[y66]

Michael Wines at NYT said:

Arizona G.O.P. Is Split on Vote Review: ‘We Can’t Indulge These Insane Lies’

The Republican leaders of Arizona’s most populous county issued a blistering rebuke on Monday to a review of the November election that had been ordered by Republicans in the State Senate, calling it “a grift disguised as an audit” that had spun out of the legislators’ control.

The senior Republican in Maricopa County, Jack Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said flatly that the county would stop cooperating with the review and suggested that it would challenge in court any of its conclusions that pointed toward improprieties.

“This board is done explaining anything,” Mr. Sellers said at a special meeting of the five-member board, four of whose members are Republicans. “People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness, and get on with this county’s critical business.”

It was an extraordinary pushback to an election review that was supposed to placate voters who insisted that Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in the state was a result of fraud, but which has mushroomed into a political spectacle with what experts call serious procedural lapses.

The Maricopa supervisors had resisted the audit since its inception in December, asking a court to decide whether the State Senate could legally take control of election records and equipment governed by strict security safeguards. They had insisted throughout that the county’s election — in which Joseph R. Biden Jr. earned a slim majority of 2.1 million total votes — had been among the most secure and smooth in the state’s history.

But they were pushed past the breaking point by a letter last week from State Senator Karen Fann, the Senate president, that implied that someone in the county had illegally removed critical election files from equipment and software that the Senate had subpoenaed for examination.

The supervisors learned of the claim when it was posted on a Twitter feed controlled by the review team. Ms. Fann’s letter asked the supervisors to address that and other concerns in a meeting with state senators and a liaison to the firms conducting the review — a meeting that was to be livestreamed by the far-right cable channel One America News.

“This board was going to be part of a political theater,” one Republican supervisor and former chairman of the board, Bill Gates, said. “The Arizona Senate is better than that. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is better than that. And I am not going to be a part of that.”

Mr. Trump had seized on the deleted-file claim over the weekend, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities in the vote. That led the county’s top election official, Stephen Richer, to call Mr. Trump’s online comment “unhinged.”

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” Mr. Richer wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”

Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Mr. Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.

The Arizona Senate president, Karen Fann, has defended the ballot review. Credit...Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press
On Monday, Mr. Richer summarized a 13-page letter being sent to Ms. Fann rebutting the claim of deleted files and other issues she had raised. In a number of cases, he said, the firms conducting the review had leaped to wrong conclusions because they had no serious experience in auditing election results.

The Florida firm hired by the State Senate to oversee the audit, Cyber Ninjas, is run by a chief executive who has touted conspiracy theories that rigged voting machines cost Mr. Trump victory in Arizona.

The unproven suggestion of impropriety in the November election raises the prospect that an exercise dismissed by serious observers as transparently partisan and flawed could become a potent weapon in the continuing effort by Mr. Trump and his followers to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in Arizona, and perhaps elsewhere.

The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results in Arizona, no matter what it finds. President Biden would have won the national election even if Mr. Trump had earned Arizona’s 11 electoral votes.

One poll by High Ground, a Phoenix firm known for its political surveys, concluded this spring that 78 percent of Arizona Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s false claims that Mr. Biden did not win the November election. A recent Monmouth University poll found that almost two-thirds of Republicans nationally believe that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. More than six in 10 Americans overall believe that he did.

Beyond the dispute over supposedly deleted files, Ms. Fann is also pressing the county and the manufacturer of its voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, to release passwords for vote tabulating machines and county-operated internet routers.

Dominion, which has been fighting a series of election-fraud conspiracy theories promoted by Trump supporters and pro-Trump news outlets, has said it will cooperate with federally certified election auditors. But it has spurned the firms hired to conduct the Arizona vote review, whose track record in election audits is scant at best.

Maricopa County officials have refused to turn over router passwords, which the auditors say they need to determine whether voting machines were connected to the internet and subject to hacking. County officials say past audits have settled that question. The county sheriff, Paul Penzone, called the demand for passwords “mind-numbingly reckless,” saying it would compromise law enforcement operations unrelated to the election.

The election review was born in December as an effort by Republican senators to placate voters who had embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that Mr. Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state was a fraud. Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s votes were cast, was chosen in part because Republicans refused to believe that Mr. Biden had scored a 45,109-vote victory in a county that once was solid G.O.P. territory.

