Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity, increasing risk for at least seven types of cancer. While scientific evidence for this connection has been growing over the past four decades, less than half of Americans recognize it as a risk factor for cancer.
…
The direct link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk is well-established for at least seven types of cancer including cancers of the breast, colorectum, esophagus, liver, mouth (oral cavity), throat (pharynx), and voice box (larynx), regardless of the type of alcohol (e.g., beer, wine, and spirits) that is consumed. For breast cancer specifically, 16.4% of total breast cancer cases are attributable to alcohol consumption.
Wild Turkeys were introduced to my area of Idaho in 1985.I had seen them on the grade down to Orofino for several years. But I had never seen them at the higher elevations. Today they triggered an alert on one of the webcams around my gun range:
According to Google Earth, this would be about 3,125 feet above sea level.
Welcome to my place guys! I now need to look at getting a license to hunt turkeys. Brother Doug says they are tasty, but do not have near as much meat as domestic turkeys.
About an hour ago, I talked to Barb about the fire. I said that the Los Angeles fire will go down in history as a major event. It will be like the Great Chicago Fire. A memorable point of history. Then I saw this from Matthew Bracken on Gab:
Brother Doug is writing a biography about my Grandfather Huffman. Doug asked that I write a little about I remember of him.
Grandpa died in February a few months after I turned seven years old. The things I write about below were all from summers when I was six or fewer years old. Doug is younger than me and just barely remembers him.
This is what I sent Doug a few minutes ago. Perhaps it will be interesting to others as well.
It always was a big event when Grandpa and Grandma Huffman would come to the farm. Early in the summer we would get a letter and/or call from Grandpa and Grandma Huffman telling us when they planned to arrive on the farm. My brothers and I would eagerly await the day. And then on the expected day we would run to check the road whenever we heard a car. Usually, it would be in the mid-afternoon that we would finally see the green Crysler Windsor pulling the camping trailer down the road to the bottom of the driveway, then up the driveway to our house. The car would stop and temporarily park in front of the old house. Mom and Dad would join us kids as we welcomed them and talked before they parked the trailer and unhooked the car.
The trailer’s normal location for the summer was under the trees to the west and a little north of the old garage. We had created a simple septic system for the trailer to connect to and there was a water hydrant supplied by a long above ground semi-flexible black plastic pipe <Doug, this is how I remember it, but I can’ t remember where it was supplied from. Was it via the pipe that went a few inches under the gravel road behind the woodshed?> They had an electricity connection too.
The trailer would spend most of time there. But sometimes they take it to go camping and fishing. Uncle Walt and Aunt Pet would always go with them with their trailer. At least once Harold and Virginia Rhymer (sp?) and brought their trailer went with them too. I don’t remember exactly where but I suspect it was up the Lochsa or Selway Rivers. Usually, our entire family went camping with them. But I know that once I went with them without my family. It was with the Rhymers and the two elder Huffman families. There may have been other times too. I remember fishing using hellgrammites for bait. I would find them under rocks and logs in the river and put them on my hook or lure (the “Super Duper” lure was frequently used) and cast them into the pools of water to attract the rainbow trout. The adults typically would use lures with a different bait and I’m pretty sure Harold almost exclusively used handmade flies. I know Grandpa raised fishing worms in his backyard in Riverside. A wood box filled with dirt and worm food was under one of the orange trees. I think he brought some of those up with him for the fishing trips.
While all the adults slept in beds in the trailers, I recall sleeping in a small tent with a sleeping bag.
One time Grandma made biscuits for breakfast. They came out the most beautiful brown and everyone was eager to eat them. I got mine first, put the required butter and jelly on it, and took a big bite. Someone asked how it tasted. I told everyone it was good. But it wasn’t good. It tasted really bad. As other people took a bit out of their biscuits it became apparent there was something very wrong with the biscuits. I continued to slowly eat my biscuit which I had proclaimed was good until several adults told me I didn’t have to eat it. They would, and did, make something else for our breakfast.
It turned out that Grandpa Huffman put all the baking supplies into containers that would not spill when the trailer was being moved. When he labeled the containers, he mixed up the baking powder and the baking soda. The baking soda is what caused the biscuits to taste so bad.
Grandma and Aunt Pet frequently told that story about me to demonstrate how polite I was by not saying anything bad about Grandma’s food.
Early one morning Aunt Pet took me out into the woods to look for what they called Mountain Tea (research on this last summer revealed it is more frequently called Yerba Buena, clinopodium douglasii, or Oregon tea). We picked the leafy ground hugging vines and took it back to camp and made a hot tea with it. The extra leaves and vines were taken home to dry and put in a container for the next camping trip. I really liked the delicate mint like tea made with the fresh green leaves and vines. But the dried tea was harsh and not something I cared for.
Here is a picture of the “Mountain Tea” I referenced above. The picture is one I used in a blog post last summer.
Previous research using seismology found that a large reservoir of magma sat beneath the caldera. However, the recent study, using a method known as magnetotellurics that tracks the electric conductivity of magma, found something different.
