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Michael Moore's Sicko (or why Orac should relent and go see this movie)

I went to see Michael Moore's Sicko last night and it is truly worthy of being seen by every American. I say that knowing how many feel about Michael Moore and his tendency towards spectacle. I hope that people can set aside whatever prejudice they have towards Moore and see this movie. This is a movie that contains more truth than any he has made so far. I went in with a skeptical mind, knowing the issues that face the practice of medicine in the United States in this new millennium, how easy they can be discussed inaccurately or flippantly and how medicine was once practiced in this…

Darwinist

Olivia Judson is absolutely right - let's get rid of the terms "Darwinist" and "Darwinism". She writes, among else: I'd like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed. (The science would be in a sorry state if one man 150 years ago had, in fact, discovered everything there was to say.) Obsessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually…

Chronic conditions key for slowing growth of healthcare costs

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released some disappointing news: several demonstration projects aiming to contain growth in healthcare spending are not showing cost savings. Specifically, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been focusing on programs involving either disease management and care coordination or value-based payment systems for the fee-for-service Medicare population. A CBO issue brief reviews programs in both these categories that have been conducted over the past two decades, and I'm particularly interested in what it says about the disease…

The Sorry State of Genre Fiction

Yesterday saw the posting (or at least the arrival on my RSS reader) of two different discussions of the current state of genre fiction. I have issues with both discussions, but reading them together makes for an interesting effect. First, there's Charlie Stross complaining about the state of SF, and once again lamenting the lack of... something in the SF vein. I'm not entirely clear what it is that he would like to see, other than that it isn't alternate history or werewolf porn-- more on this in a bit. There are various responses and duelling anecdotes in the comments. Over at the Whatever…

Why Are You Asking Me?

I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say. Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…

Ebola in Dallas Texas: Is our response adequate?

First, let’s look at the situation in West Africa, because that is way more important than anything going on in the US right now. The WHO has said two things about this. First, if there is not a full intervention, there may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases of Ebola several months from now (cumulatively). Second, with full intervention they can stop this epidemic. What is full intervention? They say that full intervention is the development and manufacture of an effective vaccine, and the deployment of that vaccine to a very large percentage of the affected population.…

Quiet down the atheists

When Atheists talk, people listen. Then, they tell them to shut up. David Phillip Norris of the Twin Cities recently wrote an article for MNPost called With talk of tolerance and equality, one group is still forgotten: atheists. This was written as a reflection on the just finished and rather dramatic fight against an anti same sex marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot in Minnesota. By today's electoral standards, the amendment was soundly defeated. So while I’m thrilled that we can start talking about the possibility of voting “yes” instead of “no” for same-sex marriage in…

How to Speke Inglish

I had never heard of The Chaos before today. I suppose that makes me unkulterd, and I'm afraid that I can't use the excuse that it came out in the 1980s when I was either in a trench underneath Boston or deep in the Jungles of Zaire, or doing double duty taking classes and teaching and writing a thesis. Chaos is a poem by Gerard Nolst Trenité that demonstrates the lockstep association between English words as we say them, and English words as we write (spel) them. In other words, Chaos, using the non-mathematical meaning of the word. The poem exists in many forms. I found what is…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 10 ... Tickling the Dragon's Tail?

This is a particularly important update. An anonymous source in Japan has told reporters connected to the New York Times that there is a visible crack in the Fukushima Reactor 3. This is the reactor that showed isotopic evidence of a leak of some kind. Arguments had been made that a hole in the reactor vessel was an impossibility. The increasingly convincing evidence of a leak led people to admit, or realize, that the reactor vessel already has holes in it ... those designed to allow pipes and such in and out of the large thick-walled metal object. It was then presumed that this is where…

Everything is Relative in the Magic Closet

The dog marches up to my computer as I'm checking my morning email. "What the heck is the deal with relativity?!?" "Well, good morning to you, too. How are you this fine morning?" "I'm fine, but I'm confused about relativity." Sarcasm is totally lost on her. "What are you confused about?" "Well, you've got Special Relativity, right, and also General Relativity. Special Relativity is all about clocks that run slow when you're moving, and bunnies that get smaller when you chase them, and General Relativity is all about bowling balls on rubber sheets." "Actually, that's just an analogy for the…

Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer

There's a blog post making the rounds of the science blogosphere titled If Sports Got Reported Like Science, which imagines the effect of applying the perceived restriction on scientific terminology to sports reporting: HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland. INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon? HOST: It's just what's in the script. All I did was read it - I've got no idea what it's really on about.…

REPOST: Little Women, Big Men, Casey Luskin Fails Again

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) I thought now would be a good time to repost one of my previous encounters with Casey Luskin, a charming gnome that volunteers at soup kitchens, who tried to take an internet 'hit' out on me. A friend and I were loling about Caseys speech last night. Friend hadnt encountered…

Interpreting Genesis

Via Jerry Coyne I came across this essay regarding the interpretation of Genesis. (Click here for Part One of the essay.) The article is by Kenton Sparks, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University. His argument will be entirely familiar to connoisseurs of this issue. The Bible, you see, was never intended to teach us science. Augustine and Calvin understood that if the Bible conflicts with well-established scientific truths, then it is our understanding of scripture that must yield. Modern creationists err in treating Genesis like a science textbook, and would do better to…

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward

A new study shows that chimps sacrifice their own advantage if they earned it unfairly.Image: Owen Booth / Creative Commons Fairness is the basis of the social contract. As citizens we expect that when we contribute our fair share we should receive our just reward. When social benefits are handed out unequally or when prior agreements are not honored it represents a breach of trust. Based on this, Americans were justifiably outraged when, not just one, but two administrations bailed out the wealthiest institutions in the country while tens of thousands of homeowners (many of whom were…

Being a teacher, continued. Presumably you'll need one of these for tenure.

Maybe this will also help with this week's "Ask a Sciencebloggers question." Most institutions will likely ask for a teaching philosophy, especially when an academic is up for tenure promotion. Although mine was written in 2003, and my interests have expanded significantly, here it is below: To Whom It May Concern: My teaching philosophy is largely grounded in the belief that effective education is a major cornerstone in the development of individuals within a society. Whether this pertains specifically to junior/senior scientists about to embark on new research initiatives or generally…

Book Review: The Selfish Genius

Mentioning Richard Dawkins is a quick way to polarize a conversation. One acquaintance once told me that she refused to read anything by Stephen Jay Gould because of Dawkins' criticisms while, on the other hand, many of my friends have voiced their exasperation with the English biologist's attacks on religion. Regardless of whether you consider him a saint or a sinner, though, Dawkins is one of the most controversial scientific figures working today, and Fern Elsdon-Baker has contributed The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy to the ongoing arguments about the "…

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

It's the very last installment of Zombiefest - one more book review, this time for one I heartily recommend! Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, prefaces his new book about zombies with an unexpected vignette - a visit to Graceland: By the time my tour hit the Jungle Room, it was obvious that the thirty-odd people walking through Elvis Presley's mansion fell into two groups. The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome. . . the…

Friday Sprog Blogging: rocks and erosion.

Yesterday afternoon, I attempted to talk with the younger Free-Ride offspring about erosion. It would seem, from our conversation, that it is not just rocks that can erode -- recall of material learned in science class can also erode, as can patience. Below is a rough transcript of our chat. I'll see if I can clean up the audio and put the MP3 up as a SprogCast by sometime this weekend. Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to ask you what you can tell me about rocks. I think you learned a little about rocks in school, didn't you? Younger offspring: No. Dr. Free-Ride: No? Did you learn something about…

Faculty unions: organizing when your day-job is a labor of love.

In spring of 2007, after nearly two years without a contract, the faculty of the 23 campuses of the California State University system (of which my university is a part) voted to ratify a contract. Among other things, that contract included raises to help our salaries catch up to the cost of living in California. (Notice the word "help" in that sentence; the promised raises, while making things better, don't quite get the whole job done.) The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-…

Rob Schneider on California Bill AB 2109: The latest celebrity antivaccinationist to make a fool of himself

Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…

I don't mind that you don't really understand the term "passive aggressive."

