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A Break from Galapagos: From Randy Olson: Mark Dowie on the over-exploitation of the U.S. EEZ

One of our longtime heros of Shifting Baselines is Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Mark Dowie. In this recent essay he takes the Bush administration to task over their plans for large scale (too large?) aquaculture. What he notes is that, "while the U.S. Congress recently passed amendments to federal fisheries law that actually improved, built on, and strengthened the Fisheries Conservation Act of 1996, other branches of the U.S. government (NOAA and the White House) were doing this." Blue Pastures in a Public Trust The Bush administration has made bringing industrial aquaculture to the…

Mental Illness and Culpability in Iraq

The Washington Post has an interesting article, href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/01/AR2007120101782.html">'A Soldier's Officer', about an officer in Iraq who attempted suicide and endangered other personnel.  The military is considering putting her on trial for "assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service." In this post, I will comment on the article and the case as…

Fake journals versus bad journals.

By email, following on the heels of my post about the Merck-commissioned, Elsevier-published fake journal Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a reader asked whether the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS) also counts as a fake journal. I have the distinct impression that folks around these parts do not hold JPandS in high esteem. However, it seems like there's an important distinction between a fake journal and a bad one. Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity Weblog wrote a meticulous examination of JPandS and of the professional society, the Association of…

Even when it's not all about vaccines, it's all about vaccines

As supporters of science-based medicine know, in the woo-sphere, there is only One True Cause of Autism, and that is vaccines. At least, so it would seem. The idea that vaccines cause autism is based largely on anecdotes tinged with confirmation bias and selective memory mixed with a massive confusing of correlation with causation whereby the increase in autism prevalence over the last twenty years appears to correlate with an expansion of the vaccine schedule. Of course, as skeptics know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, and I've often asked the question why it has to be the…

The price of refusing science-based medical and surgical therapy in breast cancer

As a cancer surgeon specializing in breast cancer, I have a particular contempt for cancer quacks. In particular, that contempt smolders and occasionally bursts in to flames right here on this very blog and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere, when I see instances of such quackery applied to women with breast cancer. They are, after all, the type of patients I spend all my clinical time taking care of and to whose disease my research has been directed for the last 13 years or so. That's why I keep revisiting the topic time and time again. Unfortunately, over the years, when it comes to this topic…

Despicable: A parents' guide to blaming the death of their child on vaccines

When I first started this blog, I had little idea of what I was in for. I thought I had some idea from having read a bunch of blogs and found role models whose blogging style I tried to emulate back in those early days, long before I developed the persona and writing style that most of my readers love and quacks and antivaccinationists really hate. Now that I've been at it for nearly eight years, there's very little that surprises me. Much of the quackery, pseudoscience, and nonsense that I see is stuff that I've seen before and possibly blogged about multiple times before. I'm starting to…

Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted: Merrily confusing correlation with causation for polio

I've been following the anti-vaccine movement for nearly a decade now, first as a regular on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative and then, beginning almost seven years ago, blogging away. Along the way, somehow I stumbled into the role of countering the pseudoscience, misinformation, and nonsense promoted by the anti-vaccine movement. It's dangerous misinformation, too. For instance, in the U.K., misinformation claiming that the MMR vaccine somehow contributes to autism, a lie based on the work of Andrew Wakefield, has led the MMR uptake rate there to plummet. As a result measles,…

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement

I originally wasn't going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren't in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman dressed in body armor, who turned out to be a married couple, entered a conference center at Inland Regional Center, a sprawling facility that provides services for thousands of people with disabilities. There, at an annual holiday party for the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, Syed Rizwan…

Homeopathy in the--cringe--ICU

About a month ago, I did a facetious throwaway piece about "homeopathic enchantments" being used by one of my favorite comic characters (who, alas, no longer has his own comic series), namely Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Given that it was not intended as anything other than a lark, I was rather surprised when it generated a long discussion thread fueled by a homeopath named Dana Ullman, who showed up in the comments and argued with me and several of my best regular commenters. He kept the discussion thread going far longer than the average thread on this blog, provoking annoyance on…

