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Showing posts from October, 2018

The News Keeps Getting More Frightening

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Without the Little Guys,  The Big Guys Will Crash More Super Scary News You Probably Don’t Know About Let it be noted we humans are “the BIG guys.” The little guys we need to survive are: Insects   (tap here )(and here )- for pollination and a lot of other eco-services; tiny plants - for  ground cover and the land food chain; plankton for the ocean food chain… And tiniest and maybe most basic: good MICROBES* for digesting our food, fighting off bad microbes plus helping us develop properly.   In the “develop properly” category, how about the avoidance of obesity, diabetes, IBS, asthma and general allergies? (plus probably even more.) Check this .  The BIG news is about the stunning decline in the tinniest guys,  MICROBES ** You need us, and we need you! “Preserving microbial diversity” in Science Magazine reads like the first chapter in an apocalypse novel. Microbes that have co-evolved with humans since long before we even became people are vital

Hemlibra; HimExpensive!

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Big Pharma's Perspective in a Nut$hell Hemophilia, a truly rotten disease to have...   ... But wowee-zowee; Money Honey! Etc. Hemlibra, a new and effective medication for the bleeding disease, is celebrated in the Big Pharma newsletters not for making life possible for the affected, but for the profits... the MARKET . fda ,  new products ,  regulatory All revved up and ready to roll, Roche is handed the keys to a multibillion-dollar hemophilia market by  john carroll  —  on  October 5, 2018 05:49 AM EDT COST TO THE PATIENT?   Over $450,000 a year . Insurance still iffy.  Medicare and Medicaid?  Fuggidaboudit for now. art credit

I Love It When a Book Grabs Me

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OK, I'll read a few pages...     Whoa! Fifty pages just flew by. I gotcha, Scooter. I started reading it because my good friend Mary Ann Ende's sister wrote it. Frankly, I am not (was not) interested in "long riding." I'm not even a horse person.  But it was only common decency that I should read a few pages so I could tell Mary Ann I had started Bernice's book. So I started. I forgot where I was, what I was doing, what I was supposed to be doing, and just read voraciously. Fifty pages in I looked up and wondered how I got from that snowbound cabin back to my living room. Now THAT's how books should work! So even before I pick the book back up and get lost for another couple hours, I wanted to stop and pay tribute to a stunningly effective first fifty pages of a darn good book. Here's how to buy the book directly from Bernice (as opposed to through Amazon.) Authors do a bunch better that way, and I feel empathy for authors for some r