What once seemed an effort to mollify angry supporters of Mr. Trump, however, has become engulfed in acrimony as Ms. Fann and other state senators have steered the review in a decidedly partisan direction by hiring Cyber Ninjas, granting One America News and pro-Trump figures broad access to the process, and allowing a “stop the steal” advocate who had participated in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol to be hired for a vote recount.

An accounting of the review’s finances remains cloudy, but far-right supporters, including One America News, have raised funds on its behalf. Nonpartisan election experts and the Justice Department have cited troubling indicators that the review is open to manipulation and ignores the most basic security guidelines.

Most Arizona Republican officials who have spoken publicly have doggedly supported the review. But State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from a suburban Phoenix district evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, made headlines last week after saying that the conduct of the review made him embarrassed to serve in the State Senate.

State Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed that Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.

The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said on Monday that he hoped the pushback against Ms. Fann’s claims would end her concerns.

“I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process,” he said. “Finish what you call an audit and be ready to defend your report in a court of law. We all look forward to it.”

[kenberg]

Quote

<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">State Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed that Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);"><br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said on Monday that he hoped the pushback against Ms. Fann’s claims would end her concerns.<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);"><br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); font-size: 11.7px; background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">“I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process,” he said. “Finish what you call an audit and be ready to defend your report in a court of law. We all look forward to it.”

Honest Republicans speaking with total clarity. Hard to see any possible motivation other than what they are saying, namely that they are not up for“peddling in fantasy”.


Dems and Reps have some serious issues to work through, we owe many thanks to those who are telling the scoundrels and lunatics to get lost. Hard to imagine it being any clearer.

[pilowsky]

Yalch has just published a paper in PLOS ONE titled "Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump" - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249892
The study is open-access so you can download it and read the whole thing if you want.
Turns out that they expected that "...narcissistic grandiosity and narcissistic vulnerability would increase the likelihood of intending to vote for Trump over and above other demographic features..."
and as you will see in the abstract aspects of narcissism did indeed predict voting intention.

Quote

Abstract
Pathological narcissism is a term often applied to former President Donald Trump, but it has been less examined as a potential predictor of voting for him. Trump projects a grandiose and omnipotent self-image during press conferences and rallies, and his followers at these events often respond with both effusive admiration and an inflated sense of their own self-regard, all of which are aspects of narcissism. However, while Trump's personal narcissism has been well documented, there is little research on the narcissism of his supporters. In this study we conducted an exploratory analysis examining the hierarchical structure of pathological narcissism and which aspects of narcissism within that structure were associated with intended voting for Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in a sample of U.S. residents collected online (N = 495) using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Results indicated that an eight-echelon hierarchy best fit the data. Within this hierarchy, antagonistic and indifferent aspects of narcissism within the fifth echelon best predicted intended voting for Trump over and above relevant demographic variables. These results have implications for the study of narcissism and, especially given the results of the 2020 election, the degree to which one can make use of narcissistic aspects of personality in political contests.

The respondents may not have been Bridge players but they were capable of adding 5+1 (I'm talking Expert and above here).

Quote

Participants
Participants in this study were 779 men and women living in the U.S. employed as workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Although Mturk is in general a source of valid data for the social and behavioral sciences (for review see [36]), we nonetheless took several steps to ensure that the responses participants provided were of high quality. First, we required survey respondents to complete a Captcha to ensure they were not bots. Second, we automatically directed survey respondents out of the survey without compensation if they provided incorrect answers on any of three items ("Which of the following is cold?", "Which of the following would a person wear on their head?", and "5 + 1 ="). Third, of those respondents who made itto the end of the survey, we deleted responses from those who did not respond to 10% or more of survey items (n = 197). Finally, we removed from analysis those who scored at or above 84Ton the Infrequency scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory [37], a scale designed to detect random or unusual responding (n = 87). This yielded a final sample of 495 people, who took on average 15.56 minutes (933.88 seconds, SD = 1087.68, range: 85–19,394) to complete the survey.

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2021-May-17, 19:36, said:

Yalch has just published a paper in PLOS ONE titled "Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump" - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249892
The study is open-access so you can download it and read the whole thing if you want.
Turns out that they expected that "...narcissistic grandiosity and narcissistic vulnerability would increase the likelihood of intending to vote for Trump over and above other demographic features..."
and as you will see in the abstract aspects of narcissism did indeed predict voting intention.


