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Maps of Seven Deadly Sins in America

Via Andrew Sullivan, One nation, seven sins: Geographers measure propensity for evil in states, counties. Here's the methodology: Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. On this map, done in yellow, Clark County is bile (see map on Page 2). Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts -- robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars. Rendered in green, of course, Clark County is emerald. Wrath was calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes -- murder, assault and rape -- reported to the FBI per…

On the Origin of African Pygmies, follow up 2

Another response by Etienne Patin, lead author of Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, to a follow up post: As to your hypothesis represented by the cladogram, this is a quite reasonable and interesting idea. Actually, the only method that we could use to prove it is to find human remains of Pygmies dating back to Bantu expansions, in regions that were colonized by Bantus. Population genetics cannot infer the presence of extinct populations. However, as stated in our article, Western and Eastern Pygmies may…

Harvard Muslim chaplain sees wisdom in my killing!

Talk Islam points to a controversy over a comment that the Muslim chaplain made in regards to apostasy on a listserv. First he outlines the dominant legal position with Islam today & historically in regards to apostasy: There are a few places on the Net where one can find informed discussions of this issue (Search ["Abdul Hakim Murad"|Faraz Rabbani" AND "apostasy"]) . The preponderant position in all of the 4 sunni madhahib (and apparently others of the remaining eight according to one contemporary `alim) is that the verdict is capital punishment. Of concern for us is that this can only…

Is human uniqueness a matter of copy number?

A burst of segmental duplications in the genome of the African great ape ancestor: It is generally accepted that the extent of phenotypic change between human and great apes is dissonant with the rate of molecular change...Between these two groups, proteins are virtually identical...cytogenetically there are few rearrangements that distinguish ape-human chromosomes3, and rates of single-base-pair change...and retrotransposon activity...have slowed particularly within hominid lineages when compared to rodents or monkeys. Studies of gene family evolution indicate that gene loss and gain are…

Christianity - Old Testament = Anti-Semitism?

In the comments about the term Judeo-Christian the Marcionite tendencies of liberal Christianity was mentioned. Sometimes I have encountered the idea that a rejection of the Hebrew Bible within Christianity naturally results in Anti-Semitism (granted, the argument is often from neconservatives who are attempting to solidify the evangelical-neocon alliance). I decided to look into the GSS.   Fundamentalist Moderate Liberal Relative to marry a Jew? Strongly favor 10.4 13.2 15.2 Favor 15.8 16.3 13.2 Neither 54.7 57.5 59.4 Oppose 11.4 9.2 9.0 Strongly oppose 7.7 3.8 3.2…

The angle of Stuff White People Like

Why White People Like 'Stuff White People Like': ...Basically, this joke breaks down as "Congratulate a white person and they will feel smugly good about themselves." It's the perfect go-to punchline for Stuff White People Like, because it's really what the site is all about. Because if there's one thing white people really like, it's pretending to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior. My friend Reiham Salam is not a fan. I have only read a few entries on Stuff White People Like over the past month. I don't have a visceral dislike of the site, but it is…

Bird flu after 22 months

When we first began to cover the bird flu problem -- back in 2004 -- it wasn't being discussed much anywhere, including the blogs. We started talking about it for two main reasons. First, it seemed to us, as it seemed to many informed public health scientists, that this was a possible freight train coming down the tracks. We didn't know then (nor we know now) how far the train was, whether it would get all the way to us or how fast it would be going if it did get to us. But we could feel the vibrations on the tracks and we knew enough about train wrecks of the past to worry. That was the…

Public Resources, Private Resources

Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like "But that would mean going back tothe stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!" I think it is fair to say that variations on the "without power, life would be intolerable" is a common assumption. Part of the thing that bothers me about it is that I don't think it is true. I've spent a lot of time studying history, and I don't think the lives of all of those in human history who preceeded us were intolerable. I am extraordinarily…

About that crank

So on the blog birthday we asked our dear readers what they've learned over the last year, and as a test we gave them this crank who attacks the bisphosphonate anti-osteoporosis drugs in his article "the delusion of bone drugs". I think the reader with the best grade is LanceR or Martin, but SurgPA would have done better if he had shown his work. But let's talk about some signs that something you're reading is unscientific crankery. In this case, we don't have a particularly sophisticated crank, and he let's the cat out of the bag in his very profile: Because of Bill's increasing concerns…

