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Kev takes 'em on twice while Orac sits back and enjoys

Tara's post yesterday about Mercury and Mythology about how mercury in vaccines does not cause autism and about a recent story demonstrating tht mercury as used in dental amalgams is safe, coupled with Phil Plait's discussion of an article in TIME about autism that seemed a bit too credulous about facilitated communication reminded me that I haven't blogged about autism in a while. Basically, not much has happened that I feel qualified to comment on since Paul Shattuck's article concluding that claims of an "autism epidemic" based on analyses of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (…

Life and Death in a Lady Beetle Colony

I love trees, but trees covered in insects aren't usually my cup of tea. 'Till now. One of the reasons I chose my house was the giant maple tree by the front porch. The foliage provides shade and privacy in the summer and a terrific Halloween backdrop in the fall. So, a few weeks ago, when I noticed the tree was infested with something, I was a bit concerned. Ok, maybe that's putting it lightly. I threw science out the window and freaked out. "The tree's covered with insects! It's gonna die! Ew!! Call somebody! Quick!" The homeowner's association sent out an arborist to take a look, and I…

DoJ's Rationale Behind Banning Non-Canine Service Animals

Yesterday, as part of ongoing follow up on my story in this week's New York Times Magazine, I posted about a Department of Justice document leaked to me with the wording of their proposal to ban all non-canine service animals. Below the jump, for those interested, I've pasted an excerpt from that proposal, which is not yet public. It outlines the arguments the DOJ heard for and against the species ban during this summer's public hearings, plus the DOJ's responses, and its final ruling on the issue. Bottom line: "The Department agrees with commenters' views that limiting the number and…

Hot rocks, thermal insulation, and the giant imaginary comforter in the lower crust

The cores of mountain belts formed by continental collisions often contain metamorphic rocks, formed when sediments were buried in the collision and transformed by heat and pressure. But the heat and pressure don't happen simultaneously - rocks can be buried (and increase in pressure) much faster than they can heat up. When the rocks are not allowed to heat up significantly, this process can create blueschists, the high pressure/low temperature metamorphic rocks formed in subduction zones. In continental collisions, subduction stops, and the metamorphic rocks sit around at depth, heating up…

Predicting height: the Victorian approach beats modern genomics

Yurii S Aulchenko, Maksim V Struchalin, Nadezhda M Belonogova, Tatiana I Axenovich, Michael N Weedon, Albert Hofman, Andre G Uitterlinden, Manfred Kayser, Ben A Oostra, Cornelia M van Duijn, A Cecile J W Janssens, Pavel M Borodin (2009). Predicting human height by Victorian and genomic methods European Journal of Human Genetics DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2009.5 Human height is a strongly genetic trait: in well-nourished Westerners somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90% of the variation in height is due to genetic factors; if your parents are tall, there's a very good chance you will be too. That means…

Five abandoned Olympic sports

There is only one truly kosher sport when it comes to the Olympics: athletics. All those ancient Greeks did was run around in the dirt butt naked. It took over fifty years for them to add a second sport: more running, but in a wild twist, a race over twice the distance as before. Over the years more sports were added, including one involving running in full armour, which much have provided much-needed advertising canvas for Classical games sponsors. After the revival of the games in 1894, various sports have been added, some successfully, whilst others fell by the wayside. Take a tour…

Nye/Ham postmortem: William Saletan and the corporatist fallacy

I've been collecting responses to the notorious debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, and intend to write a couple of summaries of various aspects of the debate: Bill Nye won it hands down, but that does not remove him from criticism, and there have been some weird arguments presented both to defend and criticize him. Right now, I want to focus on William Saletan, corporate tool and professional contrarian, who also seems to have some kind of weird Malcolm Gladwell envy. Don't feel jealous, Will, to me you're both glib and superficial apologists for capitalism. here's the gist of Saletan's…

. . . in the light of . . . well?

