My 2-cents on Biden’s prostate cancer

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not a doctor, much less an oncologist. But I happen to have a more-than-average amount of information about prostate cancer, due to the fact that I know – and am even close to – quite a few men with it. And by “close to” I mean that I even know many details about their diagnoses and subsequent medical treatment. Much of this information is also very current, one person having been diagnosed extremely recently and in Biden’s age category.

I used to think that prostate cancer in the elderly was almost never aggressive, and that if left untreated almost all those men will die of something else. However, as you can see from this article, aggressive prostate cancer is far from rare in elderly men, although their prognosis without treatment is less clear as to the time frame:

Brassell and colleagues reported on the clinicopathologic features and the survival outcomes in 12,081 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1989 and 2009, from the Prostate Disease Research database. …

Men aged 70 years (n = 3350, 30.2%), had a significantly higher clinical stage and biopsy Gleason grade. Older men also had higher prediagnosis PSAV (P <.0001), which has previously been shown to be a marker for more aggressive prostate cancer. Among patients aged 70 years, 49.4% had external beam radiation therapy (EBRT), 24.6% had RP, 18.7% received primary hormonal therapy, 6% had brachytherapy, and 1.2% had cryotherapy. Among patients who underwent RP, pathologic stage, upgrading, and positive surgical margin rates were all significantly higher in older men.

That’s an article from 2013, and I’m sure there are plenty of others but I’m not about to spend hours and hours on this at the moment. I will add that the person I know who is about Biden’s age and who was recently diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer (Gleason 9, the same score as Biden) but without metastases, was told that without treatment the cancer would probably kill him before anything else just going by his type of cancer versus his average life expectancy at that age. Other doctors may have advised him differently, of course, but the one who did his biopsy was a very well-known and highly-respected prostate cancer expert who wasn’t gung-ho for treatment of the elderly with prostate cancer in general.

The men I know who have prostate cancer, including the one with the very recent diagnosis, all had had regular prostate screenings and yet several had small bone metastases when diagnosed, and their PSAs had only recently elevated. So I don’t have a problem with the idea that Biden was only diagnosed recently. It’s even possible that he had stopped having PSA screenings because of his advanced age; a lot of doctors no longer do them routinely in men of his age. I have read that Biden was diagnosed because of a physical exam in which a nodule was felt, and I don’t find that so strange. I’ve read that his metastases are treatable as well, and that was true for the several men I know who had small bone metastases at diagnosis.

I’ll add that the elderly person I know who was recently diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and is being treated had only had a very small PSA elevation and no nodules present that could be felt, and yet had fairly extensive although localized aggressive prostate cancer. The lack of metastasis was determined by PET scan, although it could not be ruled out at the cellular level. It was recommended that he take androgen-blocking injections and have localized radiation therapy.

Prostate cancer, even with bone metastases, is usually very treatable. From what I’ve read it’s likely Biden will have androgen-blocking drugs, plus possibly radiation. As I said, the person I know with a disease profile something like Biden’s is getting those treatments, although he was first diagnosed through a slightly elevated PSA rather than nodules that could be felt. These decisions are not cut-and-dried, and not all doctors would make the same recommendations.

The usual pathway to diagnosis goes like this: suspicion raised by elevated PSA or felt nodules, special MRI to determine the likelihood of cancer and if the likelihood is in the much higher range it is followed by a biopsy. The biopsy gives the diagnosis and the Gleason score, which helps determine a treatment plan. The MRI is a more recent development (a doctor told me that it became widely available for this purpose in 2017) that greatly facilitates the decision about whether or not to have a biopsy, particularly in elderly men. Therefore it prevents unnecessary biopsies compared to in the past, and makes it more likely that biopsies are only done in men who have a good chance of needing treatment. After the positive biopsy and Gleason score, there’s usually a PET-scan to determine if metastases are present.

So I have much less difficulty than most people in assuming that Biden really has been diagnosed only quite recently. Of course, there’s zero reason to trust anything that is said about his health, due to past experience with coverups of Biden’s state. But what we’re reading about his prostate cancer diagnosis could certainly be true; prostate cancer is an odd beast for many reasons.

NOTE: Here’s one of several posts I’ve previously written on prostate cancer.

Elusive muse: Suzanne Farrell

The New Neo Posted on by

All dancers are unique. But some are more unique than others.

Suzanne Farrell may have been the most unique of all – that is, I’ve never seen another dancer who reminds me of her in the least. The closest would be Galina Ulanova, who shares the interior-ality (is that a word?) of Farell’s presentation as a dancer; that is, the sense that she is lost in her own world and not performing or posing. I’ve seen interviews where Farrell has been asked whether, when she was growing up, she wanted to be a ballerina, and she has answered that she only wanted to dance. She is a highly unusual person.

