Policy
stoat | October 12, 2016Post-referendum thoughts, and indeed Say no to Brexit refer. But so do Timmy's NO, DON'T LET MPS HAVE A VOTE ON BREXIT (Timmy is very shouty, as you'd expect) and The Brexit Conundrum - Freedom Of Movement Means Only Hard, Or Clean, Brexit Is Possible (so perhaps it is the ASI that is shouty. Well, you know what they're like).
Before we get into all the messy and unpleasant politics, here's a picture.
Chamois against the Pelvoux, seen from where the glacier Jean Gauthier used to be. You should see my close-up of a marmotte. Anyway, onwards.
[Far too late update: I've now added the question…
oracknows | September 27, 2016I’m sure that most of you watched the Presidential debate on Monday night, just as I did. Over the years, these debates have always always painful for me to watch, given the candidates’ tendency to answer the question they want to answer rather than the question actually answered; to find ways to spew prepackaged talking points into answers, whether they’re related to the question or not; and, above all, to see how much spin they can get away with. Particularly annoying is when they pander to their base with particularly brain dead bon mots. Candidates from both parties do it, of course, but…
gregladen | September 10, 2016Why is America the Greatest Country in the World?
Diversity and opportunity. And freedom. Lots of freedom, freedom is great. I can tell you, I know freedom and I know we have lots of it, more than any other country. And diversity, we've almost got that under control too.
But seriously ...
If you are like me, the tirade eventually given by the protagonist in the following clip was already formulating in your head for the first two minutes of this scene, and when it spilled out (in a form better than you or I would have managed), you were like "Yeah. Go baby!" (Or words to that effect.)
It is…
jrosenhouse | September 8, 2016On Morning Joe today, Mike Barnicle asked Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson what he would do about Aleppo. Johnson's reply was, “What is Aleppo?”
We're done here. Johnson should withdraw from the race, go home, and never show his face in public again.
When did running for President become a big joke? When did it become something you do on a whim, just because? The Libertarian Party is receiving more attention than usual this year since they have a superficially serious ticket, and since the two main candidates are unpopular. Turns out, though, that Johnson has managed to…
oracknows | September 5, 2016It's been nearly two weeks since a new "right to try" bill (AB 1668) passed the California legislature with overwhelming support and was sent to Governor Jerry Brown's desk to be signed. Thus far, he has not signed it, which is good, but neither have I seen a story that he has vetoed it either. In the meantime I learned some more about a federal version of the bill, which I will discuss after a brief recap of why right-to-try is such bad policy, which will lead into a discussion of the federal bill.
For those unfamiliar with right-to-try, such bills claim to allow terminally ill (or, in some…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2016The AP is breathlessly reporting that 85 out of 154 people coming from private interests (as opposed to governmental functionaries) who met with Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton Foundation. The headline: “Many Donors To Clinton Foundation Met With Her At State.”
Perhaps you are wondering why this is news. Big donors to the Clinton Foundation are generally major players in world affairs, and those are precisely the kind of people the Secretary of State will naturally meet with. Were the people in question unworthy of a meeting with the…
jdupuis | August 21, 2016Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change?
Astrophysicist wins Twitter burn of the year with her reply to climate change skeptic
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
Dazzling blue lakes are forming in Antarctica — and they’ve got scientists worried
The Galileo gambit and other stories: the three main tactics of climate denial
Greenland Melt Could Expose Hazardous Cold War Waste
Time for the hard work on meaningful climate policy
Effective climate change regulation: Let’s transform Canadian cars
Suncor and province discuss “stranding” some oilsands…
oracknows | August 7, 2016As hard as it might be to believe, almost as long as there have been vaccinations, there has been an antivaccine movement, and as long as there has been an antivaccine movement, there have been parents who refuse to vaccinate. Indeed, in the 1800s, there were even groups with names like the Anti-Vaccination Society of America and the National Anti-Vaccination League. These days, antivaccine groups tend to hide their true nature with names like the National Vaccine Information Center and Generation Rescue, but the opposition to vaccinations is the same, just with different evils attributed to…
lborkowski | July 7, 2016The 5-3 Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt last week was a welcome step for women's health, but resulted in the removal of only some of the barriers many US women still face in accessing abortion services. At issue in the case was Texas law HB 2, which required abortion facilities to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers and providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a facility. In the opinion of the Court, Justice Breyer explains "neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon…
cmonforton | June 27, 2016The Supreme Court of Canada ruled this month that breast cancer can be considered work-related under the country’s workers’ compensation law. The 7-1 ruling supported the case of three women who were employed as lab technicians at a hospital in British Columbia. Over a 20 year period, exposures in their work environment included solvents known to be carcinogenic and emissions from incinerated medical waste. Four other workers in the hospital lab also develop breast cancer.
