Alito, from Heather Cox Richardson’s October 5 substack:

“Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”

In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.

“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.””

Yes, being forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from a rape is truly an abstraction.  Forcing women to continue a pregnancy that increases their mortality risk compared to the alternative is an abstraction.  And women don’t organize their lives around unplanned pregnancies. Right.

And from RFK Jr.:

He likes to pretend Americans were much healthier 60 years ago: “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. But U.S. life expectancy has jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines.

Writing in the NYT, Thomas Edsall lays out the obvious evidence of a president in mental decline in his opinion piece Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality.  An excerpt:

 “On April 30 of this year Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, Democrats of Rhode Island, placed in the Congressional Record a statement by 36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office: ‘We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.'”

As further evidence, see his DJYT’s social media post from today, September 15, one day after the Supreme Court ruled against his efforts to suborn the midterms in United States Postal Service v. California et al:

“It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” he wrote.

Yes, Donald, it will – but not for this ruling. Rather, see Trump v. United States, one giving him almost unlimited immunity for actions as president, and one that will surely go down in infamy as the principal enabler of this corrupt narcissist’s terrible actions.

From a review of the 2026 Ig Nobel Awards by Adam Kovac, writing in Scientific American:

“Because of concern for the safety of international winners, this was the first time the awards bash occurred outside the U.S.”

Ref. https://improbable.com/2026/03/10/the-ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-is-moving-to-europe-after-35-years-in-the-usa/

The denigration of normal scientific discourse is this country is profoundly disturbing.

From Governing.com: a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that Waymo’s autonomous driving record is better than the average human driver in multiple urban areas. “These results provide further evidence that Waymo’s deployments of L4 vehicles in driverless operation have lower crash rates than human drivers in comparable areas—68% lower in Waymo’s current state of technology and current locations.”  From the Governing story:

• That rate varied by city: In Phoenix, Waymo had a 76 percent lower crash rate than human drivers; 71 percent lower in Los Angeles; 35 percent lower in San Francisco; and 3 percent higher in Austin. (Researchers caution that they had a small sample size for both Waymo and human drivers in Austin, which could have affected results).
• Waymo cars operating in driverless mode also got into fewer collisions severe enough to merit reporting to the police. From 2021-2024, Waymo driverless cars were involved in an average of 1.28 such crashes per million vehicle miles traveled, while human-driven cars were involved in 4.06.
• Compared to human-driven cars, Waymo cars were involved in 85 percent fewer single-vehicle crashes per vehicle miles traveled.
• Waymo cars were also involved in 81 percent fewer injury- or fatality-causing crashes per vehicle miles traveled, compared to human-driven cars.

It’s important to note that this data does not include interstate highway or freeway driving, so the results can’t necessarily be extrapolated to those venues.

No surprise here: news outlets are reporting that federal prosecutors today acknowledged that contractors hired by the Trump administration had “botched” the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and sought to drop charges against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was one of several people accused of vandalizing the landmark. The NY Times said that in a court filing the prosecution said it had received documents showing that the damage to the pool “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration.”   And Jeanine Pirro said “Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the reflecting pool to vandalism.”  Earlier this month she had claimed there was abundant evidence of vandalism.

What a sad administration we live under.

This story by Matthew Shaer in the NYT is a very good read, one that describes the very sad state of EV manufacturing in the United States.   One more example (OMB’s proposed rule that would politicize NIH grant awards is another) of how we in America are currently moving backwards rather than embracing the future.

A large and nicely done (matched sibling to reduce confounding)  study from Hong Kong by Luo S, Gong Q, Ai Y, et al. adds more reassurance to the safety of acetaminophen in pregnancy.  From the study’s key points:

“Question  Does prenatal exposure to paracetamol (acetaminophen) increase the risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in offspring after accounting for unmeasured familial confounding?

Findings  From an initial cohort of 708 020 mother-child pairs in Hong Kong (approximately 43.3% with prenatal paracetamol exposure), a sibling-matched cohort was constructed of 124 333 children who were assessed for ASD and 97 285 for ADHD. Prenatal paracetamol exposure was not associated with an increased risk of either ASD or ADHD and these findings were consistent across paracetamol exposure timing, pattern, and dose.”

Here are two medicine-relevant papers that I found very interesting.  The first discusses the work being done on the development of a fentanyl vaccine in the hope of decreasing the tragic death toll from its non-medical use.  The second is from Eric Topol’s terrific Ground Truths Substack where he talks about two recent papers, one from Germany and the other from Google in Cal, both looking at the performance of agentic AIs compared against clinicians.  Both were text based (not verbal) interactions, one with an agent presenting real world HPIs and the other with patient actors — and so decidedly not real world scenarios. Nevertheless, in both cases the AI agents outperformed real world physicians.  Read Topol’s post for his excellent summary, cautions, and analysis.

• Schweitzer K. Inside the Push for a Fentanyl Vaccine. JAMA. Published online June 12, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.6392

• Eric Topol’s Agentic AI Comes to Medicine here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2850522

From “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This” — a May 20, 2026 NY Times editorial:

“Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.

In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.”

Yup.