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Richard Dawkins on collateral damage

While perusing the new Richard Dawkins website a while back, I came across an article that, if you know my interest in World War II, you'd know that I couldn't resist commenting on, and it's been in my "to write about" queue for a few weeks now. In it, Dawkins discusses the aerial bombing campaigns of World War II and contrasts our acceptance of such carnage then with our revulsion at the thought of inflicting so many civilian casualties now. His point is that the moral zeitgeist changes with time, which is something it would not do if religion's claim of unchanging morality were truly at the…

"Almost autism": A new diagnosis created by antivaccinationists

Is it just me, or are medical propaganda films becoming the preferred media for "brave maverick doctors, dubious doctors, and quacks to promote their wares? I just pointed out how everybody's favorite "brave maverick doctor," he of the therapy for cancer for which there is no compelling evidence but that he keeps administering anyway, using the clinical trial process to avoid pesky rules about administering unapproved drugs and that is nothing more at its core than an orphan drug without compelling evidence for efficacy and of the "personalized gene-targeted therapy for dummies" based on…

How do we resist the rising tide of antiscience and pseudoscience?

The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on Usenet, that vast, unfiltered, poorly organized mass of discussion forums that had been big in the 1990s but were dying by 12 years ago, having turned into a mass of spam, trolls, and incoherence. So I wanted to do my little part (and I'm under no…

Dr. Josephine Briggs needs your help! NCCAM needs a new name!

Pretty much everyone who's gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title." It's a succinct contemplation of how much a name means, which, according to Juliet, isn't that much. She (and Shakespeare) were right then, and the same thing is still true. In particular, it's true when referring to things perhaps less appealing than young love…

The Institute of Medicine report on cancer care: Is the system "in crisis"?

Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle...When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. - General George S. Patton, Jr., June 5, 1944 General George S. Patton, Jr. was famous for his flamboyance and aggressiveness going on the attack, among other things. He was also known for a number of pithy quotes made throughout his…

"Science-Based Medicine 101": FAIL

Science Based Medicine is a site we highly recommend with experienced scientists and practitioners in charge. In other words, it's run by adults. But scientists often disagree about things. This is apparently a secret to non-scientists and many reporters who assume that when two scientists disagree, one is lying or wrong. But it's true nonetheless. Whatever the subdiscipline, there are disagreements. If you pick up almost any issue of Science or Nature you will find plenty of them, usually (but not always) couched in polite language in the Introduction or Discussion section of a paper or in…

A scientist to head OSHA? Quelle horreur!

It seems our enthusiasm for Obama's nomination of epidemiologist David Michaels to be the next head of OSHA was noted over at the high profile Science Magazine blog, ScienceInsider by Jocelyn Kaiser. Ms. Kaiser is among an elite group of science reporters and she almost always gets things right. Recognizing the importance of this nomination is certainly getting things right. My only complaint is that after noting that we (and many others) are delighted by the choice, she also notes that Michaels "is not without critics." That would be fair enough if the "critics" were fair enough. You'll find…

What's next? We fly nude?

Given the usual response to terrorist threats on airplanes, we expect the latest move to protect us will be to require us to travel nude. OK. Probably not. Republicans are too skittish about public nakedness. They prefer it in the privacy of their mistresses' beds. What we will see, instead, is yet another attempt at a technical fix, spearheaded by high priced security and aviation "consultants." I saw one of them, Mary Schiavo (former inspector general of the Department of Transportation) the other night on the PBS Newshour. She was hawking expensive explosive sniffers for airport check-in,…

The Biggest Geek and the SF List

PZ, Bora, Orac, John, and others have all put up posts about a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years. As the reigning Geek-Lord of ScienceBlogs, I figured that I had to weigh in as well. Here's the list: the one's that I've read are bold-faced. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.: A work of true brilliance. I have no idea how many times I've read it; all I can say is that I don't think I've gone for longer than two years without re-reading it since I first encountered it in sixth grade. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov. :…

