mikethemadbiologist

I don't have an answer, but the picture asks the question quite nicely: (from here)

I've posted before about the possible approval of cefquinome in agriculture, and why this is a stupid thing to even consider. So some colleagues and I got cranky and wrote a letter to the FDA. Here's the letter: Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D. Acting Commissioner U.S. Food and Drug Administration…

I visited the Smithsonian this Thanksgiving, and in the Sackler Museum is an exhibit of very old bibles (both Christian and Jewish). Actually, there are very few complete bibles more than 1,200 years old on display; most 'bibles' older than that are fragments, often a chapter or less. I started…

Massachusetts' Gov. Mitt Romney's ongoing effort to turn Massachusetts into Mississippi has entered a new phase: embryonic stem cell research. In Romney's last-ditch desperate attempt to buff up his Republican credentials, he has appointed a budget planner to be executive director of a board…

The NY Times had a pearl-clutching article by Daniel Glover about supposed conflicts of interest that progressive bloggers have (even though they typically identify those conflicts...), which has been rebutted all over the place, so I won't waste time doing that. I do have a simple question for…

The story about Kenyan religious leaders who are attempting to stifle evolutionary biology at the Kenyan National Museum is making the rounds of the progressive political blogs (interesting, how the right-wing blogs aren't covering this...). Within this story, there is a real tragedy: Kenya has a…

Here are some good links for you. First, the science: I have a post about the politics of cholera. Chris Mooney has the wacky idea that judges should actually know something about global warming before ruling on it. More about Scalia's ignorance. "Four Nobel Laureates Walk Into a Bar..." RPM has…

The best internet quiz, EVAH! My results and the link, below. Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 100% You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as…

While my theological beliefs (which have very little to do with my religious observance) tend towards that 'ol time agnostic monism, Nicholas Kristof, in one of the daffiest columns he's ever written, has decided that the Christopath Right "has largely retreated from the culture wars." Therefore,…

Glenn Greenwald, in an excellent post about privacy in the computer database era, relates the following chillling story about the public release of his personal information (italics mine): I had an ultimately inconsequential but nonetheless quite illustrative personal experience with this several…

The UK really doesn't deserve this: first, they're dragged into Iraq, and now, they're being invaded by creationists. Even though the Department for Education and Skills has called creationism "not appropriate to support the science curriculum", many science teachers may be using Discovery…

A while ago, I defined Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Complusive Centrist Disorder has always bothered me because a certain policy or view will mysteriously be labelled 'centrist' regardless of where it actually falls on the political spectrum, and suddenly it will be far more respectable than other…

At various political blogs around the internets, there has been some discussion of revisiting the Equal Rights Amendment. I really don't think that's in the cards, but, in a very good post, Amanda discusses, among other things, one of Aspazia's students who opposes the ERA because it would mandate…

One of the constant refrains I always hear is that diarrheal diseases, such as shigellosis, cholera, and other bacterial dysenteries, could be easily solved if there were adequate potable water and sanitation. That's completely correct. It's also completely unrealistic, as a recent editorial by…

Not predictable. Predicted. Over at DailyKos is a powerful diary by the wife of a Vietnam & Iraq I war veteran. During a discussion with a bunch of conservative college students, the following happened (italics mine): A little blonde got up enough nerve to say something. My husband wouldn't…

A while ago, I posted about the Missouri legislative committee that claimed that abortion had led to a shortage of workers which then resulted in illegal immigration. Really. I can't make this garbage up. Now, Nehomee over at Shakespeare's Sister has observed the same thing in Georgia: Rep.…

Well, she did have an article published in the New York Press about illegal advertising in New York City. Go read.

There was a time when think tanks on occasion actually thought. Not so, at the conservative Hoover Institute, where Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer slimed Pelosi, claiming she had to explain why her family's vineyard does not use union employees. Schweizer claimed Pelosi was a hypocrite…

The other title of this post could have been "The War on Christmas and the Politics of Failed Withdrawl." Regardless, Tuesday, the Catholic League launched the first salvo in its ongoing War Against the Jews On Christmas with a large ad on the op-ed page of the NY Times. Here's what the Catholic…

So finally, a war supporter, albeit a former one, proposes something kind of like an exit strategy. George Packer argues that we should stay long enough to get exit visas those Iraqis who helped the U.S.: Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy…

Thank you, Dennis Prager for your anti-Muslim bigotry: at least we know where the modern conservatives really stand. Despite Article IV of the U.S. Constitution which states that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States",…

There are now indications that more Russian exile critics of Putin who live in the UK might have been poisoned with polonium-210. Doesn't that mean that the West's ability to stop state-sponsored terrorism even with all of the 'necessary' encroachments on our civil liberties is utterly non-…

Sounds like a civil war to me. And as civil wars go, it's pretty awful. A year ago, I was comparing it to Northern Ireland. Actually, comparison is the wrong word, since Iraq is far more brutal than Northern Ireland ever was. This is not something 'that happened.' Those who supported the war,…

To avoid possible brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Sebastian Mallaby's columns only be read using the StupidVu 9000 Someone needs to tell Bush that when I wrote a post titled "Democrats Crush GOP; Bush Declares 'Mandate'", I was joking. Now that El Jefe Maximo has psychologically…

It's nice to see that even in the midst of two overseas conflicts, the U.S. military can find time to obsess about homosexuality. The military has downgraded homosexuality from a "disorder" to a "circumstance." This means homosexuality is considered equivalent to stammering or stuttering,…

There are reports that the U.S. has cut a deal with Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, so he can negotiate with the Sunni insurgents: According to the Iraqi newspaper Al- Quds al-Arabi, James Baker, the Bush family's Mr. Fixit, recently met with one of Saddam Hussein's lawyers in Amman…

As a part of the Carnival of the Liberals, I wrote a post about our failing political discourse. Here's something related from the archives. In an excellent post on news reporting, Thoughts from Kansas writes (italics mine): The same thing is a major part of the ongoing creationism battles. A good…

One topic that I don't discuss enough is the role that the agricultural use of antibiotics plays in the evolution (and ecology) of antibiotic resistance. A recent review in Clinical Microbiology and Infection describes how the illegal use of nitrofuran antibiotics in Portugese agriculture led to…

Here's some follow-up thoughts on my Salmonella-related moment of fame that I reposted yesterday So while on vacation, I was mentioned in a NY Times article about diseases that can be caught from your fish tank. The moral of the story is when cleaning your fish tank, pretend it's toilet water,…

Ok, so after complaining about how no one reads my posts on antibiotic resistance, one reader read this post about the FDA overriding an expert panel that advised against using cefquinome in agriculture, and then went and read the recently released minutes of the hearing (all eight gajillion pages…