Cowboy Who?

As I’m sure you have seen by now, Emperor Palpatine has recently suffered horrific injuries after being thrown into the Death Star’s reactor, which subsequently exploded and crashed into Kef Bir. I understand that many of you may have initially reacted with joy upon learning of the Emperor’s incident. This is understandable, as he has tried to kill many of you, but as Rebels, it is imperative we take the high road.

Earlier today, Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca all sent their well wishes to Emperor Palpatine. We, in turn, must join them in their show of support for a man who hates them with all of his heart. It is time that we put aside politics and the fact that he wants us all dead, and come together and join in prayer to wish the Emperor a swift recovery.

We still believe strongly in our message of fighting for the future of the galaxy, but we are considering putting a halt to our current campaign so that the Emperor has a chance to fully regain his health. We would not want to seem insensitive by continuing our fight against the Empire’s quest to destroy planets and take over the galaxy while their leader is recovering. But we also most consider Emperor Palpatine has a family, and we want to let them know they have our full support in this troubling time.

While it might have seemed as if the Emperor should have taken preventive measures to avoid being killed by his apprentice, as he was very aware of the fact that Darth Plagueis was killed the same way and yet thought he would always just magically be fine, now is not the time to point fingers or suggest that he had it coming to him. Any suggestion that this is “karma” is distasteful. At the end of the day, he is still our Emperor, and those of us who have not been killed or incapacitated by his actions have the duty to send him prayers of recovery. After all, the Emperor is a human being, just like most of us. We must offer him the basic respect a human being deserves, even if he has spent his entire reign trying to end our movement and destroy our beliefs.

It is also not the time to point out the past actions of the Emperor and view this as some kind of retribution. While it was alarming how he used loopholes to remain in power after his term was up and then issued an order that caused the death of thousands — largely made up of the Jedi minority group — and furthermore was responsible for building two space stations with the capability to instantly destroy a planet, that is politics. In times of crisis, we must separate ourselves from politics and suddenly imagine that he is a good person. Emperor Palpatine is in a serious, life-threatening situation, and it’s time to put aside our differences and not gloat or wish any pain or suffering to him. Anything short of a full recovery so he can continue his fight against the will of the people will be a crushing disappointment to all of us.

On behalf of the entire Rebel Alliance, we wish you a full and speedy recovery, Emperor Palpatine. We hope to see you back on your feet, trying to kill us and the entire galaxy again as soon as possible.

Although you have to admit, if he somehow ends up coming back from this, it would be really, really stupid.

Twitter users are flooding the #ProudBoys hashtag on social media with images of LGBTQI+ pride, displacing neo-Nazis and white supremacists posts using the tag.

A physician at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center has branded the US President's decision to visit "patriots" outside the hospital via motorcade as "unnecessary" and endangering the lives of his Secret Service agents.

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Welcome to a normal weekend in late 2020, where my hair is uncomfortably long and I'm more anxious than usual about coming into close physical contact with the outside world! There are dangerous things out there these days, like tomato slices touching your food.

Halloween is the best because Halloween includes everybody.

Dr James Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed, said the president's actions could only be described as "insanity".

The group hit headlines last week after US President Donald Trump declined to condemn them during the first presidential debate.

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Sean Conley, physician to President Donald Trump, gives an update on the president’s health as he is treated for a Covid-19 infection at Walter Reed Medical Center, October 4, 2020, in Bethesda, Maryland. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Trump was given dexamethasone, a steroid typically used in some severely ill Covid-19 patients.

Sunday’s press conference on President Donald Trump’s status as a Covid-19 patient raised just as many new questions as answers, leaving many medical experts concerned that the public still isn’t getting a complete or accurate picture of the commander-in-chief’s health.

At the briefing at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the president is being treated, his doctors said Trump is “doing very well” and had improved so much he could be discharged as soon as Monday.

Yet the optimistic report on the president’s prognosis also came with an admission by his physician, Sean Conley, that Trump had needed supplemental oxygen on Friday and that his blood oxygen saturation had dropped to worrisome levels twice in the past three days. Conley said he’d withheld details on the breathing problems at Saturday’s press briefing because he wanted to “reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president” has had about the course of Trump’s illness.

The president’s medical team also reported that Trump on Saturday was started on yet another drug to fight Covid-19: dexamethasone. The steroid has been shown in clinical trials to improve outcomes — but is only recommended for patients with severe or critical Covid-19. It’s also the third Covid-19 drug to be administered to the president, following an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment given Friday and an ongoing, five-day course of the antiviral remdesivir.

But dexamethasone can also have serious psychiatric side effects, and the decision to use it so early in the president’s infection sparked a new round of speculation about the severity of his illness.