Answering Fafarman on the Dover Board

Larry Fafarman has posted a long comment on a thread below and I'm moving it up here to answer it because it raises a really important point on this trumped up controversy over why the Dover school board didn't rescind the ID policy on Dec. 5, 2005 at the first meeting they were sworn in at. He begins by conflating two very different things: WHY MOOTNESS WAS A REAL POSSIBILITY It has been argued that because of the "voluntary cessation" doctrine ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness ), the judge could not have declared the Dover case moot even if the new anti-ID school board members had…

Forrest addresses the politicization of the Texas Education Agency

The recent unpleasant affair at the Texas Education Agency, in which the director of the science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured to resign, was triggered by Comer forwarding an email announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. Forrest is a philosopher of science, and one of our leading advocates in the ongoing fight for better science education in the face of the nonsense the creationists are promoting. She's also one of their critics the creationists most fear, so it's not surprising that her name would elicit knee-jerk panic. Forrest has now issued a formal statement on the termination of…

Boorish Behavior in Poker

The behavior of Josh Arieh during the World Series of Poker main event, aired recently on ESPN, has sparked a great deal of controversy in the poker world. For those who haven't been watching, Josh Arieh is a terrific poker player, one of the up and coming pros to watch in the future. But here are a couple of examples of his behavior during just this one tournament: In a hand with Harry Demetriou when they were down to less than 3 tables, Demetriou had AJ unsuited and Arieh had 9h10h. The flop came AKQ with two hearts. Arieh bet, Demetriou raised him (he had more chips than Arieh), Arieh…

Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions

This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it's the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and around other experiments. As usual for this series of posts, I can sum up the key result in one graph: (No spiffy color figure this time, as the experiment never made it onto the old web page, and my original figures are three or four computers ago.) What we found was that when we prepared samples of metastable…

A Curmudgeonly Post About Parenthood

I am not now, nor have I ever been, married. Most of the time I like being single, but I do have my moments of weakness. They're infrequent and don't usually last long, but every once in a while, if I squint a bit and tilt my head just so, I can just see the appeal of marriage. On the other hand, I figure most married people have moments when they wish they were single, so it probably all evens out in the end. I also do not have children, but it simply never happens that I wish that I did. I am at an age (38) where a majority of my friends have young children, but whenever I see them…

In Defense of Mockery

In Defense of Mockeryby Iris Vander Pluym Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -Thomas Jefferson I read with profound weariness a piece in Salon by Michael Lind entitled Hey, liberals: Time to give the Beck bashing a rest. Lind is apparently under the impression that (a) Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews engage in “constant mockery” of bloviating right-wing demagogues such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck, and that (b) this would somehow be a bad thing, because it is likely to backfire on “liberals.” He could not be more wrong.…

Maximizing Mastication: Chewing Gum To Enhance Cognition

Children assigned to chew sugar-free gum purportedly score 3% higher on standardized tests of math skills (as widely reported in the press). But is this just one of the 5% of all possible untrue hypotheses statistically guaranteed to have some significant result in its favor (in fact, it's worse than that)? Is the effect due to some other aspect of gum chewing (as Michael Posner asks)? Or might there be a real effect here of chewing (i.e., "mastication"), and if so, how can you use it to your maximum advantage? What we know - and what we don't - about gum and cognition To cut to the chase…

What is an agnostic?