There is a documentary about Farrell made in 1996, about seven years after she retired from her performing career, a career that began when she was a teenager and the New York City Ballet was under Balanchine’s direction. He was about forty years older than she was and became enthralled with her, not just as a dancer but in the romantic sense. They had a complex relationship that was never sexually consummated and which Farrell discusses in the documentary. I think that even in the film’s first few minutes you can see why she enchanted Balanchine so.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to embed the video, but you can watch it here. You don’t have to see the whole thing to get the flavor, although I certainly watched it in its entirety. Watch as much as you like.

Farrell also has said that you reveal your personality when you dance. That is very very true. It’s revealed in a million ways both subtle and unsubtle. The audience may not be able to describe or list them, but the audience perceives them. A dancer is relaxed or tense, self-centered or not, risk-taker or cautious – but it’s all there for the world to see. Farrell herself always seemed relaxed, in her own dreamworld but it was not at all about her, and a physical risk-taker. Although she was never flashy or show-offy, she nevertheless knocked people’s socks off.

Another thing Farrell said in another interview was that a dancer must fascinate the audience even before the dancer starts to dance. Just standing still onstage, he or she must fascinate. The strange and uncanny thing is that Farrell did exactly that, although I don’t know how she did it. Even when she was dancing as part of a group, which she didn’t usually do, one could always spot her not just through her looks or body proportions but through her unique and riveting – that is, fascinating – quality of movement.

SCOTUS rules against Alien Enemies deportations

The New Neo Posted on by

SCOTUS ruled yesterday:

Trump tried to address the problem as to a particularly vicious gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), by invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), which allows summary removal. That effort has been stymied by multiple courts, incuding the Supreme Court, ruling that persons subject to removal under the AEA are entitled to due process before removal. Depending what the due process looks like may render deportation efforts futile – you can’t have millions of trials, even if they are truncated proceedings.

Is the Constitution a suicide pact? We’re in the process of finding out.

The Supreme Court ruled [Friday] that the hold it previously put on efforts to remove TdA via the AEA will stay in place. A lot of the Per Curiam Opinon related to jurisdiction, including the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, to decide these matters.

The bottom line is the Supreme Court put everything on hold, and told the 5th Circuit to figure out what type of due process the TdA members should get. Removal of TdA members through other statutory authority, other than AEA, could continue …

It’s a bit complicated and I think, from what I’ve read online, there’s a fair amount of confusion about what it means. That’s in part because it’s still undetermined what the “due process” would consist of; SCOTUS has for the moment left that question to the lower court. This only applies to the Tren de Aragua members deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

It might be a good idea if Congress were to act on this question to create some expedited process. Then again, SCOTUS might rule it unconstitutional if it lacks what SCOTUS considers due process.

The big issue is that Biden was allowed to open the borders, and the millions who came in that way should be just as easy to deport. Illegal entry shouldn’t be a one-way street.

The release of the audio of Hur’s interrogation of Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that the audio of the Hur interviews with Biden has been released, there’s a lot of talk about what it reveals. (see this, for example). Nothing on the recording should surprise anyone on the right. Biden’s state of mind is not the real scandal; the real scandal is the failure of the previous administration to release the audio, the smear campaign previously mounted by the left against Hur, and the extent and duration of the coverup of Biden’s cognitive failures in general and not just his failures with Hur.

Here’s the full audio; it’s long:

Here’s a short excerpt:

His condition is painful, although he’s clearly not totally out of it.

One of the many things I’ve thought about as a result Biden’s cognitive problems during his entire presidency, and especially the latter half of it, is that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is useless without an honest group of people to activate it. We didn’t have that in the Biden administration, to say the least. We had conspiracy and collusion to keep his deficits from the American people, and we had a press that was an active part of it.

It’s a reminder that no laws, no Constitution, can protect a country if its rulers and its press don’t have integrity.

Joe Biden: what were they thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “TommyJay” asks:

What were the Dem leadership and their minions thinking when they engaged in this massive coverup of Sloe Joe’s feebleness and disfunction?

Good question. along with the related one of “why did they think they could get away with it?” Short version of the answer: they thought it was their only option.

If we go back in time to the 2020 campaign, it was obvious that a second Donald Trump term would be a truly nightmare scenario for the Democrats. They felt they absolutely had to win. The only thing they lacked was a healthy, vigorous candidate who could do it. Bernie Sanders become – to their horror – the frontrunner but he was too old, too obviously leftist, too ethnically Jewish. He simply wouldn’t do because they felt he would lose the election. Kamala Harris was great on paper in terms of identity politics but seemed to have zero electoral appeal even to Democrats, much less Republicans and/or Independents. The others in the running were hardly doing much better.

