Stories below the fold

I have often criticized anonymous and other hackers for only targeting the west's private files, as if they had an anti American agenda.

Well, today the Russian's Interior ministry has been hacked, and is available for your reading pleasure.

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An article lamenting that patients who overdosed on opiods continued to be prescribed the drugs by their docs. The headlines suggest bad doctors, but the details show that these were patients in chronic pain...

two possible reasons for the overdose: taking extra medicine for breakthrough pain, and second, that they developed another illness that made them sensitive to the usual dosage, e.g. major infections.
A third reason would be taking another medicine that interacted with the pain medicine e.g. alcohol, anti histamines....

but those in academia who don't treat patients just want to figure out how to treat people without giving out pain medicines.

Well, just use NSAIDS: the dirty little secret is that they also kill... restrict opiods and you will have more people dying of GI bleeds and NSAID overdoses.... or use tylenol/paracetamol, which doesn't really work and can cause fatal overdoses, but never mind.

when you read about "prescription drug" overdoses, you have to distinguish these patients from suicides and from deaths by the drugs diverted or stolen and used by druggies to get high.

Most studies don't do this, but just berate evil doctors who try to treat pain honestly (in contrast to docs who give them out by the hundreds to make money) and so are useless.

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One thing we learned in the latest Ebola epidemic was that some people survived...and now a study shows many have sequella: mainly joint pain and inflamed eyes... and if the eye inflammation is not from autoimmune problems, it might be from the virus hiding there...more studies needed.

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GatewayPundit reports that Michael Moore's latest film is being panned by the powers that be. Why? they claim he is cherry picking examples to bias his film.

DUH.

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StrategyPage reports on the Philippines.

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The Mississippi tends to flood in the Spring, when the snow melts,  but what is behind the January flooding? AlJ says it was a "series of storms"...

more HERE. One problem: The old levee system. Since bad levees were the reason for the "Katrina" flooding in New Orleans, maybe the infrastructure needs to be fixed?

RisingTide has a large section on the fight between the Father of waters and the US Army engineers trying to tame the floods.

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the attack of the mutant ninja squirrels...
via DaveBarry

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