Over a year and half ago (~1 eon in internet time) I wrote this blog entry in which I turned around the title of Dobzhansky's famous essay "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". I didn't think I was being all that clever when I came up with the following: NOTHING IN EVOLUTION MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN THE LIGHT OF GENETICS I pointed out that evolution requires heritable variation first and foremost, hence genetics lies at the center of all of evolution. I then took the opportunity to explain why Hardy and Weinberg's derivation that random mating does not change allele…

Best Biology Experiment/Discovery

Chad at Uncertain Principles, one of my ScienceBlogs siblings, is requesting his co-bloggers suggest the most important experiment or discovery in their field. There are a disproportionate amount of "bio-bloggers" -- though we each have our own niche -- and he's asking us to nominate "the most important experiment or observation in biology". I'm expecting that because of our diverse interests, you'll see some differences in how we interpret "important". This leads me to wonder why we have so many life-sciences types at ScienceBlogs and so few math/physics/chemistry types, but that's a…

Science is Not Just a Game

A week ago, a colleague pointed me to this New York Times article about Marcus Ross. Ross is an individual whom I personally have a hard time respecting, given what he's done. He's a Young-Earth Creationist who has managed to get a PhD in geosciences studying a species that vanished 65 million years ago... and all along maintaining as if he believed what he was doing. This has been written about elsewhere in the blogosphere; I'll just point you to Janet's blog entry on the matter, and you can jump forward from there. Here's my take on the matter: Ross is not intellectually honest, at least…

Your exactly accurate definition is still exactly stupid

One of the most common dodges used by Intelligent Design creationists is to use a vague definition of their subject so that critics have nothing specific too attack, and also so they can accuse anyone who disagrees with them of using a strawman argument. For example, they claim that organisms exhibit "specified complexity", which cannot have evolved and requires a designer. If someone rightly points out that their definition of complexity is nowhere close to what real complexity theorists use, they can say, "Ah, but I'm talking about specified complexity, which is something different," which…

Listicles get published in peer-reviewed journals!

I used a cruel headline, but this is actually a useful list: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. It's not just the popular media that mangle scientific language, but also more technical works sometimes slip into misleading shorthand. For instance, #1 on their list of bad terms: (1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997).…

Strange worm, Xenoturbella

This odd marine worm, Xenoturbella bocki, is in the news right now, and I had to look it up in Pechenik's Biology of the Invertebrates(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to remind myself of what it was. Here's the complete entry: Xenoturbella bocki This marine worm, first described in 1949 as an acoel flatworm and later claimed as either an early metazoan offshoot or a primitive deuterostome, has recently been affiliated with primitive bivalve molluscs, based upon a study of gamete development (oogenesis) and an analysis of sequence data from both 18S rRNA and mitochondrial genes. Little is known about…

Decoding Consciousness

"It is better to tackle ten fundamental [scientific] problems and succeed in only one, than to tackle ten trivial ones and solve them all," Francis Crick once told his devoted pupil V.S. Ramachandran, director of San Diego State's Center for Brain and Cognition. Ramachandran, apparently, took this advice to heart. The man who contends that neuroscience is ushering in "the greatest [scientific] revolution of all" believes that understanding the circuitry of the brain will soon allow us to tackle the existential questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries. He is so confident, in fact…

Dr. Kaiser responds

I was pleased to see that Dr. Kaiser responded to post from earlier this week. If you'll recall, Dr. Jon Kaiser is a doctor in California who is promoting a nutritional supplement to help treat HIV disease. I was hoping his response would be substantive, containing references to data I had missed in my research of the story. In this I was disappointed. Dr. Lipson, I was surprised when I read your recent blog about my career, expertise and perspective on HIV treatment. Facts and science can be manipulated to support any opinion, so it is a fruitless exercise to engage in a point by point…

Stupid, stupid burning bright

In case you didn't know, Science Blogs is owned by a company called Seed Media Group. They invite bloggers, host them, give them tech support, and use their blogs to post ad content. And that's it. Bloggers are offered small compensation based on blog hits, but for most bloggers, this ads up to very little. Blog content is independent in every way but one: blogging is by invitation only. Once you're here, you can write whatever you want. But conspiracy theorists are likely to be unimpressed by this. Seed's ads are everything from major corporate sponsors to google adsense garbage that…

The more things change, the more they stay the same: David Irving reverts to form.