OK, so someone sent me a copy of The God Delusion and I have to say, I'm not impressed. Let's get this straight, it's not a work of science, but of philosophy. Dawkins is making a rhetorical case, not a logical or scientific one, that God is a hypothesis that can be tested and found wanting. I'll talk about that later. What I want to deal with now is his claim that agnosticism is a weak and bad philosophical position. A technical point. Dawkins says that a deist is someone who thinks God is deus absconditus - a creator who once acted and now sits back uninvolved in the world. As far as…

Antivaccinationists against the HPV vaccine, Round 5,000

Whenever I take a day off from blogging, as I did yesterday because I was too busy going out with my wife on Wednesday night to celebrate my birthday, I not infrequently find an embarrassment of riches to blog about the next day. Sometimes it's downright difficult to decide what to write about. So it was as I sat down last night to do a bit of blogging. I briefly considered writing about Suzanne Somers leaping into the fray to defend Stanislaw Burzynski, and maybe I still will. On the other hand, it's standard boilerplate Burzynski apologetics, not even very interesting; so maybe I won't.…

A quackfest at the University of Toronto

I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I've been starting to have my doubts. My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day week in the Chicago area, was being held at the University of Toronto. As I said at the time, "Say it ain't so!" As it turns out, it wasn't so, at least not exactly, in that the University of Toronto wasn't sponsoring the quackfest. Rather, Autism One had rented a hall at the University of Toronto…

Michelle Bachmann's anti-vaccine statements cross the political pseudoscience divide

I don't often blog about politics anymore. As I've said on more than one occasion, political bloggers are a dime a dozen. Rare is the one that interests me much. However, sometimes things happen that lead me to make an exception, except that this time it's not really an exception because it has to do with two of the main topics that this blog is all about: science and the anti-vaccine movement. Those of you who watched the Republican debate the other day or saw the news reports about it yesterday probably know where this is going, but I'll go there anyway. First, I can't help but express my…

Clinical trials: Where the rubber hits the road for science-based medicine

Until recently, most of my research was laboratory-based. It included cell culture, biochemical assays, molecular biology, and experiments using mouse tumor models. However, one of the reasons that I got both an MD and a PhD was so that I could ultimately test ideas for new treatments on patients and, if I'm good enough and lucky enough, ultimately improve the care for cancer patients. If there's one thing, though, that I've learned in my nearly nine years in academic surgery, it's that far fewer patients end up enrolled on clinical trials than are eligible to participate in them. Every…

Bill Maher gets the Richard Dawkins Award? That's like Jenny McCarthy getting an award for public health

Although I often don't agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like--even admire--Richard Dawkins. While it's true I've taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don't think he's an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming to endorsing eugenics. What's really irritated me about him in the past, though, is his use of the "Neville Chamber atheist" gambit that I so detest, so much so that I once featured Dawkins in a Hitler Zombie episode (albeit not as the victim). On…

Oh, no! Orac the "Scientific Fundamentalist" has been too insolent!

Last week, I wrote about how Senator Tom Harkin is up to his old shenanigans again, trying at ever turn to do for the actual practice of quackery what he did for the research of quackery by creating the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and what he still does to promote quackery by berating NCCAM for in essence being too scientific in not having validated enough of his cherished woo. In essence, Harkin has slipped a provision into the Senate version of the 600+ page health care reform bill that is currently taking shape in Congress that included funding for "…

A horrifying breast cancer "testimonial" for "holistic" treatment

(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.) Cancer is scary. It's very, very scary, even when it is a cancer that is treatable and potentially curable. It's such a common disease that, by the time we reach a certain age, the vast majority of us have seen at least one friend or loved one die of some form of cancer. All too often, that death is horrific, and even when it is not the wasting and weakness that is often seen before the end provokes a visceral reaction matched by few diseases. Moreover, the treatments of cancer can be toxic.…

Making lab rats out one's children: Do-it-yourself cancer cures hit the media again

Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. Because DCA is a small molecule that is relatively easy to synthesize, the misguided news stories proclaiming it the "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was not patentable spawned a cottage industry of charlatans who used the Internet to sell…

The other Chicago Tribune "village quack" spews on birth control and breast cancer

The other village quack of the Chicago Tribune has decided to enter the breast cancer fray again. No, I'm not talking about the main village quack of the Chicago Tribune. That would be Julie Deardorff. Rather, I'm talking about the Chicago Tribune's newly minted breast cancer crank, Dennis Byrne. We've met him before, parroting credulously an incredibly bad study claiming that it had found a slam-dunk association between abortion and breast cancer. How bad was the study? Well, it was so bad that it was published in that bastion of politically-motivated pseudoscience, the Journal of American…

