Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology. Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.
mikethemadbiologist
Posts by this author
January 10, 2009
Did I mention how idiotic it is for Democrats to be negotiating against themselves regarding the porntax stimulus? Josh Marshall thinks so too (italics mine):
It would be far better on many counts to bring in substantial Republican support for this bill. And I don't just mean that in the BS sense…
January 9, 2009
In an excellent review blasting the false dichotomy of more versus less regulation (for additional commentary, see Amanda and Ezra Klein), economist Dean Baker proposes that the government get into the drug development business directly:
...the government could pay for the research upfront and make…
January 8, 2009
More good stuff that I'll never get around to blogging about. Science first:
Nature's "Evolution Gems"
Big Increase Coming for NIH -- Maybe
Lomberg Lies on Global Warming to Make Money
Other stuff:
A Memo to Obama on Israel
A New New Deal?
Bristol Palin to Teens: Don't Get Pregnant
Is the…
January 8, 2009
This weekend, I was going to blog about framing the tax cuts as the 'Pornography Stimulus Plan', since the last tax cut rebate benefited few sectors other than the pornography industry. It would be similar to the Republican term for the estate tax--'the death' tax.
And then Larry Flynt arrived…
January 7, 2009
Along with many of my fellow ScienceBloglings, I have doubts about Sanjay Gupta. As far as I can tell, Gupta has no experience managing an organization whatsoever.
For me, this is a serious problem. The Surgeon General isn't just a spokesman, he is also the head of the Public Health Service, a…
January 7, 2009
I was thrilled to hear that Thomas Geoghehan is running for Rahm Emanuel's open Congress seat. It's an at-large election, so there's a good chance he could win. I've written about Geoghehan before, and his piece about Social Security is worth reading.
Why Geoghehan is running:
We're deep in an…
January 6, 2009
Gallup has released a poll that shows that the percentage of Americans who use the internet for more than an hour has increased to 48 percent. But some of the claims of change in use by demographic group puzzle me--I don't think they're significant.
First, the data (percent who use the internet…
January 6, 2009
While others have commented on the gross ineptitude of OSHA, which is charged with worker safety, during the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain, one point that wasn't raised is that the OSHA fiasco also shows why we need universal healthcare that has government insurance, not private. From the…
January 5, 2009
Democrats won the election handily. Why are we rolling ourselves? I thought Obama would be smarter than the usual Democrat and not negotiate against his own position on behalf of the Republicans. Apparently, I was wrong, since that seems to be the impetus behind making 40% of the 'stimulus' tax…
January 5, 2009
Nothing could be a greater waste of taxpayer dollars than the proposal floated by the Obama administration to give every household another tax rebate (supposedly $500). In fact, it's probably one of the few things that conservative economist Bruce Bartlett and I would agree on. Last March I wrote…
January 4, 2009
Here are some links for you. Science and medicine firstest:
Life-shortening bacteria vs. dengue mosquitoes
Anti-vaccination = anti-feminist?
Teach Your Children Well
DIY BIO: clone at home but kill them later
Let The Science Speak For Itself
On Being Remembered in 2009...
Other stuff:
Can…
January 4, 2009
In the midst of all of the talk about hitting Hamas hard (or even eliminating them as a political entity), no one is asking what will happen if they are so weak that they have to relinquish power.
The assumption is that a moderate Palestinian faction will arise. But, after so much violence, there'…
January 3, 2009
Dengre reminds us that the Abramoff investigation is ongoing, and that the outcome of this investigation could bring down a lot of influential Republicans:
To date, sixteen people--including Abramoff--have plead guilty in the scandal and as terms of their pleas they have been cooperating with the…
January 3, 2009
Regular readers know I've been beating this drum since the inception of this blog, but the Krugman says it well:
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans' stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has…
January 2, 2009
If you thought this post was about is more wrong, the Israelis or the Palestinians, you've come to the wrong place. What I want to talk about is something that, in the early 1980s, I called Reaganite Judaism.
