, with apologies to Thorstein Veblen, conspicuous corruption—has become a trademark of the Trump administration. There are so many cases of huge spending of taxpayer dollars by Cabinet secretaries that it’s easy to lose track of them all—or simply to become desensitized—so here’s a few of the lowlights. …
Trevor Noah Drags Rick Santorum Over March for Our Lives ‘CPR’ Comments
‘The Daily Show’ host called the former GOP senator an “8 p.m. curfew in human form.”
Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg did a great job responding to Rick Santorum earlier on Monday after the former Republican senator suggested students learn CPR instead of marching for gun control on CNN over the weekend. But The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah couldn’t let it slide.
“As always, not everyone is totally on board with this movement,” the host said Monday night, before playing the clip of “8 p.m. curfew in human form” Rick Santorum saying the student activist “didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?’”
“Yeah, according to former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, citizens asking their lawmakers to make laws is them passing the buck,” Noah said. “What kind of logic is that? He would make one hell of a 911 operator.” …
Trump expels 60 Russian diplomats, fires H.R. McMaster, hires John Bolton, issues a transgender military ban and gets roasted by Stormy Daniels on “60 Minutes.”
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
From Rick Santorum Said Something Stupid on TV:
Now, more than ever, Rick Santorum is the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex. https://t.co/8LrdAkrbD6
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) March 25, 2018
Ed. According to his Twitter page, God began bestowing his wistom in October 2010.
Here’s another:
Retweet this and you can kill a guy.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) March 23, 2018
Texas sinkholes: oil and gas drilling increases threat, scientists warn
Ground rising and falling in region that has been ‘punctured like a pin cushion’ since the 1940s, new study finds.
A sinkhole in Rosenberg. There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator.
Oil and gas activity is contributing to alarming land movements and a rising threat of sinkholes across a huge swath of west Texas, a new study suggests.
According to geophysicists from Southern Methodist University, the ground is rising and falling in a region that has been “punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s”.
There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator. Many are in the Permian Basin, described in a Bloomberg article last September as the “world’s hottest oil patch”.
But the Southern Methodist report warns of unstable land and the threat of sinkholes.
“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Zhong Lu, a professor, said in a statement.
Wink – a tiny town 400 miles west of Dallas best known as the childhood home of the singer Roy Orbison – attracted national headlines in 2016 when the warned that the land between two expanding sinkholes a mile apart was deteriorating, risking the formation of more sinkholes or even the creation of a colossal single hole. …
Hotting up: how climate change could swallow Louisiana’s Tabasco island
With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned.
Avery Island, Louisiana, is home to Tabasco sauce.
Avery sland, a dome of salt fringed by marshes where Tabasco sauce has been made for the past 150 years, has been an outpost of stubborn consistency near the Louisiana coast. But the state is losing land to the seas at such a gallop that even its seemingly impregnable landmarks are now threatened.
The home of Tabasco, the now ubiquitous but uniquely branded condiment controlled by the same family since Edmund McIlhenny first stumbled across a pepper plant growing by a chicken coop on Avery Island, is under threat. An unimaginable plight just a few years ago, the advancing tides are menacing its perimeter.
“It does worry us, and we are working hard to minimise the land loss,” said Tony Simmons, the seventh consecutive McIlhenny family member to lead the company. “We want to protect the marsh because the marsh protects us.”
Simmons allows a silent pause as he mulls a situation where Tabasco is forced off the island. “We don’t think it will come to that, but we are working to do everything we can to make sure it won’t happen to us,” he said. “I mean, we could make Tabasco somewhere else. But this is more than a business: this is our home.” …
To Illustrate the Dangers of Cyberwarfare, the Army Is Turning to Sci-fi
Graphic novelettes issued by the U.S. Army Cyber Institute aim to educate soldiers about digital threats,
Self-Preventing Prophecies: The U.S. Army Cyber Institute’s graphic novels are aimed at making soldiers think about future threats.