Wingnut of wingnuts: Vox just can't help himself

Well, well, well. Remember about a year ago, when Libertarian wingnut Vox Day shot himself in the foot big time by using a warped logic to argue that because it was "possible" for Hitler to round up six million Jews in four years then it's not "impossible" for us to round up 12 million illegal immigrants, a contention that I had a great deal of fun royally fisking (as did Sergey over at Holocaust Controversies) and that was so bad that it was apparently deemed too offensive even for WorldNet Daily, which edited it to water down Vox's horrible historical analogy? (If not, please check out my…

Biomedical researchers at medical schools: Free-lance used car salesmen? Or: Show me the money!

From fellow ScienceBlogger Abel, I'm made aware of an excellent post on the Health Care Renewal Blog about the financial reality of being an academic physician in a modern U.S. medical school. It's an excellent overview of how medical schools view clinical faculty as, in essence, cash cows that have to bring in the cash and pay for themselves. The same thing actually applies to basic scientists as well, and I do have to quibble a bit with the internal medicine-centered view of the various ways that faculty are expected to bring in money, which do not necessarily apply to academic surgery…

Just when I thought I could put the paper bag away...

...That all around evolution-ignorant but nonetheless eager lapdog of the Discovery Institute, SUNY Stonybrook Professor of Neurosurgery Dr. Michael Egnor, is back. Rats. I thought that the utter drubbing he took at the hands of myself and my fellow ScienceBloggers (in particular PZ Myers) might have given him the message that he needs to lay low for a while. Apparently not. I guess he must have the monumental ego that more than a few neurosurgeons are famous for. (After all, it takes supreme confidence in one's own abilities to be able to cut into the human brain and believe that the patient…

Quackademic medicine at UCSF: The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine gets a new $37 million building

$37 million. If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at my old job, if memory serves me correctly, a whole new addition to the cancer center that nearly tripled its square footage cost somewhere in the range of $35-40 million. True, that was nearly ten years ago; so building the same building might now cost more than $37 million. My point…

More quackery at--where else?--The Huffington Post

I apologize to my readers. I apologize for continually blogging about the pseudoscience at The Huffington Post. Of late, it seems that I can't go more than a day or two without some new atrocity against science being tossed out from Arianna's happy home for antivaccinationists and quacks. Be it antivaccine lunacy, Deepak Chopra's "quantum" woo, or the latest quack stylings of Kim Evans, no woo is too woo-ey, no quackery too quacky, no pseudoscience too far out for HuffPo. In any case, HuffPo is a lot like blogging about the antivaccine movement. As I've characterized it again and again, it's…

A "homeopathic" bit of breast cancer "science," or: Who knew alcohol was so toxic?

Homeopaths are irritating. They're irritating for a number of reasons. One is their magical thinking, and, make no mistake, their thinking is nothing but pure magic, sympathetic magic to be precise. That's all that the principle of "like cures like" really is at its heart. Normally, that principle states that "like produces like," but homeopathy reverses that principle by saying that, while like produces like at normal concentrations, like reverses like at high dilutions. Somehow the magical process of shaking the remedy very hard between each dilution step (called "succussion") imbues it…

Mammography and the risk of breast cancer from low dose radiation: Weighing the risks versus hysteria

I'm beginning to understand why evolutionary biologists are so sensitive about how creationists abuse and twist any research that they think can be used to cast doubt upon evolution. Whenever there is research that changes the way we look at evolution or suggest aspects of it that we didn't appreciate before, where scientists get excited because they see an opportunity for better understanding of evolution, creationists see a chance to use it to launch specious and fallacious attacks against evolution. Sadly, there is no shortage of creationists willing to make fools of themselves to try to…

These boots were made for detoxifyin'

As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you. I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't…

Mike Adams adds religious nuttery to his armamentarium as he slimes Patrick Swayze posthumously