“When we used magnetotellurics, we were able to see, actually, there’s not a lot there,” said Ninfa Bennington, lead author on the study and a research geophysicist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. “There are these segregated regions where magma is stored across Yellowstone, instead of having one sort of large reservoir.”
Bennington added that her team learned that the percentage of magma stored in the reservoirs was actually quite low. This means that none of the reservoirs are capable of producing an eruption anytime soon. Their research suggests the northeast region of Yellowstone wouldn’t expect to erupt again for hundreds of thousands of years.
Although I knew it was unlikely, being within the severely impacted zone of a Yellowstone eruption has been an item of concern for me. I have seen the devastation of the Mount St. Helen’s eruption and that was barely a hiccup compared to a Yellowstone supereruption*. Yet the speed of the pyroclastic flow reached speeds of 670 MPH and may have even briefly been supersonic. Imagine the effect of a huge mass of rock, sand, and dirt on the countryside when moving across it at supersonic speeds. The death of all life blast radius of a Yellowstone supereruption would be hundreds of miles. My underground bunker in Idaho would not be a suitable refuge in the face of a such a natural disaster. It is only a little over 300 miles from the probable center of the Yellowstone eruption.
Hence, the projection of the next eruption being hundreds of thousands of years from now allows me some comfort. I can probably expect dealing with such an eruption is someone else’s problem. i can concentrate on the more immediate threats of economic collapse, tyrannical governments, and other man-made disasters.
Volcano’s, high taxes, high crime, and a high probability of damaging earthquakes. Seattle is not nearly as attractive as it was when I first moved here just out of college.
I knew about the occasional earthquakes and was thrilled to experience three of them. Now that I’m older, I know just how serious they can be. I would rather not wait around for “the big one.”
The nearest volcano, Mount Rainier, was sort interesting in an abstract way when I arrived. And it is an incredible mountain. It is awe inspiring to go hiking on it. And it seemed to be dormant enough to not worry about.
Mount St. Helen’s blowing up a little over 100 miles away made volcanoes much more real. It obliterated everything within a six-mile radius. And that is just the complete destruction area. There was more:
The deadly pyroclastic surge—a fast-moving, super-hot cloud of ash, rock, and volcanic gas—traveled as much 18 miles away from the blast. The hot lava, gas, and debris mixed with melting snow and ice to form massive volcanic mudflows that surged down into valleys with enough force to rip trees from the ground, flatten homes, and completely destroy roads and bridges. Rivers rose rapidly, flooding surrounding valleys. Ash fell from the sky as far away as the Great Plains. Two-hundred-and-fifty miles away, ash blanketed Spokane, Washington, in complete darkness.
Mount Rainier is about 50 miles to the south from where we live now. Previous mud flows from Rainier have traveled several miles north of where we live. Those flows were in the valleys. We live part way up the side of a mountain. Therefore, I’m not too worried about being directly and immediately impacted by the blast and mud flows.
But even with only some mild ash at our house, the infrastructure issues would be catastrophic because of mud and pyroclastic flows destroying roads, power lines, water lines, and sewage lines. The people issues resulting from a major Mount Rainier blast following the infrastructure destruction would affect everyone for hundreds of miles around. I would rather not have to directly deal with that.
The politics, and especially the gun laws, have gone from benign to oppressive. I can avoid a lot of the pain by leveraging my Idaho connection. But it is a constant source of irritation.
Living in the “Bellevue Bubble”, as Barb and I like to call it, certainly has its advantages. But I really need an option to bug-out if things become an imminent hazard.
If you survive the blast, and you survive the fallout, you’re going to have to survive the constant threat of mass home invasion from those whose disaster planning is just 3 days.
This is an excellent point. But once made, you realize there are going to be some exceptions. Maintain a large buffer zone between yourself and the hordes with poor planning. Doing this can minimize your risk of contact. The risk can be driven to almost zero.
Let time, distance, and others “thin the herd” before the Seattle hordes reach your underground bunker in Montana. Give yourself some good alarms and a thousand yards of open space in every direction. Then, with the right guns, ammo, optics, and shooting partners, you should not have a problem against the low life.
My first impulse is that sensationalism gets clicks, so this is mostly clickbait. But it does not take much thought to convince myself this is far more serious than ordinary clickbait. But what is the actual risk? Are we talking things going sparkly in the next week/month/year? Or is this going to be a bunch of saber rattling and chest thumping for a while before everyone backs down and claim they won the confrontation?
I want to be in an underground bunker in Idaho until this all gets sorted out.
Humanity’s quest to defy aging is entering a transformative phase. The concept of “Longevity Escape Velocity” (LEV) now serves as a cornerstone in debates over the future of human life.
This idea suggests that advancing medical technology could enable life expectancy to outpace the passage of time, potentially leading to a form of immortality. But such a possibility raises profound ethical, societal, and economic challenges.
LEV borrows its name from physics, where “escape velocity” describes the speed required to break free from a gravitational pull. Applied to aging, it envisions a scenario where biomedical advancements outstrip the aging process, potentially rendering death from old age obsolete. Although still speculative, the theory has gained both ardent supporters and cautious skeptics.
