“No bolts on the wing” in the heading should read “bolts on the wing were missing.” There were 115 other bolts. What’s distressing is the excuses that these organizations make up for the idea that their failings are unimportant. Presumably a qualified engineer originally came up with the idea that 119 bolts were needed. It is not up to a maintenance guy, or a company media liaison, to decide that the plane can fly with 115. We will get to the point where our machines and buildings are being redesigned on the fly to the level of the lowest competence in society.

I enjoy your articles but many (every?) article when referencing Americans calls them fat slobs. Why is that? I mean, why are they fat? Is their fatness relevant to your messages? There be an awful lot of books about how we eat too much of the wrong things, especially carbohydrates. You’d think that people would get with lowering their food intake, starting to feel good about themselves, being nice to each other and developing sensible foreign policy.

I do not understand why there is even a dispute about this topic for some people. In the 1990’s I quit smoking and added a middle aged belly while I watched colleagues go on the Atkins diet and drop weight. None of them stayed on the diet. Twice in my life I have gone on a keto diet. The first time I lost 100lbs. I am on one now to stay. I use my fasting blood sugar every morning and my image in my bathroom mirror to motivate me before I tuck into a plate of bacon and eggs.

Modern science has many corners that need to get swept out. Areas where data are ignored and people make a living, much of it from the government, from preaching their fantasies. String theory anybody?

Carbs are sugar. The original poster is correct. Starch is as dangerous as pure sugar. I am diabetic and monitor my sugar intake daily (=zero) and my carb intake (<20g.) Over 15 years of doing this I have thousands of data points for my own body that show there is a clear straight line correlation between carb intake and fasting blood sugar. I am not saying fructose is not a problem. It may be your problem. But carbs are also a problem.

One more comment. The data for McDonalds’ products are misleading. 9g of sugar (a carb) but what about the total carb level of 45g? That would send my following day’s fasting glucose soaring.

There are some pretty horrible things said about J*$s by the Gospel writers in the New Testament of the Bible. The Gospel of John is particularly nasty. Paul also had a few things to say on that topic.

My crystal ball says that that we will soon only be able to own redacted versions of the Bible or that the entire NT will be banned. Christian doctrine will revert to the original faith of the Jerusalem Church, which was Judaism+, led by Rome. Soon.

This is a rather garbled response. It does not matter what a European court says. My point was that John and Paul and others hated Jews. Therefore, one day soon we will be banned from reading their opinions in the NT. That’s it. The rest of your response is flowery BS.

Very good article. I agree with what’s written here. The first time I tried a “keto” diet I was 300lbs and in 3 months was down to 185lbs. Keto is 20g of carbs a day maximum. My problem was diabetes. I have tried eating more carbs and my weight and glucose drifted up again.

I plotted about a year’s worth of fasting blood glucose (FBG) data against total carb intake on the previous day. There is a linear relationship such that 30g a day of carbs reliably produces a FBG for me of 105-110 mg/dl. If I am in a state of ketosis the relationship is more complicated, but <20g a day still gives me a FBG of 90-95.

I take supplementary minerals and vitamins. You cannot rely on meat to provide everything. At one point I had symptoms that were consistent with scurvy. Boron helps testosterone level and is not found in multivitamins. Potassium is not available at sufficient levels from multivitamins so I take 1600 mg a day. That takes care of muscle aches. If you are old and your muscle tissue is degrading or has trouble recovering from exercise, then hydroxymethyl butyrate (which is not a vitamin) works. It also helps with liver enzymes in your blood.

China never needed to “steal” American technology. The patent cooperation treaty (of about 2001) did it for them. Patent applications that are filed internationally are published globally, whether or not they ever issue as patents.

From the web site:

“The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) makes it possible to seek patent protection for an invention simultaneously in each of a large number of countries by filing an “international” patent application. Such an application may be filed by anyone who is a national or resident of a PCT Contracting State. It may generally be filed with the national patent office of the Contracting State of which the applicant is a national or resident or, at the applicant’s option, with the International Bureau of WIPO in Geneva.”

Most writers of patents don’t have the finesse to hide what they need to in the application. The rules about describing the invention in a way that “enables” it are clear. Engineers from anywhere do not need to invent from scratch. They can just build on what is already published.

I got laid off several times in my career as an engineer and product designer. The “left behind” were always Indians or women. One Indian even had the nerve to complain to me about how he was treated in this country. Like I care!

Fuck this whole fucking conversation. I was a white immigrant and got a PhD on an F-1 visa. I came from a backward country just across the Atlantic from NYC. I don’t shit in the streets and I don’t join grooming gangs to r%p^ white women. I still got underpaid for 40 years. I knew it and the morons that hired me knew it. They did it because they could fucking get away with it. And the strange thing is that despite all the abuse, I still got laid off from jobs in preference to other races, and I am still basically a nice guy. America did not deserve me.