Or ... What I had for breakfast. I just got the Caribou Coffee trivia question wrong. I got it so wrong that the Barista stared at me in disbelief for a moment, then blurted out the correct answer with audible snark and disappointment. If I told you what the question was (and that is not going to happen) you would be embarrassed for me as well. This was especially bad because I usually answer the question by adding some additional fact, or spice things up by answering the question in Classical Greek or Latin, or at least provide one or two scholarly references. But this time it was a dumb…

Randy Olson's Authority, PZ Myers Olympian Presence, Chris Mooney's Framing and Greg Laden's Assholehood

Chris Mooney has made an "appeal to authority" (Randy Olson) in asserting that Expelled is a success by Hollywood standards, and this may be correct. PZ Myers and his comet tail may have increased that success as per Mooney's Framing TOE, but the reverse is also true: the science blogging share of the blogosphere has expanded and participation in that community has significantly increased. Oh, and nobody understands me. What Chris actually does is to cite Olson, who in turn makes the argument. One could ask why Chris did not make the argument himself because the argument should stand on…

A trio of woo at the UMDNJ School of Nursing in Newark

Quackademic medicine has struck again. Worse, it's struck at one of my old stomping grounds. OK, not exactly, but rather close to a past home. Let me back up a minute. I know someone who attended nursing school at UMDNJ. It's actually a very good nursing school, but, alas, it has a serious woo streak in it. Yesterday, because of that connection, I was shown a pamphlet that had arrived in the mail. It was a the Continuing Education Catalog for the UMDNJ School of Nursing. At first glance, it looked pretty unremarkable. There were the usual courses in subjects like trauma nursing, clinical…

UCLA fights back against animal "rights" terrorists

Earlier this month, I was remiss in not noting an update to a story about which I had written before, a story of domestic terrorism carried out by so-called "animal rights" advocates who are utterly opposed to the use of animals in research. The series of attacks began with an intimidation campaign against a UCLA researcher named Dario Ringach that succeeded in frightening him to the point where he gave up doing primate research. Against Ringach himself, the campaign consisted primarily of harassment by phone and other means. However, Ringach was spooked by a botched attack on another UCLA…

Homeopaths: Double-blind studies of homeopathic medicines are not ideally possible

Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755. Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.) Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…

An unexpected question in a pub

Earlier this week, I was in Washington to attend my first ever NIH study section as an actual reviewer. It was definitely an illuminating experience, and overall I left with, believe it or not, more faith in the system the NIH uses to determine how grant money is doled out. Maybe I'll become more cynical after I've attended a few, but this session was full of very fair but tough-minded reviewers who really wanted to score everything high but couldn't. Perhaps I'll write in more detail about it after I've had a chance to absorb the experience; given the confidentiality of the meeting (we had…

The DGU War

0. Introduction Volume 87:4 of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology contains three articles on the issue of the frequency of defensive gun use. The first presents David Hemenway's critique of Gary Kleck's 2.5 million estimate, the second is Kleck and Gertz's reply and finally Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center comments on both papers. I'll try to summarize the arguments and comment where I think they are wrong. 1. Hemenway's critique 1a. False Positives Hemenway's critique has two main arguments. The first is the problem of false positives. Let me define some terms…

World Exclusive: Ray Kurzweil's foreword to "9"

"Our emotional intelligence is not just a sideshow to human intelligence, it's the cutting edge" Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. And for good reason: Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the…

Time for Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, a.k.a. Quackery Week

In my eagerness to note that Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of a ten year old study that failed to find a correlation between vaccines and autism had been retracted, I forgot to write about what I was originally planning on writing about yesterday. It actually would have been more appropriate a topic for yesterday, because it was the beginning of a week. In fact, it was the beginning of a very special week for a certain class of quacks. No, it’s not homeopathy week. Here’s a hint: Do any of you remember this time last year? Sure, I knew you did. We’re talking Quackery Week 2014! I mean…

Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices

It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness. As an anthropologist living with the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, I often found myself observing some thing ... an object, a construction of some type, or a behavior ... that utterly baffled me. I learned to avoid asking about things as questions occurred to me; The very asking of a question, especially if you are roughly the equivalent of an alien visitor (an extraordinarily wealthy giant scary white being with highly advanced…

Beware genetically engineered T4 bacteriophage nanobots!

Every so often I come across something in the world of woo that catches my attention because it’s so completely batshit loony that it demands my attention, either for the sheer delusion on display or for the extreme cleverness with which the pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are woven together. No, this time, I’m not talking about the Food Babe, either, because there’s no cleverness at all there, other than cleverness at self-promotion and quackmailing food and beverage manufacturers for fun and, most of all, profit. All that’s there besides that is an incredible ignorance of science and…

What does an atheist firing squad look like?

