Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Two dozen members of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site have reported unauthorized credit card charges or settings in the past few days. Many of the charges were to WalMart, churches or youth sports groups for a few cents--a telltale sign of a credit card scam.  Photo from Pixabay The site administrator is looking into it but cannot confirm whether the site was hacked or the data breach occurred elsewhere, adding that they use numerous security measures to protect credit card information. He says their processor (PayPal) sent him this message about "an industry-wide 'carding attack' which began on or about the first week of May":  The payment industry is being attacked by carding BOTs and this is causing an unfortunate disruption in service as we work to mitigate the issue. The BOTs are using compromised credit cards and performing $0 authorizations on many merchant websites causing a financial burden to everyone involved. We apologize in advance as we know our cardin...

Finishing my garden projects without aggravating my pinched nerve has been impossible. Weeding overgrown areas, pulling up the weed barrier under the weeds, hand-tilling the soil, grading it, then planting was about the most I could do without hurting myself--but then the lawn had to be mowed. Putting off mowing it just makes it harder later. The weather going from chilly to hot within two weeks offered a very short window to get everything done, but almost all of the nearly two hundred seedlings I started are in the ground.  The worst part about my pinched nerve is that I don't sleep well. It makes my left side buzz and keeps me awake. At that point, doing yoga just makes it worse--all that helps is aspirin.  So after weeding, tilling, grading and seeding a spot by the driveway this morning, I stopped for the day spent a pleasant hour enjoying some coffee and reading what the Indiana legislature was up to. They've set up a process to create urban agriculture zones, prioritize...

Let me start by saying I'm generally in favor of vaccines: I got a tetanus shot when I fell off my bike onto the pavement; I got a flu shot last year because I didn't think I could fight off both the flu and COVID if I was unlucky enough to get both. But one reason I haven't gotten a COVID shot is because there's no way of knowing the long-term effects, if any, of the new technology it uses.  Now I have another reason. For people like me (not old, diabetic, overweight or suffering from heart disease), the clinical trials of the vaccines showed a reduced absolute risk of getting COVID of...wait for it...around 1%.  Regular readers probably know about absolute risk vs. relative risk. Reducing your relative risk of something by 70% or 95%, as the vaccines do for symptomatic COVID infections, sounds like they are extremely effective. But when your risk of something is low enough to start with, reducing it further may not mean much. This graphic of a hypothetical vaccine tr...