At first glance, Dark Hammer [PDF] looks a lot like any other science fiction comic book: On the front cover, a drone flies over a river dividing a city with damaged and burning buildings. But this short story in graphic form comes from the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, in New York. The ACI was set up to research cyber challenges, and it acts as a bridge between different defense and intelligence agencies and academic and industry circles.
“Our mission is to prevent strategic surprise for the army…to really help the army see what’s coming next,” explains Lt. Col. Natalie Vanatta, the ACI’s deputy chief of research. Dark Hammer is the first of four recently released comic books set in the near future that depict some of the emerging threats identified by the ACI. The books are free and downloadable by all, but they are primarily intended for “junior soldiers and young officers to get them to think about—well, what if the next 10 years doesn’t look like the last 80?” says Vanatta. The choice of format is unusual but far from unprecedented, she adds. “The army really has a large history of using graphic novels or fiction to help our workforce understand somewhat intangible concepts.”
The books grew out of the ACI’s collaboration with the Threatcasting Lab at Arizona State University, in Tempe. Brian David Johnson is the director of the Threatcasting Lab and Intel’s former in-house futurist. He wrote the books—Dark Hammer, Silent Ruin, Engineering a Traitor, and 11/25/27—with Sandy Winkelman as creative director. …
6 Modern Countries With Shockingly Backwards Views
6. In Japan, Some Common Occupations Are Viewed As Subhuman
Garbage collectors are criminally underappreciated everywhere, but Japan takes it to the next level. Sure, you might have a few strong words if your bin gets skipped, but Japanese sanitation workers are ostracized simply for existing. They — along with other “unclean” workers, like butchers and undertakers — are categorized as burakumin. Shintoism and Buddhism consider them spiritually tainted, which left them at the bottom of the social totem pole for centuries. They’re sometimes called hinin (literally “nonhuman”), and the term for the lowest burakumin, eta, translates to “abundance of filth.” A 19th-century legal document declares that any eta who committed a crime could be killed freely by samurai, because “an eta is worth one-seventh of an ordinary person.” You ever had someone whip out a calculator and determine your worth mathematically? It’s hurtful. (We had some harsh math teachers.)
At least the school board took our side on that “expulsion via samurai” debacle.
Despite many attempted remedies, prejudice against burakumin and their descendants persists. Burakumin are shunned by society and typically forced to live in their own communities, which are inundated with hate mail. Lists of burakumin communities and names began circulating in the ’70s and were soon outlawed, but some of those lists have survived to this day, and people use them to screen everything from potential employees to future in-laws. Keep in mind, they’re not just checking to see if (gasp) their daughter is marrying a garbage man. Anyone who has ever been related to one is off-limits. That’s about 50 percent of the Japanese population. It’s like an entire nation of Emily Gilmores. …
Longmont house ransacked after being mistaken for site of estate sale, homeowner says
Police tell Andrews it was a ‘very, very bad misunderstanding’
Items from Mary Andrews’ house are in her yard and driveway at 14 Texas Lane in Longmont on Monday.
A Longmont woman said she had her house ransacked by people who mistakenly thought it was the site of an estate sale that was actually happening a few houses away.
Mary Andrews said she left her home at 14 Texas Lane unlocked and came back on Friday morning to find people taking items from her house.
“There were cars everywhere, and there were people coming out of my house with armloads of stuff,” Andrews said. “I thought, ‘What is going on?'”
As it turns out, police told Andrews that it was a “very, very bad misunderstanding.” She said a house just a few doors down was having an estate sale, and somehow someone got into her house and began spreading the rumor that an estate sale was going on there and that everything was free.
Adding to the confusion, Andrews said she had recently had a yard sale, so she had some items strewn about on the law.
“They really did think this was the estate sale,” she said. “They all argued with me, and very few people would just put anything back.” …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Longmont police closed the case because they do not have any suspect leads.
Dying Laughing
For years, inventive companies like The Onion and Funny or Die capitalized on a culture that just wanted to laugh online. But after massive disruptions in digital advertising and on social media platforms, those companies find themselves imperiled. Did the internet kill its comedy?