Well, that didn't take long. Only a few days after his conviction for Holocaust denial, David Irving has reverted to form: Far-right author David Irving's repudiation of his views on the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it has not lasted very long. In a prison interview just days after he told an Austrian court he had been wrong to deny the Holocaust, he reverted to insisting that the slaughter in Nazi death camps was exaggerated, and that Jews "bear blame for what happened". He went on: The author was jailed on Monday for three years for denying the Holocaust during two lectures and in a…

Another way to join the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients' campaign, plus: It is noticed that Stanislaw Burzynski has thrown information about his "clinical trials" down the ol' memory hole

While I'm using my blog as an announcement platform today, I would be remiss not to mention that tomorrow is Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's birthday, and the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients are still raising money for St. Jude's Children's Hospital in order to try to get Dr. Burzynski to do something good for cancer patients for a change. The beauty of it is that, even if Burzynski declines, as is likely, there'll still be a nice big donation to a real cancer center that does real good for children with cancer, which is in marked contrast to Burzynski. Harriet Hall has joined in the…

Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.

I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens. For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even modest quantity to rats, causes the rats to get cancer and die in no time. This raises concerns for humans because, well, the rats died. So the substance must be "bad for you." But this approach to nutritional science, and the reasoning that goes with it, is deeply flawed. Now, you may wish to jump in and say, "No, wait,…

DIY Neuro-Motor Experiments: When the Left Hand Knows What the Right is Doing

In previous installments in the DIY NME series, I've looked at the application of symmetrical motor patterns using the drum kit. For this entry, the approach is a little different and says something about "handedness" as well. A few months ago I rearranged my semi-symmetrical drum kit into what I call the super symmetrical kit. The original semi-sym kit offered a centered hi-hat and three toms on each side, decreasing in pitch from front-center to rear. The remaining cymbals were arranged in a more-or-less typical configuration for a right-hander (ride to the right, crashes arrayed as desired…

Attack of the Skinny Vixens! Bad Science Journalism - Exhibit A

When I encounter horrific articles like Hope for sex-boosting slimming pill , I would just as soon take a pencil and shove it in my ear because that would be more gratifying than giving such journalistic shattery any kind of serious consideration. But what the hey, this is the Chimp Refuge, where we toss scat with giddy abandon, so I'll hold off on the pencil in ear and substitute a cathartic round of fisking. At first glance, I thought I should be pissed off at the misogynistic overtones in this article. I mean, look at the byline: Scientists are developing a pill which could boost women…

And now a word from obesity's big fat corporate sponsor.

Doc Bushwell here, pharmaceutical bogeyperson of the fast food-pharma-medical establishments' collusion against the fundamentalist fat activists (FFAs). Yes, that's right. We bench monkey pharma researchers lie awake at night, tossing, turning and vigorously scratching our nether regions, while we plot new ways of wresting money and adipose tissue from these hapless souls. Truth be told, many large pharmaceutical companies have major obesity research programs which have fed, and intend to feed, the pipeline with compounds as clinical candidate hopefuls in the war against obesity. Some, like…

I get email

Time for another stream-of-consciousness response to yet another slimy Christian. Interesting blog But I beg for just a few moments of your time. You are obviously an intelligent individual, considering you're a prof and all [Flattery alert: diverting warp power to shields. I can guess how this will end up], but consider this for one second. Could our few years on this planet be all that there is? [Yes.] You are born, live, then die and that's it? [That's what I said. Yes.] All of you loved ones that have died are no more? [What? It's not enough to have lived and to have loved ones? These…

Thinking Again About The Production of Genius

I am a fan of Oliver Sacks, and will read just about anything he has written - though, interestingly enough, I find myself so far unable to make my way through Migraine. Perhaps this has something to do with the cover illustration of a mosaic aura, which twice induced an aura (scintillating fortification) and subsequent migraine in me. If you are not a migraine sufferer, you might find this slide show of migraine art interesting, for it does depict the migraineur's experience at the onset of aura. Migraineurs, be warned: viewing the paintings in the slideshow could possibly be triggering…