The respondents may not have been Bridge players but they were capable of adding 5+1 (I'm talking Expert and above here).

This is the first I ever heard of PLOS ONE but I will look into it a bit. Nor had I heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The world moves on without me! I first thought that "did not respond to 10% or more of survey items" meant that those who responded to 15% would be counted, After all, they did respond to 10% or more. That seemed weird. But surely they mean that they threw out responses that left 10% or more unanswered.

But that's a minor matter.

Mostly I think that focusing on narcissism is not the best way to move forward. People are complex and varied. I was a weird kid, maybe I am a weird adult. But so what? I have always known people with weird social or political views and I often can see how these weird views fit their weird personality. But I really don't think that is the way to go. Most people are too busy to give a lot of thought to politics, and for that matter, it is hardly first on their list even if they have some spare time. If we want to persuade them to think differently, we have to think a bit about ordinary things that might influence their views. Writing them off as pathological narcissists is a recipe for failure. Of course, some are pathological, beyond the reach of reason. But many aren't. We do not need a study to check that, we just observe life around us.

Anyway, the Mechanical Turk sounds interesting.

[pilowsky]

PLOS one is the dernier cri of Open Access journals.
I'm not a fan of open access. Not a big thing in my field. It seems to be where knowledge goes to die when it can't be published elsewhere.
Still, PLOS probably has the best reputation of all of them.
"PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine."


It has an impact factor of 2.74 - 'archival' by biology standards.

[thepossum]

My personal feeling is that all publication should be open access. Otherwise its just a very privileged clique who get to access anything these days - data, research, libraries etc. Its a closed shop. The budget required for any individual unaffiliated professional researcher is totally prohibitive. You need to have it paid for by employer/institution if you have one and some of those organisations are gradually taking more and more control over everything in the world

The implication seems to be is that some very powerful cliques are self-determining every aspect of anything from access to information to definition of competence and the gateways. I can say one thing for certain. Many of those inside those institutions are much less deserving and/or competent even than the people outside

I do appreciate there are ways of getting access. I can either pay my own capital/get a government loan and spend a lot of unnecessary time doing some pointless course/program just to get access etc. It kind of knocks the "only the competent can access our papers" argument out of the window when anybody can get access provided they pay for a service

What's even crazier is that you do not even have to use the service. You just have to pay and enrol. It seems thats the way the whole world runs these days. Overservicing/upselling model

Speaking of unnecessary purchases/upselling where can I get assistance on how to use the new BP monitor I was advised to purchase. I'm not sure I am using it properly. I've joined those ranks now
EDIT I just found these results online
"Results
Inadequate patient knowledge and performance of measurement technique and inaccurate equipment was common. The average initial patient systolic reading prior to the five-minute rest was higher than that of the trained nurse (9.1 ± 13 mmHg systolic, p  < 0.001 and 1.5 ± 8.0 mmHg diastolic, p  = 0.12). Almost half (42%) of the initial patient blood pressure readings differed in classification of hypertension/normotension from the nurse. The difference between the patient and nurse readings after the five-min rest was 3.8 ± 11.8 / 1.1 ± 6.8 mmHg."

EDIT 2. Another example of the current business model for the world. The monitor comes with 4 (to me unwanted) batteries and no power supply. That costs extra. A bit like the budget airline model. Oh we are sorry sir. The ticket only gets you onto the plane. You have to pay extra for us to turn on the engines


PS I may check another of those useless free journals, currently scanning the Lancet issues

[pilowsky]

thepossum, on 2021-May-18, 15:52, said:

My personal feeling is that all publication should be open access. Otherwise its just a very privileged clique who get to access anything these days - data, research, libraries etc. Its a closed shop. The budget required for any individual unaffiliated professional researcher is totally prohibitive. You need to have it paid for by employer/institution if you have one and some of those organisations are gradually taking more and more control over everything in the world

The implication seems to be is that some very powerful cliques are self-determining every aspect of anything from access to information to definition of competence and the gateways. I can say one thing for certain. Many of those inside those institutions are much less deserving and/or competent even than the people outside