The Democrats’ only hope became Joe Biden, whom they knew they could label a moderate compared to Sanders. Whatever cognitive problems he had – and he clearly had them even in 2020, although not as severe as they later became – the Democrats wagered they could cover up and/or minimize them in the highly unusual COVID campaign season. The others were pressured to drop out, Biden became the nominee, and then there was a full court press to rig the election through the cooperation of the MSM and the intelligence community, which (among other things) managed to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story when it surfaced near the election. Biden’s cognitive problems offered an opportunity for control by others who were to the left of Biden himself, which they considered a feature rather than a bug.

Remember after the election, how the right was betting that Biden wouldn’t last? That he’d retire by June, a lot of people said, and would be replaced. I didn’t think so, for one simple reason: Kamala Harris was not ready for prime time, and as a black woman she could not be bypassed for a substitute. I believe that Biden’s handlers were surprised at how incompetent she seemed, much more than they were surprised at any of Biden’s deficits. So they were stuck with him, and stuck with her, and they never really figured a way out of that dilemma for the entire four years of the Biden administration.

As far as the 2024 campaign went, my guess is that they didn’t really try to talk Biden out of running at first, even though his cognitive issues had increased, because they still didn’t have a winning replacement. They hoped to take Trump out by lawfare anyway, and that would solve the problem. They tried to do that; oh how they tried! But the lawfare didn’t work and the Biden/Trump debate loomed. Did Biden do worse in that debate than they expected, or exactly as bad as they expected? I don’t know, but that’s the point at which they suddenly were forced to acknowledge – because it simply could not be denied any longer – that Biden couldn’t run for president in 2024 and had to be replaced.

Things were in a state of flux for a little while, and it was during that time that Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt. What didn’t kill him made him stronger as a candidate. About a week later Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became his nearly immediate replacement. The Democrats didn’t see any other way to deal with the mess, and they still had to pretend that Biden had dropped out for other reasons because to admit he was too cognitively challenged would be to admit that they’d covered it up for a long time. Therefore the message the campaign put out was that Biden was stepping aside to make room for youth. And Harris was also left with few options but to go around pretending Biden was cognitively intact, as well, because as his VP she had to have known and been part of any coverup.

From start to finish the entire thing was determined by the fact that Democrats had no good candidates to run as alternatives. They hoped that the MSM’s cooperation would help their sleight of hand fool the public one more time and Harris would become president. Fortunately, it didn’t work.

Now they have some ‘splaining to do, and the agreed-on narrative du jour is that they – the press and the Democrats, that is – were fooled by a bunch of canny political aides to Biden. And additionally, that Biden was too selfish and foolhardy to drop out in a timely fashion and give Kamala a chance to blossom and shine – although anyone who actually watched Harris in interviews would have been aware that time was not her friend. The tack they’re taking is ludicrous, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a better one. The truth makes them look like knaves and fools; the lie makes them look like knaves and fools. So knaves and fools it is.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go; lots of news:

(1) Ex-hostage Edan Alexander says that the terrorists treated him better after Trump’s election:

Alexander’s aunt, Sharon Senyor, told the Ynet news site on Wednesday that “he said that since Trump took power his conditions improved. From the moment they started to talk about him, they gave him more food so that he would gain weight.”

Ynet also reported, citing conversations Alexander had with others since his release on Monday, that following Trump’s inauguration, the freed hostage was moved to a “VIP tunnel” with senior Hamas officials in order to both serve as a human shield and provide him with further protection due to his American citizenship.

2025. (Office of the Special Envoy to the Middle East/X)
Freed hostage Edan Alexander’s conditions in captivity improved following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in January, according to a family member.

Alexander’s aunt, Sharon Senyor, told the Ynet news site on Wednesday that “he said that since Trump took power his conditions improved. From the moment they started to talk about him, they gave him more food so that he would gain weight.”

Ynet also reported, citing conversations Alexander had with others since his release on Monday, that following Trump’s inauguration, the freed hostage was moved to a “VIP tunnel” with senior Hamas officials in order to both serve as a human shield and provide him with further protection due to his American citizenship.

This echoes comments Alexander reportedly made during his phone conversation with Trump on Tuesday.

Fearing Trump’s anger and perhaps retaliation, they didn’t want him to look like a concentration camp inmate. So they fattened him up a tiny bit.

