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June 14, 2006
There are some remarkably evil people in this world. They come in all kinds. Some would probably seem relatively ordinary or perhaps respectable (like some of the leaders of the US government). There's the recent example of the unlamented murderer al-Zarqawi, whose passing is a net plus for the…
June 14, 2006
The US House of Representatives just did what it does best: spend money according to the most life-denying priorities one can imagine, turning human values upside down. Surprise.
The House bill (which must be reconciled with a more generous but equally egregious Senate version) vomits up $94.5…
June 13, 2006
Time out for a bit of infectious disease terminology. The words pathogenic, virulent and transmissible get tossed around a lot when talking about the bird flu virus and the possibilities of a pandemic. They are sometimes used interchangeably. They aren't interchangeable, however, and their…
June 13, 2006
At a meeting in Jakarta of Indonesian health and agriculture ministries, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the National Commission on Bird Flu, one Indonesian official announces the obvious while another tells us that what is obvious is yet to be shown…
June 12, 2006
Computer programmers are associated with computer viruses, not human viruses. But at the end of April an Indian computer programmer landed in Boston incubating measles virus. He had been hired by a business investment firm whose offices were on the 18th floor of a Boston skyscraper, the John…
June 12, 2006
Holy shit! Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway tags me with the Random Eight meme and no sooner do I get it done (incurring her wrath because I didn't pass it on), when I learn that as a ScienceBlogs newcomer we also got tagged with the pi meme by Janet (Dr. Free-Ride).
It could be a lot worse.…
June 11, 2006
A blog meme has just landed on my head, like a deposit from a flu infected migratory bird (affirmative answer to the question, "Do you have any grey poop on?"). It got dumped on me by my Flu Wiki partner, Melanie Mattson, maestra of the acclaimed Just a Bump in the Beltway blog. I tagged her about…
June 11, 2006
It's June, the month of weddings, and as it turns out the 34th anniversary of our own wedding. Mrs. R. and I are off at still another wedding this weekend, but I ran into some romantic vows to share with everyone. It seems two hackers decided to establish a symbolic link and coded their wedding…
June 11, 2006
No surprise that the American public is more concerned about how to pay for higher education than they are about the ideology of its purveyors. If I had to pay for it today (and were still paying my kids' freight), that would be my number one concern, too. I'd still worry about what they were…
June 10, 2006
One of the most valuable things WHO has to offer in an influenza pandemic is information. Unfortunately, this hasn't been their strong suit. They have been relatively slow in disseminating epidemiological information, mainly because they have not been able to get good cooperation from the member…
June 10, 2006
If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked. In 2003 Congress passed a bill creating the Citizens' Health Care Working Group. The bill was the infamous Medicare prescription drug "benefit."
The Working Group was something else. They just recommended universal health coverage.
"Assuring…
June 9, 2006
Welcome to our new house at ScienceBlogs. We trust our old readers had no trouble with the directions to get here. You can wander off to the kitchen and fix yourself a drink while we introduce ourselves to our new neighbors.
We describe EM as a forum for argument and discussion about progressive…