Vox spoke to five infectious disease and intensive care doctors about the news to try to make sense of it. They said either Trump is sicker than the White House is saying, or his doctors are over-treating their high-risk, 74-year-old VIP patient.

“I can tell you how I would approach the treatment of a patient or family member — it would be different,” said intensive care doctor Lakshman Swamy, who works with the Cambridge Health Alliance. “The challenge is that when you are a VIP patient, it doesn’t always you mean you get better care — it just means you get more care.”

One thing everyone agreed on: Trump’s health status today, whatever it is, doesn’t say anything about how he’ll be doing a week from now, given the unpredictability of this disease.

What we know about Trump’s health

If we go by the official reports from the White House, Trump has been improving and was doing just fine as of Sunday morning — but he had a bad Friday. That was when he experienced a fever and his oxygen levels dropped for the first time.

Conley said Trump’s “oxygen saturation transiently dipped below 94 percent. ... And after about a minute with only two liters, [it was] back over 95 percent.” After an hour, Trump was off the oxygen, Conley added. On Saturday, Trump’s blood oxygen saturation level again dropped to 93 percent for a short period — but Conley wouldn’t confirm whether the president required oxygen then, too.

Instead, since then, Trump’s health has improved so much, his doctors said, he may head back to the White House as soon as Monday. His doctors also said he hasn’t had a fever since Friday morning, his vitals are stable, and he’s not experiencing any shortness of breath any longer.

Conley also did not provide details about the results of the president’s chest CT scan, prompting Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, to wonder if they’d found signs of pneumonia, other manifestations of Covid lung involvement, or inflammation.

Meanwhile, Trump has been given at least three new drugs — that are all still being tested — to treat Covid-19 and its symptoms.

Trump’s treatment protocol, explained

On Friday, Trump’s doctors say they started administering the intravenous antiviral remdesivir and a cocktail of experimental monoclonal antibodies — medicines that are supposed to stop the virus from replicating and progressing into cells.

We learned Sunday he had also started taking dexamethasone — a steroid that reduces inflammation associated with Covid-19. (He had also been on zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and daily aspirin — though it’s not clear whether those drugs are for Covid-19 specifically, since there’s no conclusive evidence to back their use for the new coronavirus.)

Of the three Covid-19 drugs, dexamethasone has the strongest evidence behind it. “It’s the only drug to show improvement — overall improvement — in Covid-19,” said Joshua Barocas, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University and infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center.

Barocas referred to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It showed randomly chosen patients who received dexamethasone experienced a reduced risk of death versus those who didn’t get the drug — but only when they were either intubated or receiving supplemental oxygen.

In patients who aren’t on oxygen, the risks associated with the drug’s use may outweigh the harms. Among the particularly worrisome side effects: confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response. The Covid-19 treatment guidelines only call for dexamethasone in seriously ill patients.

“I wouldn’t be giving it to someone who is not on oxygen,” Swamy said.

“It’s not a completely benign choice of medication,” Jen Manne-Goehler, an infectious disease doctor at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals, added.

“It’s either over-treatment or he’s much more ill that [the White House] said,” said Clemens Wendtner, a professor of medicine in Munich who treated Germany’s first Covid-19 patients.

Trump’s also on a five-day course of remdesivir — an antiviral developed by Gilead Sciences that’s supposed to stop the virus from replicating.

There is published evidence for the use of remdesivir — in hospitalized patients, it shortened their recovery time compared to the placebo group — but it’s not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration and no one knows what happens when patients get the medication with the others Trump is taking.

As for the experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies: In theory, the treatment is supposed to work by neutralizing the coronavirus. But monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19 have not even been fully tested in humans. (We’ve only got published studies on hamsters and monkeys, and unpublished efficacy data from an ongoing human trial, according to Science magazine.)

“What’s confusing or surprising is [why] you would use something so early ... with no efficacy data out there,” said Manne-Goehler of the monoclonal antibodies. From a scientific standpoint, she reasoned, starting on the drug early might make sense if you’re trying to prevent the virus from entering cells. “But what’s odd is as a clinical doctor, I don’t jump to [prescribing] things I have little real-life efficacy data [on] in a person who is not super sick.”

Even if the experimental drug looks promising in early research, Swamy noted, “people said the same thing about hydroxychloroquine,” a drug now known to be ineffective for Covid-19. He added: “We don’t know enough about it.”