I do appreciate there are ways of getting access. I can either pay my own capital/get a government loan and spend a lot of unnecessary time doing some pointless course/program just to get access etc. It kind of knocks the "only the competent can access our papers" argument out of the window when anybody can get access provided they pay for a service

What's even crazier is that you do not even have to use the service. You just have to pay and enrol. It seems thats the way the whole world runs these days. Overservicing/upselling model

Speaking of unnecessary purchases/upselling where can I get assistance on how to use the new BP monitor I was advised to purchase. I'm not sure I am using it properly. I've joined those ranks now
EDIT I just found these results online
"Results
Inadequate patient knowledge and performance of measurement technique and inaccurate equipment was common. The average initial patient systolic reading prior to the five-minute rest was higher than that of the trained nurse (9.1 ± 13 mmHg systolic, p  < 0.001 and 1.5 ± 8.0 mmHg diastolic, p  = 0.12). Almost half (42%) of the initial patient blood pressure readings differed in classification of hypertension/normotension from the nurse. The difference between the patient and nurse readings after the five-min rest was 3.8 ± 11.8 / 1.1 ± 6.8 mmHg."

EDIT 2. Another example of the current business model for the world. The monitor comes with 4 (to me unwanted) batteries and no power supply. That costs extra. A bit like the budget airline model. Oh we are sorry sir. The ticket only gets you onto the plane. You have to pay extra for us to turn on the engines


PS I may check another of those useless free journals, currently scanning the Lancet issues

Interesting.


BLOOD PRESSURE
The first BP monitor I bought was the cheapest. It kept telling me that I was hypertensive (which I am, but that's another story).
Eventually, I took it to the chemist and made a side-by-side comparison - both arms - comparing mine to the one they have on the counter.
Mine was consistently wrong - so I bought the OMRON HEM-7320.
Since I am an expert on cardiovascular physiology, I felt a bit silly for being parsimonious with my original purchase - perhaps retirement addled my brain.
It is important to remember that - apart from when you get annoyed by things on the Forum - blood pressure has a natural daily rhythm - lower at night with a surge in the morning.

A few days ago, the Australian Dept of Health decided to include 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM) as a relatable item on the medicare schedule.
ABPM is a valuable diagnostic tool to detect hypertension in daily life.
Most major hospitals have a hypertension service that can do this if there is a suspicion of hypertension.

OPEN-ACCESS
Your comment on open access needs to be understood in the context of different types of open access.
Typically it will cost ~USD2000 to make an article open-access immediately on publication.
Your average research scientist can ill-afford this expenditure.

I get hundreds of requests every year to publish in open-access journals - they are basically vanity publishing sites.
Here is an example from yesterday - Hailey is excited that it is morning, but I am unsure what the ellipsis has elided. She seems to have her use of aposiopesis in a tangle.

Quote

Journal of Head Neck & Spine Surgery <spinesurgery@juniperpublishers.org>
To:

• Paul Pilowsky

Dear Dr. Researcher,

Good Morning…..!

Can we have your article for successful release of Volume 4 Issue 3 in our Journal?



In fact, we are in need of one article to accomplish the Issue. We hope that the single manuscript should be yours. If this is a short notice please do send 2-page opinion/mini review/case report, we hope 2-page article isn't time taken for eminent people like you.

Your trust in my efforts is the highest form of our motivation, I believe in you that you are eminent manuscript brings out the best citation to our Journal.

: We accept all type of articles, e-Books, Video Articles and we will provide article reprints also.

Anticipate for your promising response.

Hailey Davies
Associate Editor, Journal of Head Neck & Spine Surgery (JHNSS) ISSN: 2577-2864

[Chas_P]

kenberg, on 2021-May-18, 08:42, said:

I was a weird kid, maybe I am a weird adult. But so what?

Exactly. And, as you say, we are all different. And "weird", like "beauty", is in the eye of the beholder.

[thepossum]

pilowsky, on 2021-May-18, 17:31, said:

Interesting.