The rush in recent years (the last 50 years or so) for Americans to get “degrees” has resulted in most of those degrees being worthless, and even STEM degrees being of no application to the “real” world. I have the data here in front of me. 80% of degrees are in the area of social studies, and of those 95% concern the persecution of LGFMQ people by “Les Peuples Blanc.” Of the other 20%, 1% are in math or statistics, 5% are in pharmacology with a focus on screwing anybody that needs a medication. All the others are on nuclear physics with majors in building large colliders to look for obscure particles, strings and dark matter. None of which have been or can be shown to exist. An example of this failure which has not been publicized much is the lack or a hypersonic missile delivery system in the West. It ain’t hard folks. Just put a bloody great engine on your device and coat it (the device) with something that will withstand heating to about 5,000 degrees. Musk already knows how to make it have a controlled landing. Isn’t it ironic that the founder of SpaceX seems to be unable to solve America’s problem with hypersonics?

Something creepy just happened while I was reading this article. I wondered how it would be if AI was used to manage the electric grid. Then the power went out on the east side of the city where I live. Five minutes later it was back. (My PC is a desk model and not battery powered.) In all my years of living here I have never experienced a blackout.

The feeling of helplessness with no power for an indeterminate time is not good. I am going to go buy a generator.

The Patent Cooperation Treaty ensures that patent applications get published by all participating countries 18 months after filing. Neither China nor anybody else has to “steal.” They can copy and improve based on what is in the publication. If the patent does not issue then they can use the invention anywhere. If a US patent is the result of the filing, the Chinese are free to use the invention anywhere but the US. Filing a patent in every country is massively expensive and tends to be done only by wealthy corporations. Patenting is a game that needs to be played with a strategy.

I lived in Hong Kong for years and visited most the the places in these videos. They are unrecognizable from what they were 30 years ago. It depresses me to hear Americans looking forward to a war with China. This hubris will be the end of whatever civilization is left in the West.

I agree. GP’s in particular seem to have no time or inclination to even study what is known about disease. I retired to Arizona and all physicians here are addicted to their Medicare billing. Medicare is an ATM to them. I have never known a practitioner to actually enquire about the source of a problem or have any interest in doing other than giving you a pill. They schedule 3 or 4 people into a 10 minute time slot and pressure you to leave as soon as you sit down. One guy (who I quit seeing) would fill in the exit form as I went in to his office, he would put it in front of me on the desk and stare at his screen as I tried to explain my problem.

I studied my own ailments and realized that my (low carb) diet was lacking several vitamins and minerals. One set of symptoms corresponded to scurvy. I was not getting any vitamin C to speak of. Blood tests rarely show up deficiencies. With the right supplements most of my aches and pains went away.

It was interesting to see the comment about Chinese cancer drugs. I have type 2 diabetes and had to replace metformin as my drug of choice because my digestive system could not take it. Doctor tried to get me onto an SGLT2 inhibitor. Farxiga from Astra Zeneca. Still on patent. Cost $1400 for a prescription. Of course Medicare did not cover it. The insurance company raised the price this year just for me by reclassifying the drug to reduce what they have to pay. Now here is the fun fact. I discovered that Mark Cuban runs an online pharmacy that has a SGLT2 inhibitor for $40 a month. I use it and it is more effective than Farxiga. It is still on patent. When Farxiga goes off patent I will stick with the Cuban drug. If I can still get it.

I read the patent. About 12 inventors are from Shanghai (names are written in pinyin, the alphabet of the mainland.) There are two inventors/assignees with western names. I hope the drug is not imported from China directly, although a 10% tariff would not be too much to pay.

The thought of you (the writer), or Christians, Muslims, librarians, teachers or even my wife or anybody else, telling me what I can do in my fantasies or with my penis scares the semen out of me. You all seem to know where the lines are between good and evil or right and wrong. That process of drawing lines works with crimes, although God knows we do not seem to be able to run a society in which people really understand when they are harming or hurting others. But there is much more lower hanging fruit than my wanking (or my occasional fuck) that you could be dealing with.

I think it may have something to do (at least in the US) Christian teachings. I have started a slow crawl back to Christian faith and cannot get past the apostle Paul’s rabid anti sex ideas and his controlling temperament. So I will make up my own version of the faith. Just like he did.

I got no fucking problems, man. Your response is ridiculous. And don’t claim that you are one of the 10% that don’t wank. Then you are lying.

My wife joined a (Christian) cult with a leader who claims to have fasted once longer than Jesus. He then was anointed by God and is now a healer with a big congregation. He just bought a new Cadillac with the money that his disciples have given him. Including my wife. Next stop is the airport for a new plane.

So fasting, or saying you fasted, has rewards other than spiritual.

“Autogynephilia exemplifies an unusual paraphilic category called ‘erotic target identity inversions’, in which men desire to impersonate or turn their bodies into facsimiles of the persons or things to which they are sexually attracted.”

It really fucks you up until you strip away the moral element of your fantasy world and realize that it’s just a label for a person who can no longer get it up with women, but still fantasizes about being one. And does not want to have real sex, just fantasy sex, with a man. Once you accept yourself, you can choose to give up sex and control your fantasies, watch more porn, or move to Thailand. The internet has been a boon for self-applied therapy in this. I have sat in bars in Thailand watching American men going crazy hot over Thai “women”, knowing that the tops of their heads are going to blow off when she drops her pants. Somebody did a movie on this once in the context of the troubles in Northern Ireland. I wish I could remember the name.

My guess would be that a very large fraction of the “T” community in LGBTQ is really into autogynephilia.

This will be a great resource for my retirement. Now when I go to a movie supply channel I don’t have to stare blankly and wonder what to search for. Thanks.