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Peruse The Onion‘s recent headlines and you might notice they’ve been spiced with an extra dash of salt. On March 15: “Elon Musk Embarrassed After Realizing He’s Proposing Idea for Thing That Already Exists.” A day earlier, from the organization’s BuzzFeed parody site ClickHole: “I Did Everything I Could To Buy ClickHole, But Their Editorial Integrity Won Out Over My Billion-Dollar Offers, And I Respect Them Even More For That (By Elon Musk).” And a March 2 polemic, citing cutting-edge research: “Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click the Fucking Link.”
For decades, The Onion has been the standard-bearer for written satire, lampooning the American experience at its most horrifying and its most banal. The comedy outlet was there when the Twin Towers fell, and it was also there when an area man dared to eat lunch at 10:58 a.m. Through it all, the company has honed a set of comedic tenets now baked into online discourse: a winkingly petulant vulgarity, a penchant for absurdism, and above all else, an ironic distance from the impact of the events being mocked. In 2018, the internet typically reacts to news with a collective smirk, in large part thanks to The Onion.
Lately, though, the website has been forced to poke fun at its own predicament. Musk, avowed Onion worshipper, has poached several of the outfit’s key staffers, including former editor-in-chief Cole Bolton and former executive editor Ben Berkley, to launch a comedic venture of his own. The situation might be funny (OK, it’s pretty funny; Musk has implied the new project is called “Thud!”) if The Onion weren’t shedding audience at the same time it’s losing talent. In 2016, the website regularly attracted more than 10 million unique monthly visitors, according to data and analytics firm comScore; over the past 12 months, the average number of monthly uniques has fallen to 6.5 million. Hence, the meta media anxiety masked in a snarky headline about proper link etiquette. Such articles “provided a great way to educate readers about the plight of The Onion and only The Onion,” cracks editor-in-chief Chad Nackers. “We believed it was incredibly important to perform this civic duty.” …
Amazon is issued patent for delivery drones that can react to screaming voices, flailing arms
Amazon.com has been granted a new patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a delivery drone that can respond to human gestures.
The concept is part of Amazon’s goal to develop a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that can get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. Issued earlier this week, the patent may help Amazon grapple with how flying robots might interact with human bystanders and customers waiting on their doorsteps.
Depending on a person’s gestures — a welcoming thumbs up, shouting or frantic arm waving — the drone can adjust its behavior, according to the patent. The machine could release the package it’s carrying, alter its flight path to avoid crashing, ask humans a question or abort the delivery, the patent says.
Among several illustrations in the design, a person is shown outside his home, flapping his arms in what Amazon describes as an “unwelcoming manner,” to show an example of someone shooing away a drone flying overhead. A voice bubble comes out of the man’s mouth, depicting possible voice commands to the incoming machine. (Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“The human recipient and/or the other humans can communicate with the vehicle using human gestures to aid the vehicle along its path to the delivery location,” the patent states. …
China’s falling space lab is a prism for its space ambitions
REST IN PIECES
See you soon.
China’s first space lab Tiangong-1 is coming back to Earth soon, in pieces. Its re-entry, expected in a matter of days, has been highly anticipated.
Launched from the windswept Gobi desert in 2011, the lab represented China’s determination to catch up to—and one day outpace—global powers on every playing field. Shut out of the International Space Station over security concerns, Tiangong-1 was a major step on China’s journey to having its own space station one day.
Less than a decade since its launch, China is already one of the world’s leading space explorers, with ambitious plans to land on the uncharted far side of the moon, and to conduct a Mars mission in 2020.
A prototype for China’s future space station
On Sept. 29, 2011, nearly 10,000 local herdsmen and farmers, and tourists, gathered the night of the launch at an observational point in China’s far northern region of Inner Mongolia, state broadcaster China National Radio reported (link in Chinese). When a bright spot, similar to a star in size, showed up in the skies, some of the watchers cheered and yelled: Long live the motherland. …
POINT OF REFLECTION: It may not have been useful to embed a hyperlink to an article written in Chinese.
