It's a little hairy out there. Oddball news bits?

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You decide.  Urhm, with commentary, of course.  Doom is what he is.

I love little tidbits about heart health, predictive models, and such.  So this article is a collector.  It seems, there is a test to check for potential future heart problems.  It boils down to cutting off blood flow to an arm, letting it flood back, then checking how heavy the flow is.  The problem, with this and most other testing, is that despite having a heart on the very cusp of failure and it being so for going on three decades, all testing save echocardiography showed my heart to be normal.  Blood flow, blood oxygen, save the suspicious nature of having very high blood pressure.  Some of us are immune to most testing.  Still, I had to look.

This next one was shocking to me.  While I do have problems with public ed, and many teachers, bureaucrats, administrators, and how things are run, there are limits to that.  Apparently, the system itself has few limits.  What was done was very wrong to these teachers, students, and anyone else caught unaware.  While I live a life full of this, I am what I am.  And while I want people to get a taste of reality, there are limits to that, and the means of achieving that.  This sort of casual creation of trauma is not the sort of thing you just toss at people.  Someone will get hurt, one way or the other.  It reminds me of tactics used to indoctrinate, to create double agents, and some of the other psychology operation techniques of which I have some familiarity.  I am not sure if it was simply poor decision making, a really bad "all grown up" frat prank, or if there is something more to it.  It was a bad call all day long. You don't just terrify people.  That isn't training, it is terrorism.  Someone, or some group of people, should lose their job over this.

This piece is about the laws of nature versus the nature of civilization, or some would suggest.  Young people are playing dodgeball with Subways.  Some folk are a bit unhappy with it.  There is some suggestion that this behavior endangers other people, if that was never explained.  While they admit such activity is not new, they suggest that social media is driving an expansion, perhaps explosion, of the risk taking, and the level of risk involved due to competition.  The thing is, with risk comes reward.  In a world in which the economy is dying, job prospects are thin, and the spread between the rich and the poor is accelerating even faster than redistribution and the spread of other socialist notions (which is why the rest of the world calls socialism conservative, as it creates then maintains two classes, upper/elite and the poor), there is little to be gained traditionally.  Upward mobility, once turned into a competition based at least as much on skin color and sex, while maintaining the old boy system within the new quota paradigm, leaving merit as the dead last indicator, is causing people to drop out in record numbers.  Adding in the war on private, small, business, there isn't a lot of room to wiggle.  Might as well try to fly?  Rigged games aren't worth playing, provably by the fleet feet of the unemployed and reduction in small business and home ownership.  So they have picked their own game. Wait until they realize there is another, just as risky but possibly much better solution.  Once you aren't afraid to die, and you realize you can still fight, and begin to realize that there are actually very few holding down the very many, just what games might begin to be... considered?

Oh, right.  Sure did, if you meant to ask?  Laundry is moving through the line, dishes got a fresh soak, I did a bit of looking for the potting soil, and did some other things... can't remember what all.  But, yes, things are moving along swimmingly.  I did stop taking the ritalin over a week ago.  So that isn't the boost, if you were curious.  The problem with it is I have a limited supply.  So I need to take it when I can reliably take my blood pressure readings so as to have a leg to stand on when I ask for that medicine again.  Even with it I was falling, definitely unable to take the readings every day.  As I improve again, when I get to taking daily readings, I will restart that medicine.