It looks like my prediction about Patrick Swayze came true. Not that it was a stretch to foresee that the Woo-meister Supreme Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com would waste no time in violating the corpse of Patrick Swayze before he was even cold by using Swayze's death as an excuse to repeat once again his oft-repeated misinformation and lies about chemotherapy and "natural" therapies. After all, he did it before for Tony Snow, so why not Patrick Swayze? In fact, I strongly suspect that Adams had this rant written months ago, ready and waiting for Patrick Swayze's death. All he had to do then was…

Enablers of the vaccine-autism manufactroversy

I realize that this week in practically every new post I've been mentioning TAM7. It hasn't exactly been intentional, believe it or not, at least aside from my recap a on Tuesday and my request for photos from those of you who attended. Oddly enough, although I mentioned how proud I was to be part of the Anti-Anti-Vax Panel discussion, where I joined Joe Albietz, Steve Novella, Mike Goudeau (skeptic, juggler, entertainer, producer, and writer who has an autistic child), Harriet Hall, and Derek Bartholomaus, I didn't really discuss some of the thoughts that the panel's discussion inspired in…

A trio of terror, part III: The search for everybody's favorite brain-eating Führer continues

Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…

Is evidence-based medicine "sufficient" for alternative medicine research?

One of the consistent themes of this blog since the very beginning has been that alternative medicine treatments, before being accepted, should be subject to the same standards of evidence as "conventional" medical therapies. When advocates of evidence-based medicine (EBM) like myself say this, we are frequently treated with excuses from advocates of alternative medicine as to why their favored treatments cannot be subjected to the scientific method in the same way that medicine has increasingly applied it to its own treatments over the last few decades, in the process weeding out treatments…

More distortion of peer-reviewed data by HIV/AIDS "dissidents"

I knew there was a reason that I don't often blog about politics, and yesterday reminded me of it. Maybe I should have just launched another enthusiastic debunking of the distortions and outright false information put out by antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler. Instead, I thought it might be educational to return to a topic that I haven't revisited in a while, so-called HIV/AIDS "dissidents." These cranks resemble antivaxers in their fast-and-loose approach to and cherry-picking of the data, along with some outright misrepresentations of studies. They're at it again. This time around…

A nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett

About three weeks ago, fresh after having experienced my own attack by anti-vaccine activists who tried to get me fired, I noticed that Doctors Data was doing what cranks and crank organizations can't resist doing when they face scientific criticism, namely to lash out. Such lashing out can take many forms. In my case, as I mentioned, the cranks were the anti-vaccine loons at Age of Autism, and the attack consisted of an e-mail campaign against me to the board of directors of my university. To Dr. Barrett, who, thanks to his many more years taking on medical pseudoscience than I, is far more…

The CDC whistleblower William W. Thompson: Final (for now) roundup and epilogue

It is as I had feared. I must do one more post on a story that I’ve been blogging about for one solid week now. Hopefully after this, I will be able to move on to other topics last week, but after spending this whole week writing just about this, I figured, “What the heck? It’s Friday. Might as well make it a solid week and move on next week. I hope.” What am I referring to? Those familiar with the story, as in past installments, can skip the recap (but shouldn’t). I feel obligated to include one because of all the new readers who have appeared for these peerless bits of, in this case, not…

Dan Olmsted obliterates yet another irony circuit

Dr. Paul Offit's book Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure has hit the bookstores, and, as predicted, the mercury militia is going into a frenzy of spin and smear. As is usual, because they have no science to support their viewpoint, they are reduced to extended ad hominem attacks. For example, the clueless wonder of a reporter who couldn't find the Clinic for Special Children and the autistic children treated there but nonetheless confidently exclaimed that he couldn't find any autistic Amish children, goes for a full frontal assault in a little…

Teaching overenthusiastic CAM advocates a little bit about gene expression profiling

Yesterday, I was depressed. Today I'm a little irritated. I'm irritated because I came across a study from a couple of weeks ago that's actually a really cool study that applies actual science to the question of how diet and lifestyle changes might alter biology to improve health. It's exactly the sort of study that can apply help understand how diet affects health. It's a study by Dean Ornish, who's widely known for his advocacy of a lifestyle-driven approach to treating atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and producing evidence in the early 1990s that such a lifestyle alteration could…

"Integrative" medicine at Yale: A more "fluid" concept of evidence?