Leading geneticist George Church believes this vision could materialize within our lifetimes. Similarly, Sourav Sinha of the Longevity Vision Fund predicts that with sufficient investment, LEV could be achieved in a few decades. Their optimism is rooted in breakthroughs in gene editing and cellular rejuvenation.
…
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who coined the term LEV, criticizes society’s resignation to aging, likening it to accepting bad weather. His optimism is shared by futurist Ray Kurzweil, who anticipates the arrival of LEV by 2028. However, this timeline seems ambitious given the rigorous approval processes for new medical treatments.
Kurzweil also predicted LEV would be reached by 2024. I figured I would make it that far, and he moved the goalpost. I expect it will be moved again. The only way I see it not moving is if a black market appears for some treatment.
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, a move that follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russian territory with American-supplied longer-range missiles.
The new doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.
I really wish I could live in an underground bunker in Idaho for the next few months.
I recently installed a new weather station near my pistol range in Idaho. Barb gently mocked me about it because it is less than three-quarters of a mile from the Boomershoot weather station. The pistol range is also about 120 feet higher in elevation. I insisted the Boomershoot site has different weather than the pistol range. She just smirked as I tried to explain.
Eight years later, after being dragged from courthouse to courthouse, two assassination attempts and being labeled a “fascist” by his opponents daily, Trump has a real chance at another victory against long odds. The Daily Caller spoke to various experts across the political landscape about what to expect if that happens. From violence in the streets, to Democrats’ plans to contest a Trump win, to the media meltdown, to election lawfare from Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias, they all predicted a much more dangerous and extreme response this time around if the “threat to democracy” is democratically elected.
McGinniss told the Caller he is preparing for unrest across the country that will be more intense than what was seen in 2016. He says nearly a decade of persistent anti-Trump messaging will be an accelerant for extremism.
“[We’ve been] told that, effectively, our country is going to be under a dictatorship if Trump wins,” McGinniss told the Caller.
He predicted that violent activists throughout the country would target the nearest avatar of the government they could find, whether that be federal courthouses or police precincts.
Julio Rosas, a national correspondent for The Blaze who has years of experience covering riots and social unrest, had a similar prediction, adding that migrants who have been let into the country under the Biden-Harris administration may join in big cities such as New York and Chicago. Above all, Rosas said protests can be expected because violent demonstrators have never learned their lesson.
I don’t want to be in the city for the next few months. Unfortunately, my employer insists we be in the office four days a week. And, I don’t have an underground bunker in Idaho to live in. It is a lot of work to keep my small camping trailer there livable in the winter. And with two people in it, it is miserable to live in for extended periods.
These pictures were taken in the last two weeks from my property in Idaho.
Elk:
This was the first time I have ever got a picture of a woodpecker: They tend to be very shy birds. It is just stretching its wing. There is nothing wrong with it:
I didn’t even know there were raccoons in the area:
Mostly unrelated, but early this morning I saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever. This picture was taken from the door of my camping trailer in Idaho. The lights were too far away to be very impressive, but still, I saw them:
Last May, Barb and I visited the Scandinavian countries. One of the places we visited was Stockholm. The Airbnb we stayed at had a few issues, but location was not one of them. We were capable of walking to many interesting places and nearby public transportation enabled quick access to many others.
Barb had a list of places to visit, and we connected with all of them. But just a three-minute walk from our Airbnb I saw this:
When I was in grade school, I really loved science. I entertained a dim fantasy of someday winning a Nobel Prize.
Barb wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was, but we had the time and visited the next day. She became more enthusiastic as we went through the museum. I was excited and shared bits of history she didn’t know. For example, Alford Nobel earned his money by inventing and manufacturing dynamite. He created the peace prize to compensate. He wanted to balance the war destruction enabled by his invention. We would be watching a video and without first mentioning the person, their accomplishments or difficulties would be described. I would whisper, “That must be Niels Bohr!”, or Marie Curie, or someone else I knew about.
An old Air Force buddy of mine is an EMS worker [firefighter/EMT] in east Tennessee and he messaged me earlier today and his text was basically (paraphrasing):
"saw the videos you've been sharing and that's nothing. Those videos are just from people who are in places with… pic.twitter.com/CKRd8whq1H
The nearest neighbor is over 0.5 miles away. The nearest stop sign is over two miles away. The nearest stop light is nearly 40 miles away. And the nearest interstate freeway is over 130 miles away.
It turns out what I regard as a feature some claim this isolation is, in software development terms, a “bug.”
It all depends on your design goals. I’m designing for quiet, safety, stability, and resilience. I think it is an appropriate location for uncertain times.
At 6:00 AM it was a little cool and Barb was prepared:
I had often wondered how they got hot air in the balloon without burning them. Once they are inflated, sure, not really a problem.
They inflated them on the ground with a fan. Then, they poke the burner (they probably have a different name for them) in and put hot air in until the balloon lifts off the ground.