Perhaps not what you'd think. This is not about appeasement. It is about not being a racist slob. Imagine a firing squad run by a relatively benevolent government (that happens to have not yet gotten rid of the death penalty). The squad consist of a dozen soldiers assigned to the duty. While most soldiers accept the assignment to the firing squad out of a sense of duty and a general cultural belief that it is appropriate, it is possible but unusual to object and get out of it. So there is a modicum of personal reflection involved. A soldier asked to join the firing squad considers the…

The Dawkins-Myers incident: Sometimes it's necessary to break the frame

I really didn't want to get involved with the whole "framing" debate again. For whatever reason (and they are reasons that I've failed to understand), the very mention of the word seems to set certain members of the ScienceBlogs collective into rabid fits of vicious invective that leave rational discourse behind. And, yes, I know that by saying that I risk setting myself up as a target of said invective, but I don't care. It must be the natural cantankerousness that my low level death crud is inducing in me or maybe it's a lack of judgment brought on by large doses decongestants and…

A young antivaccine propagandist plans to teach his mad skillz to other antivaccinationists

As hard as it might be to believe, one time over 20 years ago I actually took the Dale Carnegie course and, as part of that course, read his famous book How To Win Friends and Influence People. I know, I know. It's probably not obvious from my style of writing on this particular blog, but I did, and i tried to take the lessons to heart. The main reason I took the course, however, was because back then my public speaking truly sucked. I was nervous, hesitant, and tended to mumble a lot. That course was the first time I realized that I could be a halfway decent public speaker. Now, over 20…

JAMA: A willing accomplice to co-opting “nonpharmacologic” treatments for pain as being “alternative” or “complementary”

That I’m not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM) should come as no surprise to anyone. Basically, from its very inception as the Office of Alternative Medicine in the early 1990s to its growth to large center with a yearly budget of $120+ million, NCCIH has served one purpose: The promotion and attempted legitimization of quackery and magical thinking in medicine, the better to “integrate” pseudoscientific medicine with science-based medicine. Certainly, the…

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 21: Oh, wait, maybe I am antivaccine after all

This is yet another in the continuing saga of “I’m not antivaccine,” a continuing series of posts demonstrating how the oh-so-loud and vigorous denials of antivaccine activists that they are antivaccine are in reality either a lie or self-delusion. There have been so many previous installments, twenty, to be precise. There could easily have been ten times that number. These days, I tend to take note of only particularly egregious examples. This installment, however, will be a bit different than previous installments because the actual speaker is antivaccine. She even says so. Why, then, am I…

Jerry Coyne gets everything wrong, again

I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece. He disagrees with the anti-EP piece I linked to yesterday, which is fine, but I expect better arguments than this. He completely mangles the story. An example: he cites a section of Annalee Newitz's story like this, as the one substantive argument she presents against EP: Humans evolve too fast to bear behavioral traces of ancient evolution. I agree. That statement is total…

Unconventional Evolution: Notes from the "Cliff Jolly Conference"

Category: Anthropology As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the "Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface" conference, which was primarily a celebration of the work of Cliff Jolly. I'm still a bit over my head when it comes to knowing the full "Who's Who" of evolutionary anthropology, but I do know that Cliff Jolly is most well known for his "seed-eaters" hypothesis of human origins, in which extant baboons (Papio sp.) are proposed to be better primates to study when considering primate origins and a seed-eating diet is put forward as one of the…

Being ethical -- and being prudent -- with pseudonymous blogging.

I'm following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the "old media". As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay's analysis of the…

What is Symmetry?

As I said in the last post, in group theory, you strip things down to a simple collection of values and one operation, with four required properties. The result is a simple structure, which completely captures the concept of symmetry. But mathematically, what is symmetry? And how can something as simple and abstract as a group have anything to do with it? Let's look at a simple, familiar example: integers and addition. What does symmetry mean in terms of the set of integers and the addition operation? Suppose I were to invent a strange way of writing integers. You know nothing about how I…

Powers and Products of Graphs

Often, we use graphs as a structured representation of some kind of information. Many interesting problems involving the things we're representing can then by described in terms of operations over graphs. Today, I'm going to talk about some of the basic operations that we can do on graphs, and in later posts, we'll see how those operations are used to solve graph-based problems. The easiest thing to describe is exponents of a graph. Given a graph G=(V,E), for an integer n, Gn is a graph with the same vertices as G, and with edges between two vertices v and w if and only if there is a path…