Arthur Caplan finds the Hitler zombie in bioethics

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 25, 2005 . Although the Undead Führer himself has made only one appearance, but the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy! As for all the Hitler Zombie reruns, don't worry. I decided to do that over the weekend, and now I'll change to reposts of different topics for a while. In the most recent issue…

Starchild Abraham Cherrix: It's over

Sadly, Starchild Abraham Cherrix is almost certainly doomed: ACCOMAC, Virginia (AP) -- A 16-year-old cancer patient's legal fight ended in victory Wednesday when his family's attorneys and social services officials reached an agreement that would allow him to forgo chemotherapy. At the start of what was scheduled to be a two-day hearing, Circuit Judge Glen A. Tyler announced that both sides had reached a consent decree, which Tyler approved. Under the decree, Starchild Abraham Cherrix, who is battling Hodgkin's disease, will be treated by an oncologist of his choice who is board-certified in…

On Cooking Rice

Go to the bottom of the post to see my recommended methods for cooking rice. This week, I resolved that for the new year I would start blogging more frequently. Given that I really haven't been blogging at all recently, that shouldn't be too hard. I won't bore you with the various reasons why blogging has been so slow recently, but it seems that starting a new job and a new life in a new city has upended my old routines. One activity that I have been focusing much more effort on in my new life, though, is cooking. Spurred in part by reading Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, I've been trying to…

The Taming of the Shrewd: "Get her drunk then get her done"

"Get her drunk then get her done." So reads one of the decals on the F-150 pickup truck parked in my new neighbor's driveway. Of all the objectionable aphorisms on that particular truck, that's the mildest one. I wonder what my daughter will think of that when she notices it some time over the next few days, which she surely will. There is a mud fight going on over at Ed Brayton's blog regarding his use of the word "shrew" in reference to Sarah Palin. The Kliqueons (rhymes with "Klingons") have called Ed out for being sexist. He says they should lay off and it is not OK to call him a…

Evidence-based medicine: More than a "coin flip"

One characteristic of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscience boosters is a love-hate relationship with science. They desperately crave the respectability and validation that science confers. In the case of medicine, they want to be seen as evidence- and science-based. On the other hand, they hate science because it just won't given them what they want: Confirmation and validation. The reasons, of course, are obvious; their preferred ideas about disease and modalities to treat it are not rooted in science. Rather, they're usually based in either prescientific concepts of how the human body works…

Stanislaw Burzynski fails to save another patient

I hate to end the week on a down note, but sometimes it's necessary. It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski. I'm sure you recall Burzynski. He's a hero in the alternative medicine world, having been cast as a martyr to The Man (i.e., the FDA and Big Pharma) because of his selling of a dubious cancer cure that he calls antineoplastons. Although he's been selling his questionable cancer treatments for thirty years now, he's recently been in the news a lot lately thanks to a credulous paean to his activities in the form of a movie that was released in 2010 called,…

The American College of Physicians integrates quackery with medicine in its recommendations for managing back pain

One of the overarching themes of this blog, if not the overarching theme, is to expose and combat the infiltration of quackery into medicine. What I'm referring to, of course, is the phenomenon that's risen over the last 25 years or so in which various pseudoscientific alternative medicine therapies (but I repeat myself) have found increasing acceptance, thanks largely to a major lack of critical thinking skills among both patients and, worse, the physicians who have embraced modalities such as acupuncture, naturopathy, chiropractic, and the like. In fairness, it's not just a lack of critical…

