Destroying Communism by invoking statist solutions like ordering corporations what to invest in and who should be running them.

Hmmmm.....

With the defunding or underfunding of most of the departments actually involved in determining whether there is an emergency or not, what's the point? Under Trump, there won't be emergencies to alert. It's all smooth sailing from here on out.

No, not really. I give money to a lot of companies whose business practices I don't particularly like. That's the problem with such a small number of companies having such solid control over a market. If you don't do that, you won't have a cell phone, Internet service, electricity, etc.

Arguably I don't anymore. My mom watches it all the time, so she has a real subscription. I just do an add-on plan. When they took away my basic plan by force, I dropped my personal subscription. And I'm positively giddy every time I think about the fact that that their decision to be excessively greedy pushed me into a plan that pays them even less, gives me better picture quality, and is still ad-free.

I get dinged when I haven't signed out my mom's account at my house on the other side of the country, even though I'm an add-on household for that account.

Also, my mom got dinged when she stayed out here for a while, even though obviously she wasn't using her account from back home. She ended up in a state where she couldn't watch Netflix at all until I got home and helped her fix it.

Their algorithm sucks, and is arguably elder abuse for profit's sake. F**k Netflix.

Up until the Newt Gingrich's rise to power, the Libertarians were, fairly or unfairly, deemed Conservative's useful idiots.

The Republicans know full well what a destructive force he is, and they know to one extent or another he's going to do them damage. But the core desire of the Libertarian wing of the party is the decimation of the Federal Government, so they'll accept a few body blows in service of the cause.

They have core beliefs. Those beliefs are orthogonal to what we would deem to be normative politics.

Or being one of the companies with so much cash that, as of yet, Trump doesn't have sufficient levers of state in his hand to bring to bear.

The difference between statism and regulatory capture approaches 0 as you increase authoritarianism. The difference between capitalist oligarchy and party apparatchik is a distinction without a difference. They just spout the same sermon with different adjectives.

You can certainly write a lot of verbiage to mask the bigotry, that is for certain. You seem to think you can win debates by typing endlessly and using ChatGPT to increase the number of words.

Elemental lithium does, but LiC5H3N2O4 is a salt, and, as I understand it, is not particularly reactive.

My chemistry knowledge is almost nonexistent, so all of this could be wrong, but here's what I think: Mercury is less reactive than lithium, so it won't take its place in a single-replacement reaction. Mercury is insoluble, so no double replacement, either. It's a salt, so no acid-base reaction. So unless a lithium salt somehow catalyzes oxidation of the elemental mercury, I wouldn't expect any reaction.

But again, my chemistry knowledge is almost nonexistent, and this is from my skimming a few Wikipedia articles, so I could be very wrong.

Of course, we're talking about the intersection of chemistry and biology here, so there's always some possibility that some cells in the brain might release some other chemical that reacts with the salt and releases elemental lithium for use by the brain, and that the resulting elemental lithium could the form an amalgam with the mercury and effectively aid in chelating that mercury, but I wouldn't think the odds are all that great.

The odds are way better that it is some fascinating situation where whatever cells are responsible for removing the plaques become less effective without an adequate supply of lithium, and the plaques then end up sequestering the lithium, creating a vicious circle.

And even that is probably less likely than that the sequestration-induced lithium shortage merely exacerbates the mental decline caused by the shortage of properly folded amyloid proteins, and the reduction in plaque in the mouse model has some other root cause related to how they produced Alzheimer's-like symptoms in the mice, in which case this treatment would only slow the progression in humans, rather than reversing it.

Large-scale double-blind human studies are the only way to really know for sure.

My recollection is that the amount of mis-folded amyloid isn't a strong indicator of cognitive function; rather the existence of adequate amounts of properly folded protein is. If you're producing more, then you can have more of the bad stuff and still have enough of the good stuff to feed your neurons, basically. That said, larger amounts of mis-folded amyloid probably increases the rate at which the normal amyloid protein misfolds, assuming this is a prion situation, so there's likely some correlation there, but it still ends up being dependent also on the rate of production.

How lithium fits into that framework, I can't imagine, unless maybe lithium is somehow both required for the machinery to clear out the plaque and being sequestered by the plaque.

Wait a minute. I just noticed something in the abstract that I missed on the first reading. They showed a reduction in plaques. The 2015 study showed no impact on CNS biomarkers. So apparently the specific lithium salt chosen might actually be critically important (or that effect might happen only in mice, or the presence of the biomarkers may not be correlated with the amount of plaque in the way that one might assume, or...).

I'm looking at the abstract of an article in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease from 2015 that did a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled human trials of lithium in Alzheimer's patients that showed a statistically significant reduction in cognitive decline (albeit only barely significant at the 95% CI) from lithium supplementation, with approximately zero AEs.

It's not surprising that a mouse model study would support what human studies have already demonstrated, though I guess this is interesting in that it is presumably a larger study and more controlled than any meta-analysis would be.

One neat thing about this story is that the lithium salt that they chose (chosen because of its comparatively weak amyloid binding) is lithium orotate, which is commonly available over the counter as a dietary supplement from a rather large number of companies. If you have Alzheimer's and want to try it, there's literally nothing stopping you.