Today's New York Times
Everything you need to know about today's paper!
First, a brief tour of the How Are We Oppressing Black People and Aren’t Black people the BEST? stories, featured on the Times’ homepage:
Second, here are the interesting stories in the Times today — there are 3:
«An Old Medicine Grows New Hair for Pennies a Day, Doctors Say
Dermatologists who specialize in hair loss say that the key ingredient in a topical treatment worked even better when taken orally at a low dose.
But that was not the reason the low-dose pills were discovered. Instead, the discovery occurred also by accident 20 years ago.
Dr. Rodney Sinclair, a professor of dermatology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, had a patient with female pattern baldness. The hair on top of her head had thinned, and she hated the way it looked. Unlike what happened with most of his patients, Rogaine worked for her, but she developed an allergic rash on her scalp from the drug. Yet if she stopped taking it, her hair would thin again.
“So I was stuck,” Dr. Sinclair said. “The patient was very motivated, and the one thing we knew was that if a patient has an allergy to a topically applied medicine, one way to desensitize is to give very low doses orally.”
To do that, Dr. Sinclair tried cutting minoxidil pills into quarters. To his surprise, the low dose made her hair grow but did not affect her blood pressure, the original purpose of the higher-dose drug.
He subsequently lowered the dose more and more until he got down to effective doses of one-fortieth of a pill and began routinely prescribing the drug. That first patient still takes it.
At a meeting in Miami in 2015, Dr. Sinclair reported that low doses of minoxidil prompted hair growth in 100 successive women.
***
Without a rigorous trial leading to F.D.A. approval, though, the use of minoxidil pills for hair loss remains off-label. And, dermatologists say, it is likely to remain so.
“Oral minoxidil costs pennies a day,” Dr. King said. “There is no incentive to spend tens of millions of dollars to test it in a clinical trial. That study truly is never, ever going to be done.”»
This is a perennial problem in medicine: There’s no incentive to find a cure, least of all an inexpensive cure, because then pharmaceutical companies can’t recoup the billions of dollars spent inventing it. Capitalism is great for almost everything — except new drugs that cure, rather than treat. Long, expensive treatments make money! Inexpensive cures don’t. Chemo vs. curing cancer. In order to find a CURE for cancer, we need to offer a bounty, perhaps the $50 billion we’ve already sent to Ukraine for a war that will have no effect on any American’s life.
Drink Up, Japan Tells Young People. I’ll Pass, Many Reply.
The country’s tax agency, hoping to reverse the alcohol industry’s pandemic doldrums, is holding a contest to encourage more drinking among the young.
TOKYO — Among the casualties of the pandemic is one that many young people in Japan say they do not miss: the drinking culture.
Sobriety, they have decided after two years of less socializing and nightcrawling, has its advantages. And that’s why a new message from the Japanese government — drink up! — seems to be putting few in the spirit.
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With Japan reaching new highs in coronavirus infections, including over 255,000 new cases on Thursday, many young people are wondering why the government is now saying it’s OK to go out and drink.
“The media is announcing record Covid cases, while restaurants are like, don’t talk while eating, wear a mask,” said Chika Kato, a 27-year-old consultant in Tokyo. “But the government is at the same time asking us to go all out and drink.”
“It’s an awkward situation,” she added. “Who do I listen to?”»
Another casualty of the shutdowns! Young Japanese aren’t drinking anymore.
On one hand, Americans reacted better to the ridiculous, pointless shutdowns, vax and mask mandates by resisting — protesting, refusing and, finally, moving to Florida. The Japanese submitted.
On the other hand, Japanese young people stopped drinking and probably studied more, while American young people started consuming massive amounts of pot and opioids.
We need a wall; and
How about we admit more Japanese and fewer Mexicans? Because …
«Mexico Says Disappearance of 43 Students Was a ‘Crime of the State’
The authorities said for the first time that the state had been a key player in the likely massacre of students from a teachers’ college in 2014.
By Oscar Lopez
Aug. 18, 2022
MEXICO CITY — The disappearance of 43 Mexican students in 2014 was a “crime of the state” involving every layer of government, an official inquiry reported on Thursday, in the most profound admission to date of government responsibility for one of the most notorious atrocities in Mexico’s modern history. …
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The students are among more than 100,000 people who have gone missing or are considered disappeared across the country, testament to the brutality of organized crime groups that are known to dissolve bodies in tubs of acid or burn corpses to ash.
***
In 2015, after a few months of investigation, Mexico’s attorney general reported that the students had been taken by the municipal authorities at the behest of a local gang, which then killed them and incinerated their bodies in a trash dump.
But that conclusion has been almost unanimously disputed by international experts, who have found numerous inconsistencies in the official conclusions.
On Thursday, Mr. Encinas doubled down on that criticism: That investigation “was a concerted action from the organized apparatus of power from the highest level of government, which obscured the truth.”»
The Left: "Trump doesn't matter. We're going to keep giving Trump free publicity until the message sinks in."
Once again we can all be thankful that Ann is willing to don her stylish Designer Label hazmat suit and venture into the fetid sewer known as the New York Times, plucking out choice tidbits to roast them with over the roaring fire of her prose. If the Times was run by smart people who actually wanted to do real journalism...instead of slavishly carrying water for the Democrat Party and the extreme apoplectic Left... and be rewarded by industry success beyond their wildest dreams, they'd hire her as Managing Editor, leave her alone at the reins with carte blanche, and then just sit back and complain that there aren't enough accountants available to handle the truckloads of legitimate money trying to get to their bank accounts. But no, they aren't smart people and would prefer to smugly preach unworkable Marxist propaganda to The Little People and be rewarded by regular invites to hard-Left, anti-American cocktail parties deep in the bowels of Manhattan. Their loss, our gain.
So much to enjoy in this article of Ann's but just picking one item more or less at random, I've noticed that prior to the installation of America's Puppet-In-Chief, we would be treated to near-daily blurbs on back pages of third-tier media outlets about the breathtakingly horrific Cartel-related murders occurring even in supposedly safe tourist areas of Mexico. Although it's easy to understand that putting them on the front pages would be RACIST! and so we of course can't have that...even if it might have saved the lives of untold numbers of naive American and European vacationers...it seems that they've disappeared from media notice altogether. Are we to assume that the teenaged Cartel hitmen have experienced an en-masse Epiphany and are traveling missionaries now, bringing Peace, Goodness and God's Word to all on their path... or perhaps this is to encourage a more welcoming attitude among Americans for our dear Mexican neighbors whose only desire is to achieve the American Dream by working hard, voting Democrat, distributing fentanyl by the ton and raping our young girls?
Truly another Media Mystery.