The worst sex in the world is anglerfish sex, and now there’s finally video
Speaking of science
Praying mantis sex gets a bad rap because sometimes the female bites off the male’s head and eats him. Like, once in a while. Usually, it goes perfectly fine for both mantises, but everyone fixates on the bad dates.
Deep-sea anglerfish sex, on the other hand, is an endless horror. Every. Single. Time.
A male anglerfish’s first and only sexual adventure results in his becoming permanently fused — by his lips, no less — to the side of a relatively gargantuan female that resembles David Cronenberg’s nightmare about the shark from “Jaws.”
Unlike the mantis, Mr. Anglerfish does not die as Ms. Anglerfish subsumes him into her body. His skin becomes her skin. His major organs dissolve, his fins fall off and his blood becomes her blood, until not much more is left of him than a living set of testes to make sperm at her demand.
Then he dangles off her like that for the rest of his life, even if she goes on to merge with other anglerfish, wearing her sex partners like Mardi Gras beads. …
Four times people cried ‘aliens’ — and four times they were wrong
The truth is out there, but it’s not aliens.
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The mummified remains of a fetus that was either stillborn or died shortly after birth.
Discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2003, this tiny, 6-inch-long mummy, with its pointed head and atypical number of ribs, stoked theories that aliens have visited Earth. Scientists have had genetic proof that the remains are human since 2013,, and a new genetic analysis reveals that mutations in genes related to growth might explain the mummy’s atypical bones.
The results, which have been making headlines, are a reminder that the truth may well be out there — but it isn’t aliens. A series of discoveries this past year make it clear that, sadly, it never is.
SAD BUT TRUE
Scientists have struggled to explain why this mummy, known as Ata, is the size of a fetus and yet has bones as developed as those of a six- to eight-year-old child, Science reported in 2013. The new analysis of Ata’s DNA, published last week in the journal Genome Research, reports mutations in seven genes key for human growth.
These mutations could explain why Ata’s bones developed so quickly, Gary Nolan, an immunologist at Stanford University and co-author of the study, told National Geographic. He suspects that the story is much sadder and more human than an extraterrestrial visitation: someone gave birth to a stillborn fetus several decades ago and buried her in the desert. “The alien hype was silly pseudoscience promoted for media attention,” paleoanthropologist and anatomist William Jungers told National Geographic. “This paper puts that nonsense and poor little Ata to bed.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In this web exclusive, former President Jimmy Carter talks to “Sunday Morning” host Jane Pauley about the investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and why he would hope President Donald Trump finishes out his term.
THANKS to CBS Sunday Morning for making this program available on YouTube.
Teachers in Oklahoma intently watched as their counterparts in West Virginia went on strike earlier this month, and for good reason: Public schools in Oklahoma have seen the biggest cuts in the country in per-pupil funding, and their teachers rank near the bottom in average pay.
So, as the West Virginia strike continued, teachers and labor organizers in Oklahoma began coordinating their own demands to the state legislature, asking for a $10,000 raise for teachers, a $5000 raise for support staff and an additional $200 million in school funding to cover basics like textbooks and classroom supplies. If their demands are not met, the teachers plan on walking out of their classrooms on April 2.
The situation in Oklahoma was created, in large part, by tax incentives offered up by Governor Mary Fallin that benefitted the state’s oil and energy industries as well as tax cuts that disproportionally helped the top income bracket. Meanwhile, teacher salaries in Oklahoma have not budged in ten years, even as insurance and cost of living expenses have gone up. Things got so bad last year, that, in an effort to cut costs, roughly 20 percent of school districts in the state enacted a furlough cutting the school week down to just four days.
VICE News traveled to Oklahoma City to meet with Bonnie Green, an early childhood teacher and a 30-year veteran of Oklahoma schools, who now has to take on a second — and third — job, just to make ends meet.
The Trump Administration’s newly-released guidelines on banning transgender people from serving in the military may not be in effect yet — but some transgender troops currently serving say the policy is already taking its toll on their community.