Can your pet dog make you sick? Multiple Sclerosis and Canine Distemper Virus

Student guest post by Raj Nair. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease that affects the central nervous system (CNS) consisting of the brain and the spinal cord [1]. It is thought to be an autoimmune disease since individual's immune system attacks their own healthy tissues [1]. However, studies to ascertain triggering factors such as genetic, environmental, and infectious causes are still in progress [2]. So one wonders "Who is more susceptible to develop MS" Literature reveals that typically people between 20 and 50 years of age are commonly diagnosed…

Egnor lashes out at Dunford and hits himself in the face

Ah Egnor. The chief purveyor of foot-in-mouth disease at Evolution News and Views takes on Dunford's recent post on the intellectual dishonesty of the intelligent design creationist movement and shows exactly why Dunford has a point. Intelligent design is a cheesy attempt to smear a patina of scientific legitimacy on creationist ideas. Dunford quite reasonably points out that at least the creationists are honest about their objectives, while the ID cranks play a game of hiding their creationist dogma behind psuedoscientific nonsense. Egnor takes offense, and suggests that Dunford is…

Monster pythons of the Everglades: Inside Nature's Giants series 2, part II

Episode 2 of series 2 of Inside Nature's Giants was devoted to pythons (for an article reviewing ep 1, go here). Specifically, to Burmese pythons Python molurus. And, quite right too. Snakes are among the weirdest and most phenomenally modified of tetrapods: in contrast to we boring tetrapodal tetrapods with our big limb girdles, long limbs and less than 100 vertebrae, we're talking about tubular reptiles with a few hundred vertebrae, stretched organs, distensible jaws and a total or virtual absence of limbs and limb girdles [montage above shows Simon Watt with captive Burmese python (©…

Basic Complexity Classes: P and NP

Now that we've gone through a very basic introduction to computational complexity, we're ready to take a high-level glimpse at some of the more interesting things that arise from it. The one that you'll hear about most often is "P vs NP", which is what I'm going to write about today. So, what are P and NP? P and NP are two very broad classes of computational problems. When we're talking about P and NP, we're talking about the intrinsic complexity of a problem - that is, a minimum complexity bound on the growth rate of the worst case performance of any algorithm that solves the problem. P…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 3

The Bottleneck Years Chapter 2 Table of Contents Chapter 4 by H.E. Taylor Chapter 3 Electronic Democracy, May 11, 2055 As I walked to CCU, I thought about what Jon was getting into. It was just like him to breeze in, drop a zinger and split before anyone could reply sensibly. When I was growing up, I instinctively avoided politics. I knew the broad outline of our political history, only because it was unavoidable. A lot of what had happened in North America revolved around energy. Dad lived through the oil crunch and sometimes he tried to explain to us what life was like before. He…

The Poincare Conjecture

Tuesday's New York Times had this lengthy article about progress on one of the great open problems in mathematics: Poincare's conjecture. Actually, it looks increasingly likely that the problem is no longer open: Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back…

Messier Monday: The Closest Messier Original, M39

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all." -Abraham Lincoln It might be Veterans Day / Armistice Day all around the world, but it's still Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! We may have been fighting wars for all of human history, but nearly all of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue go back long before that. Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://www.lex.sk.ca/. Today, we take an in-depth look at one of the brightest and closest star clusters in the entire night sky, one that -- despite being…

Messier Monday: A Bright, Close Delight of the Winter Skies, M34

"The deeper reason we fear our own glory is that once we let others see it, they will have seen the truest us, and that is nakedness indeed. [...] It is an awkward thing to shimmer when everyone else around you is not, to walk in your glory with an unveiled face when everyone else is veiling his." -John Eldredge Welcome back to another Messier Monday, where the glittering wonders of the night sky -- visible to anyone at the right latitudes with even simple equipment -- are on display for everyone. The bright collection of 110 deep-sky wonders include star clusters, globular clusters, galaxies…

Messier Monday: A Secretly Active Spiral Galaxy, M77

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." -Patrick Henry It's not a good idea to showcase a galaxy for you every Messier Monday, considering that even a crescent Moon can render most of them completely unobservable. Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, however, a very special spiral will be visible after sunset for the next six months or so in a relatively nondescript part of the night sky. Out of the 110 deep-sky objects that comprise the Messier catalogue, a full forty of them are galaxies, although today's object wasn't recognized as…

Scrivener on Linux: Oh Well...

UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads. So, I'm no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody! Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with…

Quantum Computing with Microwaves

It's been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging, first because I was trying to get some papers of my own written, and then because I was frantically preparing for my classes this term (which start Wednesday). I've piled up a number of articles worth writing up in that time, including two papers from an early-August issue of Nature, on advances in experimental quantum computation (the first is available as a free pdf because it was done at NIST, and thus is not copyrightable). These were also written up in Physics World, but they're worth digging into in more detail, in the usual Q&A…

The choanoflagellate genome and metazoan evolution

What are the key innovations that led to the evolution of multicellularity, and what were their precursors in the single-celled microbial life that existed before the metazoa? We can hypothesize at least two distinct kinds of features that had to have preceded true multicellularity. The obvious feature is that cells must stick together; specific adhesion molecules must be present that link cells together, that aren't generically sticky and bind the organism to everything. So we need molecules that link cell to cell. Another feature of multicellular animals is that they secrete…

Much Ado About Nothing

I've not commented on the brouhaha that has surrounded Harvard President Lawrence Summers' comment at a conference last week that innate differences might have some role to play in explaining the relative underrepresentation of women in math and science (and relative overrepresentation of women in English and the humanities). Let me do so now. Bottom line: *shrug*. This is controversial? I think the whole situation is one giant overreaction based more on emotional response than on rational thinking. For evidence of that, I submit the statements of MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins upon hearing…

Jaffa on Bork

Timothy Sandefur was kind enough to remind me after my post on Robert Bork about an essay by Harry Jaffa called The False Profits of American Conservatism. Jaffa, a student of the late Leo Strauss, is one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in the country and his essay highlights the major fault line that divides conservatism - the Declaration of Independence. He uses the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a pretext for examining this divide, noting that during those debates, while Lincoln was invoking the principles found in the Declaration as valid and binding in all times and places,…

Reader Request: Career Options

A while back, after handing in my manuscript and before SteelyKid, I asked readers to suggest blog topics. I got to a few of them already, but there's one more that I've been meaning to comment on, from tcmJOE: I'm a physics undergrad about to begin my final year, and while I'm still thinking of physics grad school, I'm starting to feel less and less inclined to go into academia. Would you talk some more about career options for physics students outside of academia/pure research? In many ways, I'm a lousy person to ask about this-- I went directly from college into physics grad school, with…

Judith Curry plants her flag

Judith Curry has become quite a blog sensation, and did so long before starting her own. I have expressed my frustration with her in the past for a seemingly reckless affinity for "hit and run" postings. I will appreciatively grant that she comments alot, and engages many conversants extensively, but she has posted many very inflammatory or technically flawed diatribes in the past, the kind sorely needing defending or ammending, and left the clear and substantive rebuttals unanswered or inadequately answered. Frequently interested readers were left with only vague promises of "more on that…

Evolution of the Lexicon

I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to it. Yet. So here we go. The tail does not wag the dog The primary finding of the Pagel et al. study is this: When comparing lexicons from different languages, meanings that shared a common word in an ancestral language change over time more slowly if the word in question is used more…

Understanding Michele Bachmann in the context of Human Evolution

This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party is hard to understand in this way: How can a party that is trying to become more rather than less relevant keep putting Michele Bachmann on the podium in places like the National Party Convention and, most recently, at CEPAC??!?!?!? I can't explain any of this, but I can at least redescribe the…

Dubious Legal Analysis From the Discovery Institute

This one requires some set-up. Eric Hedin is an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University. Last year, he was accused of teaching intelligent design, and of making disparaging remarks about non-Christian religions, in a science seminar that he was teaching. Some students complained, and the situation came to the attention of Jerry Coyne. Jerry made a big fuss about it at his blog and wrote letters to Ball State. Eventually the university forced Hedin to stop doing what he was doing, and they issued a strong statement that intelligent design was religion and therefore had no…

Nisbet and Kitcher

I see that my fellow bloggers have not been idle during my absence. Matt Nisbet has another one of his Dawkins bashing posts up. This time his champion is philosopher Phillip Kitcher. Nisbet quotes Kitcher as follows, from a recent podcast of Point of Inquiry: DJ Grothe: Did you write the book to sell secular humanism, or maybe in a more limited way atheism to the public? All these anti-God books are the real rage right now, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens...your book is addressing some of the same topics, are you addressing the same audience... Kitcher: Well I'm actually not happy with…