BLOOD PRESSURE
The first BP monitor I bought was the cheapest. It kept telling me that I was hypertensive (which I am, but that's another story).
Eventually, I took it to the chemist and made a side-by-side comparison - both arms - comparing mine to the one they have on the counter.
Mine was consistently wrong - so I bought the OMRON HEM-7320.
Since I am an expert on cardiovascular physiology, I felt a bit silly for being parsimonious with my original purchase - perhaps retirement addled my brain.
It is important to remember that - apart from when you get annoyed by things on the Forum - blood pressure has a natural daily rhythm - lower at night with a surge in the morning.

A few days ago, the Australian Dept of Health decided to include 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM) as a relatable item on the medicare schedule.
ABPM is a valuable diagnostic tool to detect hypertension in daily life.
Most major hospitals have a hypertension service that can do this if there is a suspicion of hypertension.

OPEN-ACCESS
Your comment on open access needs to be understood in the context of different types of open access.
Typically it will cost ~USD2000 to make an article open-access immediately on publication.
Your average research scientist can ill-afford this expenditure.

I get hundreds of requests every year to publish in open-access journals - they are basically vanity publishing sites.
Here is an example from yesterday - Hailey is excited that it is morning, but I am unsure what the ellipsis has elided. She seems to have her use of aposiopesis in a tangle.

I'm currently running something of a little experiment to find when best to measure my BP to find where on the huge spectrum I sit (and how inaccurate I am). I seem to from close to normal to hypertensive remarkably quickly - although what is normal these days - maybe even that has changed

My rant on Open Access is just one of my pet peeves as an individual private business with very low budgets trying to compete for so many years against organisations/people with massive resources. Its just one of my pet gripes. That may even contribute to my current stress levels. Who knows. I'm never going to test it ever after reading the Water Cooler. - but I am trying to follow doctor's advice and relax a bit

[thepossum]

Apologies for not fully citing the above results. These days I assume people realise they aren't my words and the authors can easily be found

"CLINICAL METHODS AND PATHOPHYSIOLOGY
Self-measurement of blood pressure: accuracy, patient preparation for readings, technique and equipment
Campbell, Norm R.C.a; Milkovich, Lornab; Burgess, Ellenb; McKay, Donald W.cAuthor Information
Blood Pressure Monitoring: June 2001 - Volume 6 - Issue 3 - p 133-138"


PS I know its an old ref and I'm sure there is a huge literature and that technology has changed. I just posted it for rhetorical reasons

[pilowsky]

Your blood pressure can vary (in the resting state) from ~80/50 (asleep) to ~130/80 (during the day).
Everything will affect it, walking, eating, sleeping - visiting the Doctor - so-called white coat hypertension. It is problematic if it stays over 140/90 on multiple occasions.
The Australian BP guidelines are widely available.
Arguing about the guidelines is a blood sport at hypertension conferences.
If you have hypertensive readings on >3 occasions it may be helpful to have ABPM at a hypertension clinic.
You will need a referral from your GP (in Australia).

[pilowsky]

thepossum, on 2021-May-18, 19:17, said:

Apologies for not fully citing the above results. These days I assume people realise they aren't my words and the authors can easily be found

"CLINICAL METHODS AND PATHOPHYSIOLOGY
Self-measurement of blood pressure: accuracy, patient preparation for readings, technique and equipment
Campbell, Norm R.C.a; Milkovich, Lornab; Burgess, Ellenb; McKay, Donald W.cAuthor Information
Blood Pressure Monitoring: June 2001 - Volume 6 - Issue 3 - p 133-138"


PS I know its an old ref and I'm sure there is a huge literature and that technology has changed. I just posted it for rhetorical reasons

See above.
It is too out-of date. Things have changed - a lot.

[y66]

From Ezra Klein's interview with Nicole Hemmer:

Quote

KLEIN: If you were a historian from another country, looking at American history and present right now, would you say this just looks like a society headed for schism?

HEMMER: Yes, I think you would say that it’s a society headed for some kind of break. And you wouldn’t just look at it through the last five years of wrestling with Donald Trump and the turn the country has taken in that sense. But you would go back further. You would go back to the decision to invade Iraq. You would go back to the 2000 election and flash scenes of the so-called Brooks Brothers riot and the unrest over that election. You would probably flashback even further to the 1970s and the economic decline that the US was going through in that period and has not responded to in a way that has been economically satisfying for all but a small percentage of Americans.

