There Goes The Neighbourhood

  In 1987, at the age of 76, Republicans became concerned enough, that they held a meeting at which several major figures in the Reagan Administration sat around the president to listen, watch , and ask him questions - trying to discern whether he was mentally present.  There had been stories about his lackadaisical manner - lack of interest in reading or listening to people drone on about whatever bureaucratic issue.  These Republicans were considering invoking the 25th Amendment.  What they found was that Reagan was mentally present, sometimes distracted, but fully aware - especially when the issue was of interest, and was not as had been described as 'inattentive and inept'.   Reagan had ear damage from his acting days when a gun went off near his ear.  He lost hearing or considerable amount of hearing in that ear - so when people talked to him from the wrong side, he would often appear as if he was inattentive.  He also preferred one on one di...

    Note:  The point is to read this, absorb it, and as a generalization of WP, NYT and others ... consider it when reading news about anything right of left.   I Was a Heretic at The New York Times I did what I was hired to do, and I paid for it. By Adam Rubenstein   Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. February 26, 2024, 7:31 AM ET   Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration. On one of my first days at The New York Times , I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice...

      The following from Slate.com, Jacob Grier Feb 13, 2017.   A decade later, comprehensive smoking bans have proliferated globally. And now that the evidence has had time to accumulate, it’s also become clear that the extravagant promises made by anti-smoking groups—that implementing bans would bring about extraordinary improvements in cardiac health—never materialized. Newer, better studies with much larger sample sizes have found little to no correlation between smoking bans and short-term incidence of heart attacks, and certainly nothing remotely close to the 60 percent reduction that was claimed in Helena. The updated science debunks the alarmist fantasies that were used to sell smoking bans to the public, allowing for a more sober analysis suggesting that current restrictions on smoking are extreme from a risk-reduction standpoint.