If the term is unclear, it is a backhanded reference to the nascent neoconservative…
January 1, 2009
A loyal reader forwarded to me a link of an imaginary July 4, 2009 edition of The New York Times. My favorite was the fake op-ed (not) by columnist Thomas Friedman:
The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a…
January 1, 2009
And do we want to? Maybe it could help formally include non-publishing activities in a scientist's evaluation?
When I first read this PLoS Computational Biology article, "I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number", I was ready to beat down on its ass. After all, how seriously can you take something…
December 31, 2008
By way of Edward Glaeser's post (via ScienceBlogling Jonah) about the relative stability of housing prices in the New York City area, I was looking at the S&P/Case-Shiller Seasonally Adjusted Home Price Values (I really need new hobbies...). The really odd thing I noticed is that in the…
December 30, 2008
...nominated by bloggers themselves. Jon Swift has put together a self-nominated list of the best blog posts of 2008. My contribution is here, but, as the kids say, go read the whole thing. It will keep you busy for a while....
December 29, 2008
...why not letting bygones be bygones matters. Driftglass crushes Andrew Sullivan in one of the best posts of the year:
George W. Bush was not Conservatism's aberration, but its apotheosis. His reign of faith-based disasters, failure, treason and lies all grew from the soil Sullivan and other…
December 29, 2008
So, does the Mad Biologist follow the advice given by big-time bloggers? Like Farhad Manjoo, I've actually read (ok, skimmed) The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, but Manjoo gives an electronic version of the guide, upgraded to include advice from other bloggers. Onto the advice:
Set…
December 28, 2008
I don't mean hope in the same way the Obama campaign did. Ian Welsh writes an incredibly powerful post about the personal politics of hopelessness--you should read the whole thing (it's arguably one of the best posts of the year). But this little section struck me:
The US now has the least…
December 27, 2008
By lowering its benchmark interest rate virtually to zerohttp://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/12/median_wages.html, the Federal Reserve has eliminated monetary policy as a financial tool to aid the economy. Good riddance, because this was never a financial crisis.
What led to the whole…
December 26, 2008
So, if you go on the teevee machine and tell people that investment banks should be allowed to pay out dividends, and you're simply an economics professor, we should probably take the claim at face value. But what if you have tens of thousands of shares as compensation for being a board member?…
December 25, 2008
By way of Pandagon, I came across this good rebuttal by David J. Buller of evolutionary psychology. He's certainly nicer about it than I am, since I think much of EP exists to justify middle-aged faculty sleeping with their younger graduate students. As the kids say, read the whole thing.
December 25, 2008
Since, once again, my brethren and I failed to destroy Christmas, despite our new tactic of infiltrating the U.S. with cells of domestic homosexualists, I'll wish everyone a Merry Christmas (only if you celebrate it of course):
I had no idea that moose were traditional Christmas animals...
December 24, 2008
I go away for vacation, and the most interesting arguments always seem to break out (at least, no one can claim it's my fault). Lost in the entire kerfuffle over whether or not science journalists are wackaloon idiot fucknozzles is the question of why did Johnson bash ERV in the first place.…
December 23, 2008
By way of Steve Benen, we read that, in response to Lou Dobbs' question of "What is dominant in terms of influencing weather?", CNN meterologist Chad Myers responds:
To think we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant. Mother nature is so big. The world is so big. The oceans are so…
December 22, 2008
I'm loath to call Scienceblogling Josh of Thoughts from Kansas out since he was one of my earliest linkers and readers, back when I was but a wee Mad Biologist; I probably wouldn't have the readership that I have, in part, were it not for Josh. But Josh wrote something about Eric Lander that…
December 22, 2008
Every so often, conservatives bring up the flat tax, wherein everyone pays the same amount of income tax, regardless of how much they make. Most of these plans, unless you want to eliminate the entire Pentagon, will raise the tax burden on the lower middle and middle class, and lower them on the…