Medical research – Politics Plus

Open Thread December 26 2025

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 10:14 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Dec 252025

Yesterday, of course, was Christmas Day. I hope yours was exactly what you wanted it to be. I had a dinner which was special and different without being complicated – and almost finished another sweater (I should easily finish today – and start another.) I’m expecting a package or two – both too large for the mailbox but small enough to bring in easily. But – we’ll see.

From The Lever News. This quote pretty much says it all: “Trump workplace regulators say jobs in entertainment, sports, and other fields are too dangerous to be covered by safety protections.” Of course, there are always derails.

From The Conversation. The story of rapamycin is fascinating. Treating the subjects like objects (grammatical pun intended) was 100% typical of the time frame, and sadly, probably still happens.

Archived from The Intercept. If you thought all those ICE bounties were going to individual disreputable MAGA insurrectionist bounty hunters – which would certainly be bad enough – think again. It’s worse than that.

Open Thread February 13 2025

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:54 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Feb 132025

Yesterday, VoteVets sent me an email containing their nickname for Elon Musk: “Dork Vader.” Who says military people have no sense of humor? And I did manage to get through my emails, though I had to speed through a lot of them.

All I can say is that, even if you already thought that ICE was nothing but a bunch of malicious bully Keystone Kops, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. But then, what else could anyone expect from this administration?

Cutting federal funds for medical research is personal to all of us, since any of us could at any time be stricken with some disease or condition which is the subject of research, on which our very lives might depend. But it’s also personal to Joyce Vance in a different way. I’ll let her explain.

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. We have it at all through our hosting partner, BlueHost. In order to update it, we have to go through Bluehost. During his life, TomCat was the only one who had access to our account there. I (JD) am now the only one. I have been to BlueHost and investigated updating our PHP to 8.3 or even to 8.1. I found instructions to do so - in fact, I found two conflicting sets of instructions. I went through one set of the steps and got the message that Our site could not handle 8.3, but that it had successfully updated to 8.1. I then went back here to see what it looked like. But I couldn't get in - either as an administrator or as a reader. It was just gone. I had to reach BlueHost by phone. It was determined that Politics Plus is in fact not compatible with any version of PHP newer than the one we have. BlueHost therefore uninstalled it for me, and the site came back to normal. Of course, like everyone else, I care about security. But I also am aware that TomCat elected to use different providers for several of the services that BlueHost provides, for instance backups. We are backed up daily - but not by BlueHost. However, out PHP is through Bluehost. I feel that if they are not worried about the older version, I am not going to worry about it. I believe that our security here is all or mostly through WordFence, whom I trust.