Responses to VA Tech

Here's Franklin Graham, from last night's Scarborough Country, reminding us of what's important about the VA Tech shooting: First of all, we know that God loves us and God cares for us. And there is a devil in this world. There is evil, and we have seen this manifest itself today in the life of one individual who took the lives of these students. It's a tragedy. But God loves us very much, and I don't think we should ever forget his love for us that he has provided a way for us to be with him in heaven and that's through his son Jesus Christ. And later: Well, I don't blame God for it,…

The Evolution of Religion

With all the fuss lately about the atheistic books of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, it is easy to overlook another glut of books that tend to threaten religion. I am referring to the series of books intending to provide a scientific basis for the prevalence of religious belief. Examples of the genre include Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust. In each case the idea is to show that a propensity for religious belief is the result of evolution by natural selection. This week's New York Times Magazine featured this cover…

Evolution and Suffering

Over the past few years I have asked a fair number of creationists what it is they find so objectionable about evolution. They have a great many complaints, but the one I hear most often is some version on the problem of evil. Evolution by natural selection is a cruel and wasteful process. It is not at all the sort of thing a just and loving God would set in motion. They are hardly alone in thinking that. In his book Living With Darwin philosopher Phillip Kitcher wrote, referring to the evolutionary process: There is nothing kindly or providential in any of this, and it seems…

Herding cats and framing science

Plenty of e-ink has already been spilled regarding the panel on "Changing Minds Through Science Communication: a panel on Framing Science," from this past weekend's NC Science Blogging Conference (see Larry Moran, Rick MacPherson, Molly Keener, and Ryan Somma for examples). The panel was the least "unconference" session of the meeting, beginning with 10 min presentations from ocean conservationist and marine biology bloggers Jennifer Jacquet and Sheril Kirshenbaum followed by Chris Mooney, Sheril's co-blogger, freelance writer, and author of The Republican War on Science and Storm World.…

Thomas Nagel on ID and Evolution

Philosopher Thomas Nagel, writing in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, criticizes the exclusion of Intelligent Design from science classes on the grounds that evolutionary science too rests on an assumption: the naturalistic assumption. He argues that both evolution based on natural selection and ID have untestable assumptions. Frankly, I think that Nagel is wrong partly because he doesn't understand the people pushing ID and partly because he doesn't understand science. With respect to the first, he seems to give the IDers like Michael Behe credit as honest brokers pushing a…

A better way to calculate GPA?

In education school, I was taught that the purpose of grading was to rank-order students -- to create a system whereby the highest-achieving students were ranked at the top and the lowest-achieving students were at the bottom. But recently there have been worries that grade inflation is making it difficult to use grades to rank students. At most Ivy League schools, nearly 50 percent of grades given are A or A minus. When dozens of students have perfect GPAs, how do you determine who is best? If the average GPA at a school is 3.4, then what's the point of having a four-point scale: half the…

How Bad Was Abu Ghraib? It Depends on the Comparison

I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas about how to use framing in a particular area of discourse. And because the Science article has made framing a hot topic again, and because it is clear from much of the discussion that many are still very confused about what framing is (if I see someone describe framing as "spin," again, I'm going to throw something at them), I think it's important to talk…

Profiles in mentoring: Dr. James E. LuValle.

(Written for the inaugural edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival, with big thanks to DNLee for launching it.) Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department's large job announcement binder (familiarly…

The "fundamentals" of voltage quackery

In medical school, or so we're told, aspiring young doctors are taught the fundamentals of medicine. What we science-based physicians usually mean by "fundamentals" includes the basic science necessary to understand human health and disease, the mechanism by which human disease develops, and the basics of how to treat it. We also learn a way of thinking about diagnosis and treatment, a systematic approach to differential diagnosis and how to hone in on a diagnosis based on history, physical findings, and imaging and laboratory tests. Fundamentals are important in any profession. Being a…

How to be simultaneously right yet oh-so-wrong about homeopathy

I've often (perhaps too often) referred to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. If not homeopathy, what other quackery would rule? Homeopathy is, after all, the perfect quackery. Most of its most "potent" remedies are nothing more than water, because homeopaths believe that the more a solution is serially diluted (with succussion, or vigorous shaking, between each serial dilution), the more potent it becomes, and frequently dilute their solutions far beyond the point where it is likely that there is even one molecule of the original substance in the resulting homeopathic dilution…