And so, there’s a story not just from the viewpoint of another country, but just put into the perspective of the last 50 years or so, where you look at the path that the United States has been on. And it is some form of decline. Whether that decline ends in a political schism, whether it ends in sort of a rotting husk of an empire — I mean, it’s hard to say what exactly it looks like. But you would not say that the U.S. is on a glide path toward another golden age.

Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project.

[pilowsky]

Best news ever:
Scotland is planning an "Unexplained Wealth Order" concerning the Trump golf course.
If he can't explain where the money came from they can seize it.



https://www.business...021-2?r=US&IR=T

[Winstonm]

pilowsky, on 2021-May-18, 19:40, said:

Best news ever:
Scotland is planning an "Unexplained Wealth Order" concerning the Trump golf course.
If he can't explain where the money came from they can seize it.


https://www.business...0My link21-2?r=US&IR=T

If you look at the date on the story you will notice that this is old news - Feb 2021. There was a vote and the UWO was voted down.

If you want a real story, CNN just tonight reported that NY has just told the Trump Organization that the investigation into that organization is no longer simply a civil investigation but is now a criminal investigation - that's some good news!

A bit more about the golf courses and other things:

Quote

Harvie alluded to the closed-door congressional testimony in 2017 of Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the political-research agency that produced the so-called Steele dossier on links between Trump and Russia (one part of which a UK judge called "misleading").

Simpson told lawmakers that the firm's investigations had identified in the Trump Organization "patterns of buying and selling" real estate that "were suggestive of money laundering."

Simpson, without the ability to subpoena, saw patterns suggestive of money laundering - imagine what the DA's have found now that they have Trump's tax returns.

[thepossum]

pilowsky, on 2021-May-18, 19:29, said:

See above.
It is too out-of date. Things have changed - a lot.

I still wonder at how many people us their equipment properly. Any studies on the latest retail tech

[pilowsky]

thepossum, on 2021-May-18, 21:46, said:

I still wonder at how many people us their equipment properly. Any studies on the latest retail tech

That's why people see Doctors and go to hypertension clinics.
OTC BP monitors are for AFTER the diagnosis and, if necessary, treatment.
They are not available so that people can compete with each other about their blood pressure readings, although since this is a Bridge forum, I can see the appeal.
The OMRON device is recommended by the HBPRCA.

[kenberg]

thepossum, on 2021-May-18, 21:46, said:

I still wonder at how many people us their equipment properly. Any studies on the latest retail tech

A few words about my own experiences. About 8 or 9 years ago 9 so in my early 70s) I suddenly was having some trouble speaking and when I stood up I was having trouble with balance. (Yes, I will be getting to BP). The medical decision was a TIA, aka a mini-stoke. I had had a lifetime of good health and this was unsettling. Among other things, I started regularly taking my blood pressure. It hopped around a lot. I told a nurse about this and her advice was to not take my blood pressure so often. I ignored this advice. I have since paid more attention to blood pressure readings at medical check-ups. Often the nurse has me sit on the examining table and stick out my arm while she takes my pressure while engaging me in conversation about other health matters. I have some decent blood pressure device, I forget the brand, and I trust my own measurements with my own device far more than I trust the readings in the doctor's office. Lately, they have been better at how they go about this, maybe I am not the only one who noticed.

As to my TIA (a not totally certain diagnosis because unlike what happens with a true stroke there are few measurable after-effects), it's an amusing story. I was given a series of tests by a series of docs. In one case I fell asleep on the examining table. The doc suggested I be checked for sleep apnea, indeed she was right, and after that got treated my AHI (a number related to apnea that you want to be as low as possible) went from around 20 to around 2. No more TIAs. I think she saved my life by her suggestion I check ou apnea as an issue. She was a real character, of a sort that I very much like. She gave me some exam, maybe an MRI, or something that looked inside my head. We looked at the results together without her preparing any tactful presentation. Her first words were "Oh, your brain has shrunk". She might not have been the first person to think that, but she was the first person with medical evidence.

I now return this thread to its planned program of discussing politics.

[y66]

Good example of the questionnaire wording problem:

Quote

Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans — 60 percent to 70 percent, in recent polls by both Gallup and Pew — say they do not want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. Similarly, close to 60 percent of Americans say they favor abortion access in either all or most circumstances, according to Pew.

These are the numbers that abortion rights advocates often emphasize.