(2) Kash Patel says the FBI will be moving from the Hoover Building. Not just the building, but DC itself:

“Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not. In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees,” Patel said. “That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here, so we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”

“Every state’s getting a plus-up, and I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, ‘we want to go work at the FBI because we want to go fight violent crime, and we want to get sent out into the country to do it,'” he added. “That’s what we’re doing in the next three, six, nine months we’re going to do that hard.”

(3) You know that Qatar airplane the left has made such a hue and cry about, as though it’s a gift for Trump? Well, now we learn the following from an interview with Senator Markwayne Mullin:

“What the media isn’t telling you and what no one’s talking to you about is this same 747 has been in negotiations for a year,” Mullin revealed. “The Biden administration is the one that started these conversations.”

“It didn’t start in the Trump administration. Why? Because we need a backup for Air Force One. Because right now, the President of the United States is flying around on a 40-year-old plane and there is no backup for it.”

Mullin reiterated his initial point.

“No one is discussing that part. They’re discussing that the deal ended with President Trump,” the senator continued. “Maybe the media doesn’t know.”

Yeah, maybe. Nor do they care to find out.

(4) Speaking of “not knowing,” that’s Comey’s claim about a tweet of his highlighting what appears to be a call to assassinate Trump:

Comey claims to have had no idea what the numbers meant. Why put it up, then? And if he’s really that ignorant – which I very much doubt – has he never heard of finding out?

More here on the subject.

(5) Trump’s budget bill fails to come to a vote in the House. The Budget Committee didn’t approve:

The committee vote failed with just 16 lawmakers in favor, and 21 voting against.

Several hard-liners signaled that they would derail the tax and budget measure over concerns that it adds to a bloated national debt. The holdouts — which include Republican Reps. Ralph Norman, Chip Roy and Andrew Clyde — threatened to prevent the package from advancing out of the House Budget Committee, which convened Friday morning.

And that’s what happened. I assume there will be more negotiating on this.

Trump gets down to business in the Arab world

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the way I see it, too:

President Trump is first and foremost a businessman, and he sees things through that lens. He went to the Middle East to do business, to talk business, to make deals, and the leaders of the Arab nations he has visited, including most notably Saudi Arabia, seem to be reacting very positively to his approach.

That’s basically it. Whether these deals will end up being good, or will matter in any but the economic sense, remains to be seen. After all, “experts” thought that doing business with China would make China less of a threat, and so far it hasn’t quite worked out that way. It’s just a different kind of threat than it used to be.

On the other hand, I’ve read a ton of articles indicating these deals mean that Trump is pulling away from his support of Israel. I don’t see it that way. I’ve seen no real indication of it, and people such as Rubio and Huckabee certainly deny it. And, for example, Trump delivered this message to Iran while on his trip:

Speaking at a business roundtable in the Qatari capital Doha, Trump reiterated that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon” and suggested that negotiators are “getting very close to maybe doing a deal.” …

During his Gulf tour, Trump has repeatedly warned that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon, threatening to strike the country if it fails to reach a nuclear deal. But he has not explicitly ruled out Iran enriching uranium on its own soil. While uranium is used as a nuclear fuel, it can be weaponized if enriched to high levels. …

In an interview with Breitbart last week, US foreign envoy Steve Witkoff said that an enrichment program in Iran is a “red line” for the US.

Plus he repeated his proposal for Gaza:

The president repeated his proposal for America to take over the enclave while speaking at a business roundtable in Doha with top Qatari officials on Thursday.

Trump said: “If it’s necessary, I think I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone. Let some good things happen, put people in homes where they can be safe and Hamas is going to have to be dealt with.

SCOTUS will be considering the legality of nationwide injunctions

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s very important for the Court to rule on this:

Today, the United States Supreme Court will hear three consolidated cases in Trump v. CASA on the growing use of national or universal injunctions. This is a matter submitted on the “shadow docket” and the underlying cases concern the controversy over “birthright citizenship.” However, the merits of those claims are not at issue. Instead, the Trump Administration has made a “modest request” for the Court to limit the scope of lower-court injunctions to their immediate districts and parties, challenging the right of such courts to bind an Administration across the nation.

That’s from Jonathan Turley, who also goes into the history of such injunctions:

Under President George W. Bush, there were only six such injunctions, which increased to 12 under Obama.

However, when Trump came to office, he faced 64 such orders in his first term.

When Biden and the Democrats returned to office, it fell back to 14.

That was not due to more modest measures.

Biden did precisely what Trump did in seeking to negate virtually all of his predecessors’ orders and then seek sweeping new legal reforms. He was repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution, but there was no torrent of preliminary injunctions at the start of his term.