So one could read the use of unapproved drugs typically given in severe cases as a sign that Trump is sicker than the White House is acknowledging. Or maybe it’s just because the patient is the president, said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

“You know he’s got risk factors. He’s starting to get sick. Has had a fever and an oxygen requirement. The question is what do you do?” Hotez said. “If something were to happen to the president — whether he becomes incapacitated or worse — that’s a huge national security threat.”

All the doctors said it was difficult from the limited information being released from the White House to know what’s truly going on. What is clear: Trump’s doctors were veering far from the Covid-19 guidelines, with the multiple therapies — some unproven — being administered in combination.

The bottom line: It’s too soon to tell if Trump is on the road to recovery

Trump’s health status now — even if he’s discharged from Walter Reed Monday — tells us little about how he’ll fare over the next week.

Patients “can be doing fine, requiring a little bit of supplemental oxygen, and then very rapidly deteriorate to mechanical ventilation — that’s one of the scariest things about this virus,” Barocas said.

Manne-Goehler agreed: “What makes Covid scary is that who falls off a cliff — and who doesn’t — still can be difficult to predict.”

She recently cared for a patient who was similar to Trump in terms of his age and underlying health risks, Manne-Goehler said. “He looked pretty bad, he got to the edge of the cliff and got better. But there are people who just blow through anything we try to do [for them] and do terribly. That script — even with what we understand about risk factors — is part of what scares the medical community.”

Trump’s doctors have also gone off script for his treatments, which makes applying what we know about how patients fare to the president even more challenging.

Overall, though, people with Covid-19 are generally doing better now than they did mere months ago because doctors have refined their approach to treating the disease. And while Trump has an elevated risk of complications and death — because of his age, sex and underlying medical conditions — the odds of survival are in his favor.

But The public will have to wait until at least 10 days after his symptoms began for a clearer picture. That’s when patients — if they are doing well — are usually thought to be in the clear. If we assume the White House’s Friday timeline is accurate, that brings us to October 11. Until then, Manne-Goehler said, the disease is “a roller coaster.”

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Elon Musk said the driver-facing camera in Tesla cars was to monitor future robotaxi service, but a sleuth suggests the company might be open to checking human drivers as well. Code investigator Green says they’ve found (via Electrek) the in-cabin activities Tesla’s camera is looking for. They appear to revolve around signs of distracted driving, such as phone use or looking away from the road.

It also appears to have special checks for sunglasses (such as whether or not you’re looking down). It’s uncertain what “blinded” and “dark” mean, although this may refer to moments when lighting conditions prevent the camera from detecting anything.

There’s no certainty Tesla will use the camera this way. It only activated the camera in June, and then for a voluntary program that captures pre-collision photos and videos to help with safety features. The brand currently checks for attention during Autopilot through torque applied to the steering wheel.

It wouldn’t be unheard of for Tesla to monitor driver attention, though. GM’s Super Cruise already uses a camera system to ensure you’re focused without requiring hands on the wheel, and Ford’s Mustang Mach-E will do the same. If Tesla added the feature, it could match its rivals and offer truly hands-free driving — at least in those situations where it’s safe.

In case you were wondering what does the selfie camera in model 3 currently try to detect:
BLINDED
DARK
EYES_CLOSED
EYES_DOWN
EYES_NOMINAL
EYES_UP
HEAD_DOWN
HEAD_TRUNC
LOOKING_LEFT
LOOKING_RIGHT
PHONE_USE
SUNGLASSES_EYES_LIKELY_NOMINAL
SUNGLASSES_LIKELY_EYES_DOWN

— green (@greentheonly) October 4, 2020

Seven senior officials said in a letter obtained by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE that they have reason to believe Paxton is violating the law.

Since the revelation of the U.S. president's diagnosis of COVID-19, multiple cases have already been confirmed among those who have had close contact with Trump and his close adviser, Hope Hicks.

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If you go back 100,000 years, being able to launch a wooden dinghy is pretty much the best you can hope for.

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A disastrous press conference from US President Donald Trump's doctors left the world wondering if it can trust the White House to tell the truth about the health of one of the most powerful leaders on the planet, writes Emily Olson.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson said there was no reason for him to quarantine while awaiting a COVID-19 test result, which came back positive.

Physicians looking after Donald Trump said they were "cautiously optimistic, but he's doing great".

The president also said that he chose to go to Walter Reed medical center rather than be "locked up in a room upstairs" in the White House. He said he is feeling better than when he arrived Friday.

