President Trump, speaking at the White House, gave direct and unproven medical advice contradicting decades of research about vaccines and the use of a common painkiller in pregnancy and infancy. … Medical experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, stressed that acetaminophen is safe.
Acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver failure in the United States. Responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits and 2600 hospitalizations, acetaminophen poisoning causes 500 deaths annually in the United States. Notably, around 50% of these poisonings are unintentional, often resulting from patients misinterpreting dosing instructions or unknowingly consuming multiple acetaminophen-containing products.
I recently purchased some acetaminophen. The CVS brand expired nearly a year after the Tylenol-brand Tylenol. Maybe it would be worth paying more money and accepting the shorter expiration date in exchange for a U.S.-made product? The CVS bottle said “Made in India”. The Tylenol-brand bottle said “Active ingredient made in India.” When did Americans forget how to make common chemicals such as this one?
Lawyers for the pro-Palestinian activist said they plan to appeal the immigration judge’s order, which was revealed in court documents filed Wednesday.
The order from the immigration judge, Jamee Comans, came despite a separate order in Khalil’s federal case in New Jersey blocking his deportation while that court considers Khalil’s legal argument that his detention and deportation are unlawful retaliation for his Palestinian advocacy.
Khalil’s March 8 arrest and subsequent detention in Louisiana was part of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on foreign-born pro-Palestinian academics who were studying or working in the U.S. legally. Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student who helped organize campus protests, was arrested at his Manhattan residence and put into deportation proceedings. He has not been charged with a crime.
In a letter to the New Jersey federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, Khalil’s lawyers said they have 30 days from Sept. 12, the date of the immigration judge’s ruling, to appeal her decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The lawyers said they expect that process to be “swift” and that an appeal of the BIA decision, which would go to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, is unlikely to be successful, since, they wrote, the appeals court “almost never” grants stays of removal to noncitizens.
If we include the judges and also the tied-up federal government attorneys on this project, is it fair to say that all, or nearly all, of America’s attorneys are working for Mahmoud Khalil?
The influential National Association of Realtors and several brokerages were ordered to pay damages to home sellers who said they were forced to pay excessive fees to real estate agents.
A federal jury ruled on Tuesday that the powerful National Association of Realtors and several large brokerages had conspired to artificially inflate the commissions paid to real estate agents, a decision that could radically alter the home-buying process in the United States.
… under the verdict, the sellers would no longer be required to pay their buyers’ agents, and agents would be free to set their own commission rates, which could be slashed in half or less. For example, a home seller with a $1 million home can now pay as much as $60,000 in agent commissions — $30,000 to their agent and $30,000 to the buyers’ agent.
Leading real-estate brokerage Compass said it has agreed to acquire rival Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion, the clearest sign yet that a long stretch of lackluster home sales is sparking industry consolidation.
The all-stock transaction would create a new industry giant with an enterprise value of about $10 billion, including debt, in one of the largest deals ever in the residential brokerage industry.
Compass and Anywhere were already the first- and second-biggest brokerages by volume in 2024, respectively, according to RealTrends. Compass has about 40,000 agents, while Anywhere has about 51,000 agents at brokerages it owns and another 250,000 agents at its franchises.
I’m trying to figure out why the U.S. has antitrust laws if something like this is allowed to occur.
Note that all of the lights in the empty offices are blazing. A flagpole out front, July 2, 2025, earlier in the day:
A friend in Maskachusetts did his Zero Emissions share for 2025 by buying a Cybertruck and, due to the staggering weight of the vehicle, will be able to deduct 100 percent of it immediately on his small business tax form. He’s already gotten some hate from the Righteous, e.g., a Subaru driver shouting “Cybertruck is gay; Tesla sucks”. A friend who grew up in Brookline, Maskachusetts suggested “How about a big wrap with patriots beating Jessie Smolette, THIS IS MAGA COUNTRY, and Trump and Elon standing in solidarity – and Fauci behind bars?” Another anti-vandalism wrap idea: BLM banner or photo of Greta Thunberg combined with Palestine flag. Messages:
[teenage daughter] just cried to [wife] that she doesn’t want to get picked up at [elite private school, since MA doesn’t support gifted education] in a Cybertruck.
[wife] assured her she would pick her up instead
Separately, it’s International Day of Peace and the Islamic Republic of Britain is celebrating by recognizing the world’s most peaceful government and people: “UK, Canada and Australia announce formal recognition of Palestinian state” (BBC). It’s a little confusing because there already is a Palestinian state, i.e., Michigan, and I thought that the UK, Canada, and Australia already recognized Michigan. Also, the UK says that it doesn’t want Hamas to run any Palestinian state, which I guess means that the mullahs in charge of the UK prefer Palestinian Islamic Jihad?