The importance of being median

Peter Freed wants to you to know that Jonah Lehrer is Not a Neuroscientist. Lehrer doesn't claim to be, of course. He's a journalist and science writer who covers developments in neuroscience, and a good one at that. Freed is concerned about how Lehrer handled a recent study on "the wisdom of crowds" in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The wisdom of crowds is a long-standing and often-successful idea that you'll get a better prediction by aggregating the responses from a bunch of people posed with the same question than you'd get by simply asking a given expert, or even…

Peak Oil Is Still a Women's Issue and Other Reflections on Sex, Gender and the Long Emergency

In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…

Dembski Stoops Even Lower: Legal Threats to Silence a Critic

For those who have slightly better memory of recent events than an average gerbil, you'll surely remember that not too long ago, the Intelligent Design folks, with the help of Ben Stein, put together a whole movie about how evilutionists are all a bunch of evil fascists, out to silence the poor, hard-working IDers. You'll also remember that Bill Dembski has been talking up the fact that he's got two peer reviewed papers allegedly about intelligent design. So, you'd think that after complaining about being locked out of the debate, now that he has some actual papers to talk about, he'd be…

Perverse Incentives

A lot of people, reading the reporting on the current financial disaster, have been writing me to ask what people mean when they talk about incentives. The traders, the bankers, the fund managers, and all of the other folks involved in this giant cluster-fuck aren't stupid. So naturaly, the question keeps coming up, why would they go along with it? And the answer that we keep hearing is something along the lines of "perverse incentives". The basic idea is that the way that the people in the industry got paid, it was actually in their interest do do things that they knew would eventually…

Mars Probe Parachuting Velocity

As you've hopefully all heard by now, the Mars Phoenix lander made a perfect landing over the weekend, and is already returning images. NASA managed to not only achieve a perfect landing, but to use Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catch a picture of the Phoenix descending with parachutes deployed! Alas, NASA's Phoenix press people aren't nearly as good as its technical people. As an alert reader pointed out, in their press release about capturing the photo of the probe with parachute deployed, that they said the following: Phoenix released its parachute at an altitude of about 12.6…

Asteroid Apophosis, Orbit Changes, and Boy (not)Geniuses

You might have heard the story that's been going round about the asteroid Apophis. This is an asteroid that was, briefly, considered by NASA to be a collision risk with earth. But after more observations to gather enough data to compute its orbit more precisely, the result was that it's not a significant risk. The current NASA estimates are that it's a collision risk of about one in 45,000. The news around it is that some German kid claims to have figured out that NASA got it wrong, and that the real risk is 1 in 450. What was NASA's big mistake, according to the kid? He says that if the…

Science Diversity Meme: The CS Mutant

At Science, Education, and Society, the Urban Scientist posts a meme to name five women scientists from each of a list of fields. Sadly, my fields are left off the list. So I'll respond in my own way by adding computer science. This is a very idiosyncratic list - it's women who are particularly important to my own experience as a student and later practitioner of computer science. It's worth noting that I've got a very atypical experience as a computer scientist, in that many of the most influential people in my career have been women. That's very unusual, given the incredibly skewed ratio…

Fractal Applications: Logistical Maps and Chaos

In the course of the series of posts I've been writing on fractals, several people have either emailed or commented, saying something along the lines of "Yeah, that fractal stuff is cool - but what is it good for? Does it do anything other than make pretty pictures?" That's a very good question. So today, I'm going to show you an example of a real fractal that has meaningful applications as a model of real phenomena. It's called the logistic map. The logistic map is a way of describing the expectations about the size of a population which is primarily bounded by limited resources. In a…

A Bid to Shut Up the Religious Bigots

This post is quite thoroughly off-topic for this blog. But as someone who is openly religious and who has written a number of posts that criticize Christian institutions, I get a fair bit of mail from cretins who make demands that I speak up to defend their pathetic insistence that all religious people must support discrimination. In the hopes that I can get these jackasses to leave me alone by demonstrating that I'm so far beyond the pale that pestering me is a waste of time, I present this post. I do not "support" homosexuality - because I do not believe I have the right to an opinion on…