Yet, when Trump returned to office, the number of national injunctions soared again in the first 100 days and surpassed the number for the entirety of Biden’s term.

Turley doesn’t explain why it was used so much more often against Trump, but my notion is that it’s because judges on the left are more inclined to employ it. Turley also doesn’t explain when national injunctions were first issued by lower courts, but I found some information on that here:

Commentators broadly agree that nationwide injunctions as currently understood did not exist in the pre-Founding English courts of equity, that no nationwide injunctions issued in the early years of the Republic, and that such injunctions have become more common in the last two decades.51 In a May 2019 address, Attorney General William Barr stated that federal courts “issued only 27 nationwide injunctions in all of the 20th century.” By contrast, as of February 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had identified 12 nationwide injunctions issued during the presidency of George W. Bush, 19 issued during Barack Obama’s presidency and 55 such injunctions issued against the Trump Administration. Beyond the general agreement that nationwide injunctions have increased in recent years, scholars debate many significant points, including when the first nationwide injunction issued, whether other types of injunctive relief provide historical precedent for current nationwide injunctions, and the extent to which historical precedent is relevant to the legality of nationwide injunctions today.

There’s much much more at the link. Although left and right disagree on when it started and exactly how to define it, it seems to me that the practice really picked up steam against George W. Bush and has accelerated greatly against Trump. At this point, it’s the left’s main tool against him.

ADDENDUM:

See also this article which contains a discussion of some of today’s SCOTUS hearings on the subject.

Politics as “mental illness”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cavendish” wonders:

A few questions: What is the difference between “mental illness” and “incapable of thinking rationally”? What, precisely, is the definition of “thinking rationally”? And, is “incapable of thinking rationally” suffered uniformly and consistently, or is it situationally dependent?

By that I mean, is a person living independently in a capitalist society who fully embraces and aligns with Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders but can easily discern and choose between between grapes at Fred’s for $2.00/lb versus identical grapes at Jane’s for $1.75/lb is, by one measure, demonstrating irrationality in the former but rationality in the latter; does that mean he or she is “partially mentally ill” or subject to “situational irrationality”? And, if it’s “situational irrationality” exactly what does that mean, and how does it relate to “mental illness”?

The questions arose as a response to this statement by commenter “Richard F Cook”:

Your friend [the Rachel Maddow fan who thinks non-criminal citizens are being deported] is mentally ill. In the the face of facts they have to believe their version of reality to maintain their concept of how virtuous they think they are.

First I’d like to deal with the concept of “mentally ill.” It’s an old-fashioned term that originated as an effort to medicalize the treatment of the insane/psychotic/crazy. The idea was that, by listing clusters of symptoms and giving each cluster a name, the problems could be addressed much like physical diseases were addressed. That dream turned out to have been untrue – at least so far – although it bore fruit for certain problems such as schizophrenia, which seems to have a strongly (although not entirely) physical cause and can be greatly helped (although not cured) by medication. Other problems conform more or less to the medical model, mostly less, but it’s been somewhat helpful in a lot of cases and less so in others.

In addition, “mental” illnesses and such diagnoses persist very powerfully in part because insurance coverage is based on them.

The world of “mental illness” was also divided into the very serious psychoses, which involved breaks with perceptions of reality, and neuroses which did not. These distinctions still hold to a certain extent but the term “neurosis” is less used than before.

Modern surveillance capabilities and revelations about the NSA have made it less “crazy” for a person to think the government is spying on him or her. After all, cameras are ubiquitous in public places, there are ways to determine identity from a photograph, cellphone records are accessible – you get the picture. So although it’s “crazy” to look up at your own ceiling and think you can see a camera there placed by the government, the thought that you’re being spied on in general is not far-fetched – although focusing on it can certainly cramp your life.

Being on the left, believing Rachel Maddow, none of that is a mental illness. It’s not even really irrational, depending on your sources of news and information. Maddow can easily be proved wrong, but in order to do that two elements are necessary: (1) a person has to take in the relevant information that discredits what she’s said; and (b) a person has to believe that information comes from a source more credible than Maddow. But people of the left often only take in sources on the left, and those sources are consistent with each other. Those sources continually say that it’s sources on the right that are lying. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to make the effort to go to sources on the right for fact-checking, and it’s easy to dismiss them when just about everyone you know is also on the left and agreeing with Maddow and company.

None of this is crazy or even mentally ill or irrational. It has internal consistency and logic.

I will add that most people – left or right – tend to seek out sources that confirm their already-existing opinions. That’s human nature.

Lastly, we all are a combination of rational and irrational. Emotions are not totally rational; we’re not Star Trek’s Vulcans.