The administration is proposing a return to a 1990s-era policy that kept most drug ads off TV. That could dent the revenues of drugmakers and major networks.
The proposal, which would effectively reverse a 1997 policy change that opened the floodgates to a deluge of TV drug advertising, is likely to be aggressively opposed by the drug industry, which has long had the courts on its side on this issue.
Past efforts to even modestly restrict drug advertising have been blocked by the courts on First Amendment grounds.
I would be delighted if our kids could be spared from having to learn about all of the disgusting diseases that afflict adults when they’re trying to enjoy an NFL game, but it seems as though the Trump plan is not a blanket “no disgusting diseases” policy. The workaround of the First Amendment is to force pharma companies to disclose all of the disgusting side effects of their marginally effective products.
On Tuesday, the administration said that it planned to return “to the status quo policy pre-1997.” It said that companies would no longer be allowed to simply “recite a vague ‘major-risk statement’ and then point viewers to a website, toll-free number, or print insert for more complete information.” Instead, they would have to give detailed safety information in the ad itself.
[the hated sub-dictator RFK, Jr.] likes to point out that the United States and New Zealand are the only wealthy countries that do not sharply restrict prescription drug advertisements.
The F.D.A. has significantly slowed the pace of its warnings to drug companies about ads that do not align with federal rules. In 2010, the agency’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion issued about 50 warning letters, and it posted at least 20 letters per year through 2013, according to an analysis by the law firm Covington.
In more recent years, the numbers have fallen to five or fewer warning or so-called untitled letters per year, typically telling companies that they overstated the effectiveness of a treatment.
If Trump is successful what would replace pharma ads on TV? It has to be something that is ridiculously lucrative and also mass market. AI is ridiculously lucrative, but everyone with enough money to buy Nvidia’s server chips already knows about Nvidia and the average consumer would buy only a gaming GPU board, no longer a significant source of revenue or Nvidia. Maybe OnlyFans? From Hearst, the company where I built most of my early web publishing software (user activity analysis, catalog shopping ecommerce with credit card billing (same weekend that Amazon launched!), ad serving, content management, nationwide classified ads with auctioning (same month that eBay launched!), etc.), “Inside the Rise of OnlyFans on Campus” (Town and Country):
Remember when coeds made some extra cash stacking books at the library or working a shift at a restaurant? Now, with tuition skyrocketing and talk of entrepreneurship and fast and easy millions in the air, students—including those attending highly selective schools—are turning to a new line of work to pay the college bills.
Loren, 21 and starting her senior year this month, has been doing OnlyFans since her senior year of high school. A natural entrepreneur (she previously ran her own handmade soap company), she saw the sums of money that could be made through online content—especially if she was willing to go topless—and evaluated success within that ecosystem mainly as a challenge involving branding, marketing, and advertising. Could she, a young woman from Olympia, Washington, with the ambition to attend an elite university, game the system? It turned out she could. “My second month on OnlyFans, I made $50,000,” she says. “At that point I couldn’t stop.”
Loren had already been accepted by Boston University—a highly selective, Top 50 institution that charges more than $91,000 per year—as a Presidential Scholar. Her parents (her mother is a doctor, her father a marketing entrepreneur) had saved enough money to make a dent in BU’s tuition, but by her sophomore year Loren told them to keep it. Her OnlyFans income could cover it.
The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where drug makers are allowed to market prescription drugs directly to consumers. The U.S. consumer drug advertising boom on television began in 1997, when the FDA relaxed its guidelines relating to broadcast media.
A documentary film on female students responding to increases in college tuition:
People in the U.S. who say that we have a critical shortage of affordable housing and that income and wealth inequality are a “crisis” simultaneously say that we must keep our borders open to low-skill migrants, elderly and disabled migrants, and others who will never be able to pay a median rent. The people who observe that the U.S. health care system is unusable due to lengthy waiting lists and capacity shortages also say that we should bring in child migrants with diseases that will entail months of hospital stays (at a cost of $millions and with a result of extending waiting lists for native-born Americans; see, by contrast, Australia).