Blake Dremann, an active duty Navy Lieutenant Commander who also leads an association of LGBT service members called SPARTA, told VICE News he’s already heard from other transgender military personnel who’ve been discriminated against.
“My superiors have been very supportive. But we have had service members who have experienced discrimination — typically along the lines of, they don’t agree that we’re able to serve. They don’t like the policy and they refuse to follow the regulations,” Dremann said.
The Trump Administration’s ban, which President Trump announced via tweet last summer, has yet to take effect because it’s been blocked in the courts, after a handful of LGBTQ rights organizations challenged the proposal last year.
But the Administration is still moving forward with crafting guidelines and policy around the ban, and on Friday the White House released a new, more specific memo endorsing a handful of recommendations from a Department of Defense panel convened to study the issue. The panel recommended — and Defense Secretary James Mattis signed on to — banning individuals who’ve undergone gender confirmation surgery in the past, or plan to in the future, from enlisting.
Dremann said he fielded texts all weekend from transgender people currently serving in the military, confused about what the new policy means for them.
“We’re expected to be tough-minded,” Dremann told VICE News. “And while it is going to add stress to their deployment, the expectation is that they will be able to deal with that.”
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Sam spent the weekend doing her favorite form of exercise: walking slowly while holding a 1 ounce sign and talking to the future of our country!
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Jordan attends the March For Our Lives to keep an eye on teens protesting gun violence and confronts the lame liberal parents trying to co-opt youth culture.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper for making this program available on YouTube.
Stormy Daniels’ ’60 Minutes’ interview was must-see TV and, for Trump, must-not-tweet TV.
In a surprise to no one, conservative commentator Rick Santorum doesn’t understand millennials.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels sits down with Stephen Colbert at different times in separate locations.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on Far Cry 5. This cheeky video is sponsored by Ubisoft. Cheers ya legends!
Max decided he wanted to try to to talk to the worker at the garage.
FINALLY . . .
‘Who’s a good boy?!’ Dogs prefer naturalistic dog-directed speech
Do you talk to your dog differently than you would to a person? Have you ever wondered why? Maybe it’s because he or she seem to prefer that kind of “dog baby talk”. These researchers found that dogs prefer this “dog-directed speech” – both because of its sound and also because of the “dog-relevant content words.” See, you’re such a good boy. Such a good boy! Does Fido want a bone? Does he? Does he?!?
Abstract
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a special speech register thought to aid language acquisition and improve affiliation in human infants. Although IDS shares some of its properties with dog-directed speech (DDS), it is unclear whether the production of DDS is functional, or simply an overgeneralisation of IDS within Western cultures. One recent study found that, while puppies attended more to a script read with DDS compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), adult dogs displayed no preference. In contrast, using naturalistic speech and a more ecologically valid set-up, we found that adult dogs attended to and showed more affiliative behaviour towards a speaker of DDS than of ADS. To explore whether this preference for DDS was modulated by the dog-specific words typically used in DDS, the acoustic features (prosody) of DDS or a combination of the two, we conducted a second experiment. Here the stimuli from experiment 1 were produced with reversed prosody, meaning the prosody and content of ADS and DDS were mismatched. The results revealed no significant effect of speech type, or content, suggesting that it is maybe the combination of the acoustic properties and the dog-related content of DDS that modulates the preference shown for naturalistic DDS. Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic DDS, comprising of both dog-directed prosody and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs’ attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets.
Introduction
When talking to an infant, adults use a special speech register characterised by elevated fundamental frequency (pitch), exaggerated intonation contours and high affect (Burnham et al. 2002). This phenomenon is evident across languages including English, Russian, Swedish and Japanese (Kuhl et al. 1997; Andruski et al. 1999). It is thought that infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates infants’ linguistic development by amplifying the phonetic characteristics of native language vowels (Kuhl et al. 1997), allows infants’ to select appropriate social partners (Schachner and Hannon 2011) and increases social bonding between infant and caregiver (Kaplan et al. 1995).
In the same way that IDS is produced automatically when talking to infants, humans in Western cultures also produce a special speech register when talking to their pets. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?