I realize that I've been very, very remiss in attending to a task that I've been meaning to get to since late January. There are several reasons, albeit not excuses, for why I have failed to do this task. Perhaps the most powerful impediment to my overcoming my inertia and just diving in and doing what needs to be done is that it depresses me to no end to contemplate what needs to be contemplated to complete this task. Moreover, although I have completed a great deal, I sense that I have barely even scratched the surface of what needs to be done to complete the task, which also continuously…

Homeopathic ophthalmology and chromatotherapy? Keep my eyes away!

Contrary to what you might think, the longer I do this blogging thing, it doesn't necessarily get easier. The reason, of course, is that after more than nine years of near daily posts there are days when it's really hard to come up with something that really gets me fired up to do the hard work it takes to write. I'd be lying if I said there weren't days when the thought going through my head goes something like, "Another bit of idiocy by antivaccinationists? How many times have I seen this before." But sometimes, as much as I sometimes think I've seen it all with respect to quackery, there…

A paean to naturopathy on—where else?—The Huffington Post

If you're a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine (SBM), as I am, no doubt there are times when you ask yourself in exasperation, frustration, or curiosity just what the appeal of quackery is to so many people. Why do people fall for this stuff? you no doubt ask yourself at times. Certainly I do sometimes, and even though I know a lot about the cognitive shortcomings that we humans all share that lead to confirmation bias, confusing correlation with causation, mistaking placebo effects and regression to the mean for real therapeutic effects, and poor observational skills, sometimes…

Quacks react to Andrew Weil's proposed board certification in woo

About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing "integrative medicine" (IM), or, as I prefer to call them, physicians who like to integrate pseudoscience with their science, quackery with their medicine. At the time, I referred to it as a board certification in woo. Was I harsh? Yes. Accurate? Also yes. Unfortunately, many medical centers, both academic and…

What's scarier than dubious stem cell clinics? A naturopathic stem cell clinic!

I've frequently written about bogus stem cell clinics that use hard sell techniques to sell unproven and expensive "stem cell treatments" to desperate patients. For instance, I deconstructed the story claiming that hockey great Gordie Howe improved so markedly after a severe stroke, thanks to stem cells offered to him for free (because of his celebrity) by a dubious stem cell company (Stemedica) through its Mexican partner (Clínica Santa Clarita). The whole incident basically opened my eyes to just how unethical the for-profit stem cell clinic industry is, as clinics use hard sell techniques…

An antivaxer starts a WhiteHouse.gov petition for a five year moratorium on childhood vaccines. Hilarity ensues.

I've been writing about antivaccine loons for a long time, and during that time I've seen them propose some crazy ideas. The other day, I came across one proposing what might well be the craziest, most irresponsible idea I've ever seen from an antivaccine activist. It comes from our old friend Kent Heckenlively. Heckenlively, as you might recall, started out over at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism but, for whatever reason, left the blog to write somewhere else. Amazingly, that "somewhere else" turned out to be the website of one Patrick "Tim" Bolen, whom I just mentioned yesterday…

No, torturing colicky infants by sticking them with acupuncture needles won't calm them

So I was distracted yesterday from what I had intended to write about by an irresistible target provided me courtesy of Toby Cosgrove, MD, CEO of The Cleveland Clinic, who bemoaned all those nasty pro-science advocates who had had the temerity to link the antivaccine rant by the director of the Clinic's Wellness Institute to the quackery practiced there of whose affinity for antivaccine quackery Cosgrove appears to be oblivious. So I took care of that target, and now I'm back to the topic I had wanted to apply some Insolence to. Yes, there was no way I was going to allow this pseudoscientific…

A rare win for science: The FTC issues its enforcement policy on homeopathic remedies

Whenever I write about homeopathy, I almost always refer to it at least once as “The One Quackery To Rule Them All.” It’s a phrase I’ve used to describe homeopathy for several years now, and for good reason. Of all the quackery out there, with the possible exception of reiki, homeopathy is the one that is most obviously quackery. Its two main “Laws” are so clearly pseudoscience that you’d think it incredibly unlikely that anyone would fall for such nonsense, but fall for it they do. I’ll briefly show you what I mean. That I can do so this briefly should show those unfamiliar with homeopathy…

Another child dead from quackery: The parents say they're being persecuted in a plot to impose forced vaccination

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a story of a sort that I've had to write about far too many times over the last eleven years. I wrote about the death of a child—but not just any death of a child, the death of a child who could have—should have—lived. The child's name was Ezekiel Stephan, and his parents are David and Collet Stephan. The reason that child should have lived is because he suffered from a disease that medicine can treat, meningitis. Unfortunately, his parents didn't take him to a real doctor. They took him to a naturopath, who recommended maple syrup, juice with frozen…

Dobzhansky, Evolution and Me at AAAS

At the AAAS meetings in Chicago two weeks ago, I was privileged to be on a panel with such luminaries as Olivia Judson, David Deamer, Neil Shubin, and this year's winner of the AAAS Award for the Public Understanding of Science, Ken Miller. It was a great occasion, and afterward I got to shake hands with the original Tiktaalik fossil at Neil Shubin's lab, conveniently located catty-corner to my old dorm at the University of Chicago. I plan to make slidecasts of several of those talks to post on Youtube or Slideshare when I get the time. Until then, we can anticipate a multi-part series…

Stolen emails, climate change, and the practice of science

A week or so ago, someone broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and made off with a range of emails and other data from the university's Climate Research Unit. This excited lots of climate change deniers, as they've long claimed that CRU had secret evidence that global warming wasn't happening, or something. Much web commentary followed, in which a supposedly "random sample" of these emails were widely distributed and dissected publicly. My first thought on reading about this was not about climate change or the ensuing storm of BS about it. I thought of the scientists'…

To crush your enemies, and steal their cattle for your sons!

As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring. To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents.…

Another Week of GW News, March 9, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) Top Stories:OECD Environmental Outlook, Burning Tundra, Particulates Melting Arctic, Potential Arctic Conflict, Antarctica, Earth Hour Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science, Seitz Obit. Carbon Trade, Carbon Tax, Optimal Carbon Reduction…

Fractal Mountains

When you mention fractals, one of the things that immediately comes to mind for most people is fractal landscapes. We've all seen amazing images of mountain ranges, planets, lakes, and things of that sort that were generated by fractals. Seeing a fractal image of a mountain, like the one in this image (which I found here via a google image search for "fractal mountain"), I expected to find that it was based on an extremely complicated fractal. But the amazing thing about fractals is how complexity emerges from simplicity. The basic process for generating a fractal mountain - and many other…

I Get Letters About Bush Dogs

These are much cuter than Congressman Marshall (from here) I received an email from Jane Hamsher and Matt Stoller about S-CHIP: Dear Mike, Despite overwhelming bipartisan support and a near veto-proof majority in the House, eight Democrats voted against the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That list includes Bush Dog Democrat Jim Marshall of Georgia's Eighth Congressional District. Today, we can pressure Marshall to switch his vote and move the party an absolutely critical step forward towards overriding the President's veto. We've created an ad to run next Tuesday, right…

Confusing Brains with Sociopathy

Sometimes in blogging timing is everything. I had this post about Karl Rove all ready to go, and then he goes and resigns on me. Oh well. Anyway, this is a response to an excellent post by Maha about Karl Rove's vaunted political acumen not being so, erm, acumeney. Maha writes: Another factor: I've thought many times that the Bush White House has a weird inability to respond to unexpected events. Whenever something happens that was not on the schedule -- like 9/11 or the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina or Dick Cheney's hunting "accident" -- they are flummoxed. Often they are slow to…