Let’s compare this to animal hoarding, as explained by the Minnesota-based Animal Humane Society (I picked Minnesota because the noble citizens there are passionate about importing as many Somalis as possible, regardless of education level or propensity to work):
Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals. Their hoarding begins with a strong desire to save animals. They also may have an extensive network of enablers, and are in complete denial about the dangerous or unhealthy conditions in which the animals are living.
Does the analogy hold up? Below, from Politico, a situation that has changed exactly nobody’s mind in Maskachusetts regarding the merits of open borders.
Related:
the UK is jammed with advocates for open borders despite a 2023 report by Human Rights Watch about “this system [of taxpayer-funded everything for migrants] has increasingly been plagued by serious deficiencies, in violation of people’s human rights to housing, food, education, health, and social security”
national ASPCA page: Animal “hoarding” can be identified when a person is housing more animals than they can adequately and appropriately care for. … guardians believe they are helping their animals and deny this inability to provide minimum care.
“‘You’re not welcome here’: Australia’s treatment of disabled migrants” (BBC): It is one of few countries that routinely rejects immigrants’ visas on the basis of their medical needs – specifically if the cost of care exceeds A$86,000 ($57,000; £45,000) over a maximum of 10 years. New Zealand has a similar policy but Australia’s is much stricter. … The government defends the law as necessary to curb government spending and protect citizens’ access to healthcare.
A Trump-hating professor at the University of California recently posted “Got my flu and new covid vaccines at CVS this morning”:
His friends (nearly all Trump-hating academics) were thrilled. Here are some of the 27 comments:
Sounds good. For the theorists amongst us …. Yale researchers last year used, simple parsimonious 😃 models (see screenshot) to compute the optimal time of year for a Covid vax. For NYC, it’s Sept. 15th.
Where? There appear to be none available (yet) in San Diego. Using their scheduling tool, I could only get it to declare me eligible if I clicked the “I have an underlying condition that makes me susceptible to severe outcomes from the COVID-19 virus”. Is that what you did? (Response: CVS in La Jolla Village Square. I went to pick up a prescription and the pharmacist asked if I would like to receive the flu and/or covid vaccine.)
Good on you. I have been told to wait until next month. Wearing my mask on the MTA until then.
Mazel tov. I had Covid a few weeks ago so I will have to wait a few months. (This is my favorite; she got 7 previous shots and then got the disease and her confidence in the value of Shot #8 is not diminished.)
Readers: I hope that all of you posted on Facebook after receiving a vaccine!
Happy National Construction Appreciation Week to those who celebrate.
We’re supposedly building roughly the same number of new houses and apartments that we did in 1960 when the U.S. population was 180 million, i.e., roughly half of what it is now. St. Louis Fed:
During the intervening years we had an influx of about 80 million immigrants (Pew for 1965-2015 then add for the extra years before and after) and we are also home now to the children of those immigrants. How is it possible that we haven’t been building more houses in the aggregate?
One possible answer is that families are much larger today and, therefore, we have more people in the typical house or apartment. But 1960 was prior to the age of no-fault (unilateral) divorce. ChatGPT:
Another possible answer is that we have people living in tents, California-style. But Brookings says “Our calculations show that the U.S. housing market was short 4.9 million housing units in 2023 relative to mid-2000s”. I.e., if we assume a household size of 2, at most 10 million Americans and migrants are living in tents. (Note that this 10 million number is roughly comparable to the number of undocumented migrants who came across the border during the the Biden-Harris administration.)
A final possible answer is that we are living in shabby old houses. I asked ChatGPT:
Maybe this is good because it shows that we did such a great job building homes circa 1960-1980 that they’re not wearing out? ChatGPT says it is not good:
I can’t figure out how this happened. We are informed that migrants are skilled eager construction workers. Labor is 30-50 percent of the cost of building a single-family house. We are richer in migrants than at any time in U.S. history. Why wouldn’t we have at least the same ratio of housing starts to population size that we had in 1960 before we began to be enriched by migrants?
Photos taken just a few minutes apart in the Boise airport, July 5, 2025, show the full spectrum of current American religious faith:
I’m still awed by folks who, rather than drive or Zoom it in, voluntarily enter a 100% jammed commercial airliner while relying on a Fauci-style cloth mask to keep themselves safe from an aerosol virus.
What about converting legacy Christian buildings to one of the new religions? Here’s an example from Cleveland, Ohio in June 2025:
The eagerness of churches to convert supports my theory that Rainbow Flagism is the most attractive religion to Americans because adherents are never asked to donate money or even do anything than posit the existence of anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ haters.
The Boise City Hall flies just one religious flag (July 2, 2025):