A Laughable Laffer Curve from the WSJ

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal has a *spectacular* example of really bad math. The WSJ is, in general, an excellent paper with really high quality coverage of economic issues. But their editorials page has long been a haven for some of the most idiotic reactionary conservative nonsense this side of Fox News. But this latest piece takes the cake. They claim that this figure is an accurately derived Laffer curve describing the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues for different countries; and that the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the world. There's an idea in…

A Creationist Spills the Beans

Since I'm speaking at Harvard today*, I thought sharing this bit from Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard would be appropriate (and it's a fascinating read). The president of Patrick Henry College, whose mission is "to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding", accidentally divulged his strategy to get young earth creationism in the public schools (italics mine): But there's one hitch with this model: Many evangelicals, especially the older generation, are not like Catholics or…

The University of Minnesota has failed to enshrine racism in its policies!

Katherine Kersten is Minnesota's own version of Glenn Beck. She's a 'columnist' (literally true, since she is given a regular column to fill with right-wing nonsense) for the Star Tribune, and is a regular embarrassment. She recently aimed her smear-gun at the University of Minnesota, in a deranged tirade that has been picked up by Wing Nut Daily and Hot Air (read the comments at that site for a glimpse of how insane the right wing has become). What made her so angry? The UM has a program in the college of education called the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, or TERI. It's a reasonably…

Genetics, the myth-buster? The case of Argentina

As I have noted before one of the consequences of genomic analysis techniques becoming relatively cheap and accessible is that they are now viable tools toward exploring a host of fundamentally non-genetic questions. That is, instead of exploring the dynamics of evolutionary biology, they can be used to shed light upon other sorts of dynamics. Sometimes the questions are fuzzy and the techniques can be laborious; e.g., the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA and their subsequent insertion into an explanatory framework where the non-genetic data are patchy. On other occasions, the…

Misconceptions in evolutionary biology

Chad Orzel is asking about misconceptions in science that irritate. Evolgen and Afarensis have chimed in. My problem is not an misconception, it is a pet peeve. As I've noted before, random genetic drift is a catchall explanation for everything. I am not saying drift is not powerful, it is the basis for the neutral theory of molecular evolution. This theory states that the rate of substitution on a neutral locus is proportional to the rate of mutation. Substitution would be when you have allele X at 99% frequency at time 1 and allele Y at 99% frequency at time 2 on a particular locus…

The Heartless Cruelty of Movement Conservatism: Devil Take the Hindmost As Public Policy

According to Florida Republicans, these are freeloading parasites not worthy of your tax dollars (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel) We typically think of budgets as boring, dry things, the charge of the green eyeshade brigade. But they are a profound statement of what we think is important, of who we fundamentally are. And Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott's budget proclaims him to be a monster. Republican Gov. Scott has recently ordered massive cuts to group homes for the developmentally disabled: Florida Gov. Rick Scott ordered deep cuts Thursday to programs that serve…

Why human nature matters

People often assume I'm a "genetic determinist" because of my close attention to the interface of our species' biology and behavior. I'm also focused on evolutionary science, a discipline where noise, error, and diversity generated by a constellation of variables is assumed (and to some extent, essential). From my interest in the latter it can be easily inferred that I don't think there is anything necessarily deterministic about how mind and society manifest themselves over the course of development. Rather, an understanding of human nature can make us aware of the constraints and biases…

The Confusion About the Social Security 'Crisis' Is Economists' Fault: More on Sizzle

One of the topics I discuss on this blog is the idiocy surrounding Social Security--despite all of the hype, Social Security is not DOOMED!! (To make a longish explanation short, every year for the last fourteen years, Social Security has been predicted to become insolvent in 32 to 36 years. 'Insolvency' will only occur if the economy underperforms on an unprecented scale--including the decade surrounding the Great Depression--for several decades. In that case, a very modest increase in the payroll tax will cover all necessary payouts. There is, however, a general budget crisis that the…

KPC: The Other Potential Pandemic--And We're Completely Ignoring It

In the midst of the concern about TEH SWINEY FLOO!, very few people (other than the Mad Biologist), have been discussing the double whammy of influenza followed by bacterial infections. A couple of years ago, I first started describing reports of KPCs: No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now. Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae [these genes are now showing up in other bacteria], but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool…