Tom S

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture. America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side. As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will. That scene, broken this week by Mattia Ferraresi in an extraordinary piece of journalism for The Free Press, may be the most remarkable moment in the long and knotted history of the American republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church. substack.com/home/post/p-19…

Trump every time the S&P 500 drops more than a percent

@PeteHegseth @KidRock @USArmy They broke military protocol. Undisciplined soldiers are an indication of undisciplined leaders. Your approval of that only serves to show that it is true.

This is truly insane, and it should be front page news across America.  Denmark secretly deployed soldiers to Greenland prepared to blow up airport runways to stop a U.S. invasion. They brought blood supplies to treat the wounded. France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden quietly coordinated against us. This was not a drill. This was our closest allies preparing to fight Americans. Let that sink in. NATO allies. Countries whose soldiers have fought and died alongside ours for decades. They looked at this president and decided they had to prepare for the worst. Fewer allies does not make America great. It makes us more isolated, more vulnerable, and it hands Russia and China exactly what they have always wanted: an America abandoned by its friends. The American people deserve to know how badly this president has damaged our standing in the world.  bbc.com/news/articles/…

Strange situation where we await a statement from Iran to check whether there's any truth to what US president is saying.

Trump hated Mueller because he was everything Trump isn’t. A marine, a public servant, loved by his family

I'm sure there's no possible ironic outcome to training AI to strip the last molecules of flesh from a skeleton

🏆🌞New solar record in Texas today, first time over 33 gigawatts! Texas' new solar record is 54% higher than California's solar record. #txlege #txenergy

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch. We had an AI super cycle. We had deflationary growth. You could've shut your mouth, grifted, and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But no. You just had to blow it up. You. And your pride and your ego.

I have been an economists for a very long time. I have always been a little surprised by how some people will talk about recession as a necessary reset or a “cleans.” There is this “let them eat cake” kind of mentality that emerges that somehow a recession is like a fast for a day and healthy. Recessions are painful, especially when accompanied by inflation. I became an economist as a fluke - it was the only class open when I registered & it sounded interesting. I loved the math and the intuitive study of collective human behavior. It gave me an understanding for the train wreck of an economy I experienced growing up in the modest suburbs of Detroit as a kid. My best friend’s dad died of cancer when I we were in high school. She stopped bringing lunch to school - there was no money for food. Her family dug up their backyard to plant a garden & put food on the table. Her yard was bigger than the postage stamp of my own, but the ground was toxic. Many of her siblings died of cancer very young. I still remember the smell of baked bread - it was the only bread they could afford. My mom, who was on her own tight budget, gave me money to buy her lunch each day. Stagflation and recession were brutal. The scarring effects of all those years ago linger. Families broke down & vicious cycles of poverty emerged in towns that became known as the Rust Belt for their rusting factories. Recessions are ugly, unpredictable and leave a scar. Those accompanied by inflation are worse. The economy is not a single body that can be fit from a “cleans,” as I have so often heard in my career. It is a complex system that has increasingly seen inequality worsen in the wake of recessions. Income inequality hit a low as measured by the Gini coefficient in 1979 in the US. We have been seeing a rise in inequality ever since, with more sidelined for long periods after recessions, with perhaps the brief surge in hiring we saw in the wake of the pandemic. That is over. We are already flirting with a payroll recession, which is showing up as losses in payroll employment. I would like to believe that rate cuts could cure what ails us, but I fear what we are enduring is systemic. Lower interest rates cannot spur hiring with firms dealing with so much uncertainty. That means the Fed should focus more on inflation. I hate to think of what a recession to derail the inflation we are enduring would look like, although I think about it a lot. It is not pretty. The economy is about people’s lives and livelihoods. It is what you deal with when you walk in your front door if you have one to walk through. It is worrying about feeding and sheltering your kids. It is about all the choices we make every day. It is a living organism that does not do better when pain is broader. I will never say a recession is good. Recessions are hard. We may have to suffer one to derail inflation - I hope not but worry that may end up being the case. That is a horrible place to be. Food for thought. I have seen talking heads talk about a recession with a cavalier attitude. I find that hard to witness. The tails risks of recessions are large. They hurt people. Break bread not ties. Empathy is a gift to few share. Time to fill our cups with it.

The karma Baltimore deserves is Crosby getting traded to Cincinnati

A Trey Hendrickson agreement? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, finalised entirely within the last 12 hours?

Burrow rules

what is this strange feeling of loving the Bengals' free agent moves

MacBook Neo vs iPad (A16) + Keyboard

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I really appreciate Iran rubbing the US Navy's collective institutional nose in the fact that US Navy West Pacific facilities are wide open and defenseless to China's "Guam Killer" class one way attack drones in the event of a war over Taiwan.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇 For @Nature: nature.com/articles/d4158…

@DrSiyabMD Best way to personalize risk is to ask a patient if they are worried about having a heart attack and what they would be willing to do about preventing one. Statins are one leg of a 3 legged stool

As a country bumpkin doctor, I will add that I have always found it funny when people try to use the NNT to say "hey that means this drug/treatment X probably won't work for ME." Trying to make an individualized decision for YOURSELF solely based on NNT is unwise, imo. This comes up in various ways routinely in my daily practice. Especially for drugs that have overall excellent safety profiles with BIG potential benefit, like statins. You have to consider: 1. NNT measures a binary outcome. For most people, that means heart attack vs no heart attack. But heart disease occurs on a SPECTRUM. Yes, there are the binary events , but there is also chronic atherosclerosis that over many years can cause many bad things like heart failure, peripheral arterial disease, renal failure, vascular dementia, etc. Even if you never have a heart attack, you also never want to have any of the bad chronic stuff happening to you. Statin therapy helps prevent all of this. One NNT cannot measure all of that. 2. Context and baseline risk - a 55 year old with multiple comorbidities who has already had a heart attack (at high risk of another one) is NOT the same as a 30 year old overall healthy man who is being evaluated for screening purposes. You can't use the same NNT for both. 3. Time horizon. A NNT of 20 from a trial over 5 years does not apply if you are thinking about benefit gained over decades of life. The real benefit of statins is cumulative and shows up over decades, not a few years. People do not have the risk at 10 , 20, 30 years down the line that they do at 5 years. Again, If you have a heart attack at 55, I'm trying to help you live to 80, not just 60. 4. You are trying to prevent a debilitating, catastrophic, potentially deadly outcome, such as a heart attack - even if you think the risk may be "low". It's not a minor event, it's a big life altering event. If you told me there was a way to try to do that (statin therapy to lower LDL over decades), with an excellent safety profile to boot, I would take it in a heart beat. I don't quite care if the NNT is too "high". 5. "Only 1 person gets the benefit" - A NNT of 20 does not mean that only 1 person had all the risk and therefore the other 19 had a 0% chance of a heart attack. That's obviously not true, there is no such thing as 0% risk. Everyone has *some* risk, some more than others. I try to keep it simple and use common sense. Side effects are real, yes, but can be managed; don't let that discourage you from potential massive benefit.