Climate Change, Clean Air, Congress, and the Court

Chris Mooney finds Justice Scalia being proudly clueless as he prepares to decide whether the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, if it permits such regulation, or whether the state of Massachusetts has a right to even get into that argument. JUSTICE SCALIA: your assertion is that after the pollutant leaves the air and goes up into the stratosphere it is contributing to global warming. MR. MILKEY: Respectfully, Your Honor, it is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere. JUSTICE SCALIA: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I'm not a scientist. (Laughter…

Scary, scary people

A repost from the old blog, first published in July, and lightly edited. This is in part a response to critics of my criticism of Richard Dawkins, but also a chance to break the first rule of Fight Club. Blog Meridian brings us a discussion of Fight Club. John quotes someone quoting a review which says: Quite honestly, if I didn't believe in God, I would join Tyler Durden in his philosophy. If God didn't exist—if Christ didn't offer salvation—then Tyler would be right [to reject morality and consequences]... and to live otherwise in this mad world would be hypocritical, and a waste of air.…

A too-critical critic?

If I got paid to do reviews of books, movies, websites, and products I definitely could turn it into a full-time job. Almost every day something turns up in my inbox telling me about a new website or product that someone wants me to take a look at and plug here. I end up deleting most of them (sometimes wondering why some of these people think I'm fit to review websites about herbal remedies and other such things), but a few are interesting enough that I do want to take a look. Some things I know I'm going to like before I even receive the materials, others I end up being pleasantly…

A contorted Gorgosaurus

The articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus (AMNH 5428) found in the Belly River Formation near the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada. From Matthew & Brown 1923. In 1913, an American Museum of Natural History expedition led by Barnum Brown (with P.C. Kaisen and George Sternberg as assistants) searched the Cretaceous Belly River Formation in Alberta, Canada for dinosaurs. Although there had been an expedition to the same area the year before, the 1913 trip yielded "more exhibition material," including the articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus*. When it arrived in New York it was prepared by…

Eotriceratops xerinsularis!

A close-up of the Triceratops mount on display at the AMNH. Ornithischian dinosaurs don't often get much attention, perhaps because some groups (i.e. hadrosaurs) are often viewed as the "cows" of the Mesozoic, having almost the exact same body plan only differing in head ornamentation. Members of the family Ceratopsidae often have better publicists, though, Triceratops being one of the most recognized and popular of dinosaurs despite public unfamiliarity with many other ceratopsids.* It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that a new ceratopsid closely related to Triceratops…

Repealing Taft-Hartley to fix immigration

There's very little agreement on the immigration issue, and unlike so many issues, it is not a purely partisan issue. One area where everyone seems to agree is that illegal immigrant labor drives down wages in at least some industries. I should point out that the evidence of economy-wide effects of immigrants seems to be neutral. We all benefit from cheaper food, so the effects on wages among fruitpickers balances out when you consider the whole economy. People who argue that immigrants are just taking jobs that Americans won't accept are, after all, basically claiming that Americans…

Why I Don't Blog About Politics

Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of glossy campaign mailers. In the last 48 hours, Obama has appeared at the local high school and Richardson showed up at my favorite pub. McCain practically lives in my zipcode. Over the last year, I've had the privilege of attending numerous political events. (And I say this as someone who grew up in LA and lived in NYC and never, ever saw a…

On the Overton window

In the comments on my post the other day about the importance of evidence in skepticism and science outreach, RBH leaves an interesting comment that's worth digging into a bit. I replied in the thread, RBH's invocation of the Overton Window struck me. He writes: We hear about the Dunning-Kruger effect; let's not forget about the Overton Window. In a lovely irony, it might be PZ's (alleged) ineffectiveness that enables Josh's (purported) effectiveness. It would be ironic indeed, but there's no reason to think it's true. RBH is a smart guy, and may well have a more sophisticated model of that…

On false equivalencies

In Ophelia Benson's writeup of the Ron Lindsay/Chris Mooney discussion, there's a passage about the Templeton Foundation that jumps out as deeply problematic: Then they talked about the Templeton Foundation, and Mooney's "fellowship," and the fact that it was controversial. Would you accept a fellowship from the Discovery Institute? Lindsay asked. No. Liberty University? Probably not. But they interfere with science, and Templeton doesn't. Templeton, he said, "are generating a dialogue about the relationship between science and religion." He thinks that's a good thing. I don't. On its own,…

Skeptics and the Pope

So there's no confusion, I'm entirely down with the skeptical movement. I'm on the board of Bay Area Skeptics (the oldest local skeptic group in the US), I'm helping organize SkeptiCal: The Northern California Science and Skepticism Conference (register now). I've hosted the Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Yay skepticism. I've also jumped on the recent stories about the Pope's role in covering up rape by priests. I do that not as a skeptic, not as a scientist, not as an agnostic, not as a Democrat, not as a fan of Firefly and The Wire. I do it as a person concerned about the wellbeing of…

What if Props 1A-1F fail?