The women filed claims for workers’ compensation arguing that their exposure to carcinogens on-the-job was a factor in…
jrosenhouse | June 7, 2016The inevitable has now occurred. Barring something earth-shattering, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President. She is the first woman to become the nominee of a major political party. In fact, she is the first woman even to be a serious candidate for President.
In her speech tonight, Hillary took time out to make a gracious mention of Bernie Sanders and all that he has accomplished in his campaign. Her audience cheered. Bernie, for his part, made only a brief, classless mention of Hillary (making hey of the fact that it was she who called him). His audience booed…
jdupuis | May 30, 2016I'll be attending upcoming Canadian Library Association National Forum, a kind of sunset conference as CLA reimagines and recreates itself. The idea is to take the pulse of Canadian librarians on the important issues in the library-related landscape. I'll be curating the session on Canada's National Digital Strategy, including presentations by me and two others, Emily Landriault and Bobby Glushko.
The details are below.
Digital Strategy and the Government of Canada
Presentation speakers
Emily Landriault: Open Government and Open Data
Bobby Glushko: Cyberbullying and Doxing
John Dupuis:…
lborkowski | May 26, 2016Last week, the World Health Organization stopped short of declaring a yellow fever outbreak centered in Angola to be a public health emergency of international concern, but its emergency advisory committee “emphasized the serious national and international risks posed by urban yellow fever outbreaks.” Angola has reported more than 2,000 suspected cases of the disease and nearly 300 deaths. Cases among travelers from Angola have also been reported in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya.
Like Zika, yellow fever is a flavivirus spread by Aedes mosquitos. Typical symptoms include…
oracknows | May 20, 2016it was less than a year ago that I described a bill wending its way through Congress called the 21st Century Cures Act “old vinegary wine in a new bottle.” The reason I characterized the bill that way was because it really was nothing new and it rested on a very old fallacy, namely that the only way to speed up medical “innovation” is to weaken the FDA and its standards for drug and medical device approval, which is exactly what the 21st Century Cures Act would do if passed into law. It’s basically the American cousin to the British Saatchi Bill, which in essence proposed to do very similar…
oracknows | May 15, 2016It is an unquestioned belief among believers in alternative medicine and even just among many people who do not trust conventional medicine that conventional medicine kills. Not only does exaggerating the number of people who die due to medical complications or errors fit in with the world view of people like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola, but it's good for business. After all, if conventional medicine is as dangerous as claimed, then alternative medicine starts looking better in comparison.
In contrast, real physicians and real medical scientists are very much interested in making medicine…
gregladen | May 5, 2016I'm going to publish my full review of The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto closer to the publication date, which is June 7th. (I believe you can use the above link to pre-order the book.) But I just wanted to let you know the book exists, and is amazing, you will want to read it. You will definitely, absolutely, not want to not read it. It is a must read.
This isn't just someone yammering about the lack of respect for science in America, or about the Republican Party's antiscienceosity, etc. Shawn's book is actually a history of…
oracknows | May 2, 2016[Note: Since this was written, Donald Trump won Indiana and Ted Cruz has suspended his campaign. This is why I changed the title of this post on Tuesday night. Meet your presumptive nominee, Republicans.]
I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump and vaccines in a while. When last I did write about him, I enumerated his long, sordid history of making ridiculously pseudoscientific antivaccine statements linking vaccines to autism dating back at least to 2007. That was when I first discovered him and referred to him as the latest celebrity antivaccinationist drinking the Kool Aid of vaccine…
gregladen | April 28, 2016Voting is not party involvement.
We hear a lot of talk these days about "voters" being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform -- why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us -- that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call…
lborkowski | April 26, 2016Reading over the list of 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners makes clear just how essential journalism's watchdog role is to public health. In 2015, news organizations devoted considerable resources to researching, reporting, and commenting on slave labor in international seafood supply chains; funding cuts resulting in dangerous conditions in Florida mental hospitals; and failures in justice systems across the country. Bringing public attention to these problems is a first step to fixing them, and in many cases, this reporting has gotten results.
The Associated Press won the Public Service prize for…
gregladen | April 14, 2016A while back Vox produced a tax modeler that would tell you how your taxes would change with Sanders plan. It raised most people's taxes by a few thousand dollars. But the modeling was misleading because the same plan would probably reduce health care costs for those same individuals.
I pointed that out back at the time but most of the response to me pointed out was the ridiculous recitation of completely wrong information (from both sides of the debate) so I dropped it because it really doesn't matter. President Sanders or President Clinton would not produce any tax plans. Not their job.…