(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

As lawsuits by Democrats proceed against Governor Greg Abbott’s order limiting Texas counties to one mail-in ballot collection location, the state’s lawyers will rely on a plausible-sounding justification for the action: to improve the “security” of the mail-in ballot process. The state will also surely argue that the order is limited in scope. Most of Texas’s 254 counties already had only one drop-off location. The rule affects mainly a few populous counties, including Harris, home of Houston, which had set up twelve collection spots for its 2.4 million registered voters. The order doesn’t technically keep anyone from voting—voters are, of course, still ostensibly able to mail in their ballots. But put Abbott’s order in the proper context—a high-stakes battle for control of the Texas House…View Original Post

The post Greg Abbott’s Voter Suppression Methods Have Become More Subtle—But They’re Still Transparent appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Venice's floods are caused by a combination of factors exacerbated by climate change.

A Grindr vulnerability allowed anyone who knows a user’s email address to easily reset their password and hijack their account. All a bad actor needed to do was type in a user’s email address in the password reset page and then pop open the dev tools to get the reset token. By adding that token to the end of the password reset URL, they won’t even need to access the victim’s inbox — that’s the exact link sent to the user’s email anyway. It loads the page where they can input a new password, giving them a way to ultimately take over the victim’s account.

A French security researcher named Wassime Bouimadaghene discovered the flaw and tried to report it to the dating service. When support closed his ticket and he didn’t hear back, he asked help from security expert Troy Hunt who worked with another security expert (Scott Helme) to set up a test account and confirm that the vulnerability does exist. Hunt, who called the issue “one of the most basic account takeover techniques” he’s ever seen, managed to get in touch with Grindr’s security team directly by posting a call for their contact details on Twitter.

While Grindr quickly fixed the issue after hearing from Hunt, the incident underscored the platform’s shortcomings when it comes to security. And that’s a huge problem when the dating app caters to individuals whose sexual orientations and identities could make them a target for harassment and violence. This isn’t the first security issue Grindr has had to deal with. Back in 2018, it had a couple of flaws that risked exposing a user’s location. Earlier this year, the Norwegian Consumer Council published a report accusing Grindr and other dating services of spreading sensitive information, such as GPS locations.

Grindr chief operating officer Rick Marini told TechCrunch that in response to the discovery of this particular flaw, it’s taking additional steps to tighten its security measures. It’s making it easier for researchers to report security issues, and it vows to announce a new bug bounty program “soon.”

“We are grateful for the researcher who identified a vulnerability. The reported issue has been fixed. Thankfully, we believe we addressed the issue before it was exploited by any malicious parties.

As part of our commitment to improving the safety and security of our service, we are partnering with a leading security firm to simplify and improve the ability for security researchers to report issues such as these. In addition, we will soon announce a new bug bounty program to provide additional incentives for researchers to assist us in keeping our service secure going forward.”

Stepien took over Trump's campaign in July and attended the debate on Tuesday. Although Conway no longer works at the White House, she recently attended an event at the Rose Garden.

(Image credit: Evan Vucci/AP)

But the Senate majority leader said the Judiciary Committee's work can continue on Oct. 12 with the confirmation process for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court.

(Image credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

President Trump's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, told reporters on Saturday morning that Trump was "doing very well." But an official identified as chief of staff Mark Meadows gave a different account.

(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

You Know What’s BS!? Inflatable Decorations (YKWBS Episode 42)

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The country singer-songwriter Mac Davis, who died in Nashville this week at age 78, spent most of his life in Tennessee and Los Angeles—but he always loved his hometown of Lubbock. Of the hundreds of songs he wrote over his sixty-year career, his favorite was “Texas in My Rearview Mirror.” Released in 1980, the song captures a feeling that many young Texans can still relate to—a restless desire to leave behind a sleepy hometown and move to a big coastal city: “I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas, in my rearview mirror / My mama kept calling me home, but I just did not want to hear her.” These lyrics have led the song to be frequently misinterpreted as a putdown of Lubbock. But listen all…View Original Post

The post Remembering Lubbock-Born Country Musician Mac Davis appeared first on Texas Monthly.

United States senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, wasn’t happy when he boarded an American Airlines flight from DFW to Portland in early July. The day before, the airline had adjusted its COVID-19 safety policies and resumed selling every available seat, rather than leaving most middle seats empty as it had been doing since the onset of the pandemic. Merkley took to Twitter to voice his displeasure. “@AmericanAir: how many Americans will die [because] you fill middle seats, w/ your customers shoulder to shoulder, hour after hour,” he wrote above a selfie showing the cabin nearly full of passengers behind him. “This is incredibly irresponsible. People eat & drink on planes & must take off masks to do so. No way you aren’t facilitating spread…View Original Post

The post Why Is American Airlines So Infuriating? appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Eight months into the pandemic, the Senate is now preparing a plan to meet and vote virtually as COVID-19 cases continue to spike and provincial restrictions make travel difficult for some members of the Red Chamber.