Calitics is pretty excited. Polling, most recently from SurveyUSA, shows that a series of amendments meant to solve this year's California budget crisis are likely to fail. All get less than 50% support, with only one seeing less than 50% opposition (and a lot of undecideds, obviously). In the abstract, I'm glad. The problem in Sacramento is twofold. First, property taxes are capped in ways that have progressively starved the state over the last 30 years. That means you have to raise taxes every year in order to simply keep up with inflation and population growth. Which brings us to the…

The Epic USATE Post!

I had two big deadlines this Friday for various projects, and I am happy to report that I made both of them. That means I finally have time to take a breath, and write the post you have all been waiting for. What happened at the U. S. Amateur Team East chess tournament!? That's right! Over President's weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to Parsippany, NJ, to play in the biggest tournament of the year. With something like 1200 players, it's really just a big chess party. I don't play nearly as much tournament chess as I used to, but I definitely make an effort to come out of retirement…

"Why doctors hate science"? More like: Why does Sharon Begley hate doctors?

If there's' one theme, one cause, that this blog has emphasized throughout the four years of its existence and the three years of its having resided on ScienceBlogs, it's been to champion science- and evidence-based medicine over pseudoscience and quackery. Whether it's refuting the lies of antivaccine zealots, having a little fun with some of the more outrageously bizarre forms of pseudoscience, railing against cancer quackery, lamenting how easily pseudoscientific quackery has infiltrated medical academia, complaining about drug companies rigging clinical studies, or trying to educate my…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It's all in the shoes, or is it?

One of the favorite failings in logic and science among the woo-friendly crowd is the ever-famous one of confusing correlation with causation, also known as non causa pro causa, which means "non-cause for the cause." Examples of this are rampant, and include the antivaccinationists who confuse correlation with vaccination and the age at which autism is usually first recognized with vaccines causing autism, taking a homeopathic remedy shortly before having their symptoms resolve spontaneously and mistaking this for the efficacy of the homeopathic remedy, chelating children with autism and…

John McCain a "dead man walking"? Not so fast

Less than a month ago, I got a bit perturbed by some vile rhetoric written by a left-wing blogger named Matt Stoller, who referred to John McCain as a "crazy, cancer-ridden dishonest madman." As you recall, I administered a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to him. It wasn't so much because I like John McCain. Indeed, I've pretty much decided that McCain is a lost cause, a shadow of his former self. I would have voted for him in 2000, but in the last eight years he's let his ambition to become President utterly destroy whatever honor he had left, a truly sad thing to see given his previous…

The revenge of "microfascism": PoMo strikes medicine again

I hate postmodernism. Well, not exactly postmodernism per se, but I hate it when pseudoscientists and purveyors of dubious "alternative" medicine treatments invoke bizarre postmodernist-sounding arguments to attack science or, in the case of medicine, science- and evidence-based medicine. Usually these attacks involve a claim that science is nothing more than one other "narrative" among many others, a "narrative" that isn't necessarily any more valid than any other. Even worse, these sorts of arguments often claim that science (or, in this case, evidence-based medicine) is nothing more than a…

Don't be a dick

Over the weekend, the skeptics gathered at James Randi's annual The Amazing Meeting, or TAM. By all accounts, it was a great show. Probably the most buzz came from a talk by Phil Plait, which became known as the "don't be a dick" speech, because, well, he argued that skeptics will be most effective when they aren't dicks. As I wasn't there, I couldn't comment on the speech, but twitter exploded over it. A surprising number of PZ Myers' fans seemed to think Plait was talking about PZ, though PZ wasn't mentioned. Interesting, that PZ's supporters either think he's a dick, or think other…