A homeopath and Dr. Jay will teach you about vaccines—and, no doubt, autism

Remember Dr. Jay? Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him promoting antivaccine nonsense claiming against all science that vaccines cause austism on—where else?—that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. Since then, Dr. Jay has assiduously denied that he is antivaccine, all the while spewing antivaccine canards hither, thither, and yon…

The infiltration of quackademic medicine metastasizes to the community

The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it's not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all shapes and sizes. Frequently, proponents of quackademic medicine try to portray those of us who oppose the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine as being behind the times, as futilely resisting the wave of the future. They portray so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) as the…

On the evolution of quackery

Once upon a time, there was quackery. It was the term used to refer to medical practices that were not supported by evidence and were ineffective and potentially harmful. Physicians understood that modalities such as homeopathy, reflexology, and various "energy healing" (i.e., faith healing) methodologies were based either on prescientific vitalism, magical thinking, and/or on science that was at best incorrect or grossly distorted. More importantly, they weren't afraid to say so. Quacks did not think this good. Then, sometime a few decades ago, supporters of quackery decided that they would…

Year end award lists you do and don't want to be on

Christmas and New Years are almost here. As a result, as is always the case this time of year, we're being flooded with "year end" lists. These lists are a fun distraction that I actually rather look forward to as an amusing (and sometimes annoying) year end tradition. In particular, I'm a sucker for "best of the year" and "worst of the year" lists, particularly the latter. Unfortunately, I've usually been too lazy to construct such lists of my own, but maybe this year will be different and next week I'll do so. Or not. Be that as it may, it gave me a bit of a chuckle to see that Mike Adams…

A godless ramble against the ditherings of theologians

Last week, I was told that I have a "god-shaped hole in my heart." My first thought was to reply that no, I have a perfectly intact heart thick with good strong sheets of muscle, but of course, that would have proven his point, that I've willingly replaced the Holy Ghost with actin and myosin, and the sacraments with Hodgkin and Huxley's sliding filament theory. So I have to confess that my email correspondent was correct in his sentiment, at least: I lack any feeling for god, religion, and superstition. It's simply true, and freely admitted. Although if I were to digest the idea down into a…

When is cancer care "futile"?

Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on December 5, 2005. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor it once again. There was an interesting article in this week's New York Times Magazine about Susan Sontag's last battle with cancer, written by…

Rallying resistance to the antivaccine jihad

About four weeks ago, I wrote what I thought to be an amusing piece about how our blog "buddy" J. B. Handley, antivaccine advocate extraordinaire and now second fiddle in the organization he founded (Generation Rescue) to a Jenny-come-lately former purveyor of Indigo Child woo previously best known for being Playboy Playmate of the Year, a game show hostess on MTV, the star of her own short-lived sitcom, and a gross-out comedienne known for eating her own vomit or sitting in a pool of her own menstrual blood. Unfortunately, along with her A-list boyfriend Jim Carrey, this former D-list star…

7 Questions with... Eric M. Johnson

Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Eric M. Johnson (twitter, blog) is pursuing a doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science focusing on evolutionary biology. He is especially interested in how cooperation and morality were…

Our national pastime and the never-ending hunger

Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead. Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…

Don't get sick in July? (Revisited)

June is almost over. If you work in an academic medical center, as I do, that can mean only one thing. The new interns are coming, and existing residents will soon be advancing to the next level. The joy! The excitement! The trepidation! And it's not all just the senior residents and the faculty feeling these emotions. It's the patients too. At least, it's the patients feeling the trepidation. The reason is the longstanding belief in academic medical centers, a belief that has diffused out of them and into "common wisdom," that you really, really don't want to get sick in July. But is there…

The "health freedom" legislative agenda for 2015 and beyond

Now that we're solidly into 2015, it's a good time to check in on what the legislative priorities are going to be among various advocates of quackery and "health freedom" (but I repeat myself). There's a new Republican Congress, and a lot of chairmanships are going to be reshuffled, with various legislators finding themselves in control of important Congressional committees. Fortunately for us, one of the major promoters of "health freedom" (or, as I like to call it, the freedom of quacks from pesky government laws and regulations), has laid out exactly what its priorities are for 2015.…