When Media Consumers Revolt

Something very interesting in the news about the news--the Chicago Sun has publicly announced its decision to make its op-ed page more liberal. From Editor and Publisher: The tabloid that shifted toward political conservatism under the brief ownership of Rupert Murdoch more than two decades ago now says that it is "rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush's war in Iraq." Under marching orders from Publisher John Cruickshank and Editor in Chief Michael Cooke, new Editorial Page Editor Cheryl L. Reed introduced a new Commentary…

Israel Has Won

One of the problems I have with the U.S.'s self-appointed Jewish leadership is that too many of them appear to believe that Israel will be annihilated at any moment. In today's NY Times, Daniel Gavron puts that fear in context: While it is true that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talks about wiping Israel off the map, and he might be developing the technical means to do so, he has also said that he will agree to whatever agreement the Palestinians accept. The Lebanese Islamic group Hezbollah is utterly hostile, but it is now focused on events in its own country. The Palestinian…

ID Creationists and Antibiotic Resistance: The Hackery Continues

You would think after the sound thrashing Michael Egnor received due to his mangling of the basics of evolutionary biology, the Discovery Institute might want to find someone else to quote in a guide for students. Nope: "Microbiology tells us that bacterial populations are heterogeneous. Individual bacteria differ from one another. Molecular biology tells us that some bacteria have molecular mechanisms by which they can survive antibiotics. Molecular genetics tells us how these resistance mechanisms are passed to other bacteria and through generations of bacteria. Pharmacology helps us…

Fossil Mummy Dinosaur

No, it doesn't eat brains: that would be a fossil zombie dinosaur. From The Washington Post: A high school student hunting fossils in the badlands of his native North Dakota discovered an extremely rare mummified dinosaur that includes not just bones but also seldom seen fossilized soft tissue such as skin and muscles, scientists will announce today. ...."He looks like a blow-up dinosaur in some parts," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England who is leading the inquiry. "When you actually look at the detail of the skin, the scales themselves are…

Zero Sum Policies and Compulsive Centrist Disorder

Now that the Democrats have taken both houses of Congress, there will be loud calls for them to govern from center. This silliness will be promulgated by the likes of David Broder and other Mainstream Media Mandarins who suffer from Complusive Centrist Disorder. Complusive Centrist Disorder has always bothered me because a certain policy or view will mysteriously be labelled 'centrist' regardless of where it actually falls on the political spectrum, and suddenly it will be far more respectable than other policies. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness of a high order. One problem is…

Antibiotic Resistance and National Healthcare

While the main reason to use antibiotics only when needed is to preserve their effectiveness, it's always nice to have an economic incentive coupled with proper use of these important drugs. From the Guernsey Press and Star: The States prescribing support unit is claiming success in a campaign to encourage islanders to think more carefully about their need for the drugs. Prescriptions fell by 983 courses - a reduction of 3.3% on the previous year - between October 2005 and March 2006, reducing costs to the States by £30,000. 'That is a significant reduction in what is the peak season for…

You know it's a stinker when they're afraid of the reviewers

Way, way back on 16 July, I got a letter from the Discovery Institute. Dear Dr. Myers: I am writing to ask if you have plans to review Dr. Stephen C. Meyer's new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne). I would be happy to ask Dr. Meyer's publisher to send you a review copy. I know you are busy but if you can get back to me about this, including any thoughts or comments you may have, I will grateful. Sincerely, Janet Oberembt Assistant to Dr. Meyer Discovery Institute Oh, great, I thought — I know what kind of drivel Meyer was going to…

Jury Duty: Do Yours

Nobody likes jury duty: most criminal and civil cases involve some moron doing something they shouldn't have--and you end up have to waste time due to said moron. Nonetheless, having a jury trial is a cornerstone of our justice system. It's also useful in the 'smaller' cases, since the ability of prosecutors to say "I have a jury next door waiting to hear this case" often results in plea settlements. Unfortunately, Suffolk county, MA has a jury pool problem: Suffolk County, facing a years-long surge in violent crime and a spike in trials, will run out of prospective jurors by October,…