Fractal Dimension

One of the most fundamental properties of fractals that we've mostly avoided so far is the idea of dimension. I mentioned that one of the basic properties of fractals is that their Hausdorff dimension is larger than their simple topological dimension. But so far, I haven't explained how to figure out the Hausdorff dimension of a fractal. When we're talking about fractals, notion of dimension is tricky. There are a variety of different ways of defining the dimension of a fractal: there's the Hausdorff dimension; the box-counting dimension; the correlation dimension; and a variety of others…

Why I Don't Talk About Religion Much

One of the common responses I get to posts about theopolitical conservatives is that I am advocating atheism or calling for the destruction of 'religion.'* This is absurd, as I am one of the defenders of some religions (though not all of them obviously). This is often accompanied by complaints of 'why don't you criticize Dawkins for saying mean things about religion?' First of all, there is a difference in kind in using harsh language when criticizing a particular theology or supernaturalism as a belief or idea system versus using eliminationist rhetoric against those who wish to use…

Senator Clinton Supports Science: Welcome to the Coalition of the Sane

I guess we should be glad that Senator Clinton has a plan to end the Republican War on Science. It needs to be done and she is right to do this, but it's sort of like getting excited that someone boldly supports the notion that 2 + 2 = 4. Clinton announced yesterday that: Hillary will restore the federal government's commitment to science by: * Signing an Executive Order that: o Rescinds President Bush's ban on ethical embryonic stem cell research and promotes stem cell research that complies with the highest ethical standards. o Bans political appointees from altering or removing…

Putting the S-CHIP Battle in Context

Maha does a great job of getting at the underlying issues in the Bush adminstration's opposition to expanding the S-CHIP children's health insurance program: The most legitimate question that we have to ask, seems to me, is why is there government? In particular, what is representative, republican government good for? Do people really elect representatives to Congress so that their needs can be ignored in favor of special interests? Is the Constitution really all about limiting the power of people to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the…

A Bit More on Pseudoconservatives

Maha responds to my previous post about pseudoconservatives. I don't really have much to add to what she said, but I want to make several additional points and clarifications: 1) I agree with maha that it's difficult to figure out what conservatism is, even for conservatives. In large part, this stems from what she correctly describes as antagonism. Being opposed to something is not the same as philosophical coherency--a point I've made about the 'progressive' movement. 2) I think we also agree that the modern conservatives are running the U.S. into the ground. Increasing income…

Opaque Markets and the Need for National Healthcare

Revere proposes a simple healthcare plan: "Medicare for all." He bases this on the finding that the healthcare outcomes of people aged 55 to 64 don't become worse once they turn 65, even though that would be expected with chronic conditions. Why? Access to healthcare through the Medicare system: If you have heart disease or diabetes and you are uninsured you are worse off than those who are insured by several measures. Those are the kinds of health conditions that usually worsen with age, too, so you would expect this to be a bigger problem for the uninsured near elderly. But they don't…

Teaching, Testing, and Training

A while back, I came across two great posts, one about merit pay (something I've discussed before) and the other about teacher training. First, one teacher's take on merit pay: Were I compensated on the basis of test scores, I would have received a huge increase this year, because of the much higher rate at which my students passed the state test. of course, next year in all likelihood I would then receive a similar sized pay cut when my pass rate drops heavily, as in all likelihood it will: the students I have this year came to me far less prepared than those of last year. I can tell…

Social Security and Compromise: Kevin Drum Doesn't Get It

I think there's a related disorder to Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Magnanimous Pundit Syndrome. It seems to have hit Kevin Drum pretty hard (italics mine): I'm on record (several hundred times, probably) saying that Social Security is basically fine and that the best thing we can do is just leave it alone and then revisit it in a decade or so. At the same time, I don't think any of us would (or should) have any serious problem with, say, a 1983-style commission that beavered away for a year and then recommended a basket of modest tax increases and benefit reductions to keep Social Security…