The most confounding aspect of public opinion is a contradiction between Americans’ views on Roe itself and their views on specific abortion policies: Even as most people say they support the ruling, most also say they favor restrictions that Roe does not permit.

Roe, for example, allows only limited restrictions on abortion during the second trimester, mostly involving a mother’s health. But less than 30 percent of Americans say that abortion should “generally be legal” in the second trimester, according to Gallup. Many people also oppose abortion in specific circumstances — because a fetus has Down syndrome, for example — even during the first trimester.

One sign that many Americans favor significant restrictions is in the Gallup data. Gallup uses slightly different wording from Pew, creating an option that allows people to say that abortion should be legal “in only a few” circumstances. And that is the most popular answer — with 35 percent of respondents giving it (in addition to the 20 percent who say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances).

This helps explain why many abortion rights advocates are worried that the Supreme Court will gut Roe without officially overturning it. Yes, the justices are often influenced by public opinion.

From David Leonhardt at NYT: https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

[pilowsky]

kenberg, on 2021-May-19, 07:33, said:

A few words about my own experiences. About 8 or 9 years ago 9 so in my early 70s) I suddenly was having some trouble speaking and when I stood up I was having trouble with balance. (Yes, I will be getting to BP). The medical decision was a TIA, aka a mini-stoke. I had had a lifetime of good health and this was unsettling. Among other things, I started regularly taking my blood pressure. It hopped around a lot. I told a nurse about this and her advice was to not take my blood pressure so often. I ignored this advice. I have since paid more attention to blood pressure readings at medical check-ups. Often the nurse has me sit on the examining table and stick out my arm while she takes my pressure while engaging me in conversation about other health matters. I have some decent blood pressure device, I forget the brand, and I trust my own measurements with my own device far more than I trust the readings in the doctor's office. Lately, they have been better at how they go about this, maybe I am not the only one who noticed.

As to my TIA (a not totally certain diagnosis because unlike what happens with a true stroke there are few measurable after-effects), it's an amusing story. I was given a series of tests by a series of docs. In one case I fell asleep on the examining table. The doc suggested I be checked for sleep apnea, indeed she was right, and after that got treated my AHI (a number related to apnea that you want to be as low as possible) went from around 20 to around 2. No more TIAs. I think she saved my life by her suggestion I check ou apnea as an issue. She was a real character, of a sort that I very much like. She gave me some exam, maybe an MRI, or something that looked inside my head. We looked at the results together without her preparing any tactful presentation. Her first words were "Oh, your brain has shrunk". She might not have been the first person to think that, but she was the first person with medical evidence.

I now return this thread to its planned program of discussing politics.

A TIA is not a stroke of any kind. It is a "transient ischaemic attack" - it just means that for some reason or another the supply of blood (oxygen) to the brain is very briefly interrupted. TIA's only last a few minutes (maximum) because otherwise, they would be a RIND - a "reversible ischaemic neurological deficit" - RIND's can last up to a maximum of 24 hours and then any deficit is completely reversed.
A stroke big or small is where there is a permanent loss.
AHI -apnea-hypopnea index is the amount of time you spend with low or no breathing during a sleep study - obviously it is bad not to breathe because it reduces the oxygen supply everywhere - including the brain.
Sleep apnoea is commonly associated with hypertension and/or obesity.
Intermittent narrowing of the upper airways because of fat in the airways combined with other mechanical factors causes it - even so, non-obese people can also get it.
The main treatment - a device sold by RESMED - generates a continuous positive pressure in the airways when you are asleep.
It was invented by a friend of mine from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital - Sydney University - Dr Colin Sullivan.

Blood pressure measurement - when, where, who - is a big problem in the diagnosis of high blood pressure. This is why the gold standard is a 24-hour ambulatory measurement (see above). The ABPM is the blood pressure equivalent of a Holter monitor which checks your ECG for 24 hours.

In a way, it is also political. Successive Australian governments have decreased funding for medical research and training. Now they complain that we aren't making and distributing vaccine because of 'supply problems' - not at all surprising when you remove funding from all the 'suppliers'.
Trump's contempt for research - "I could have been a scientist - it's easy - I know all this stuff - the Doctors are amazed" - to paraphrase - was a massive problem.

Progress was made because the residual infrastructure worked around him.