Saturday Recipe: Ginger Scallion Sauce

Today's recipe is something I made this week for the first time, and trying it was like a revelation. It's simple to make, it's got an absolutely spectacularly wonderful flavor - light and fresh - and it's incredibly versatile. It's damned near perfect. It's scallion ginger sauce, and once you try it, it will become a staple. To quote David Chang, whose cookbook I learned this from: if you've got ginger scallion sauce in the fridge, you'll never be hungry. There are two main variations of this: there's a cooked version, and a raw version. Mine is the raw version. I love the freshness of…

Insurance: Why it sucks

Look folks, I don't want to become an economics blogger! Stop sending me economics questions. I hate to disappoint my readers and not answer their questions, but this economics stuff is almost terminally dull to me. The mortgage posts have gotten an insane amount of traffic, which has in turn brought in a huge number of questions. Most of them are about details of the whole mortgage situation - and honestly, I can't answer those. I don't know the details, only the basics, and I can't explain what I don't know. On the other hand, a lot of people have used my down-to-earth explanation of the…

Civil Unions: Let's Party Like It's 1399?

Via LiveScience comes this interesting story about gay relationships during medieval times (italics mine): Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says. Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past. "Western family structures have been much…

Driftglass' Reponse to Sebelius

Seven years into the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain, some Democrats still don't get that the Republicans and movement conservatives do not reconsider and rethink, they regroup and rearm. driftglass tries to help Democratic Kansas Governor Sebelius understand this (bold original): And then comes the Democratic response from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius: I'm a Democrat, but that doesn't matter tonight. The fact that you're tuning in suggests that you're[....] Oh, Jebus. Pause, while I roll my eyes and reach for the Fwow Up Bag. Sebelius: I will now detour from the…

Abortion and the First Amendment

I happy to see that others are coming around to the idea that the abortion debate is ultimately about the establishment of religion (italics mine): She [Keenan] was saying more that the people in the mushy middle feel like they're in a moral quandary about abortion, because it's all mixed up with various other issues about sex, commitment, self-image, family, ickiness, and other touchy subjects and thus most people refuse to really think the issue through and come to the correct conclusion: Anything so complex and personal should be a matter of personal conscience. The term "moral complexity…

Fitness and a Tale of Two Beta-Lactamases

Beta-lactam antibiotics, penicillin and all of its subsequent derivatives, are critical, life saving drugs. One way bacteria protect themselves from these antibiotics is by producing enzymes known as beta-lactamases that cleave the beta-lactam, rendering the beta-lactam antibiotic harmless. There are many different kinds of beta-lactams (such as CTX-M), and they differ in how common or rare they are. A recent study examined looked at the role fitness might have in making TEM class beta-lactamases very frequent and found in many different species, and keeping SME class beta-lactamases rare…

Conservative Exiles: Welcome to Liberalville

Driftglass describes the racist horror that is the Republican base and which is becoming repellent to some conservatives: The Base is pro-torture for the simple reason that they are sadists and imbeciles; because unless somewhere some Scary Brown Person is being beaten to death with a pipe wrench in their name, they feel empty and impotent and afraid. Like their slaveholder great-grandfathers, their Jim Crow grandfathers and John Birch daddies, their entire identity is undergirded by an ideology that says - as hateful, cowardly, ignorant and covetous of everyone and everything as they are -…

Gotta keep you on your toes

The comment registration system here is still a PITA. I know; I get so many complaints from so many people, yet at the same time, I need the dog-damned thing in order to manage the horrendous pile of spam and troll-trash spilling over into the comments. So I'm going to compromise a bit. I will occasionally switch off the comment registration requirement for random periods of time, just so people who are locked out by its clumsiness can get a word in; but I will also sporadically switch it back on whenever the noise gets to me. Which might be every day. Or every couple of days. Or every…

Salmonella and Illegal Antibiotic Use in Agriculture

One topic that I don't discuss enough is the role that the agricultural use of antibiotics plays in the evolution (and ecology) of antibiotic resistance. A recent review in Clinical Microbiology and Infection describes how the illegal use of nitrofuran antibiotics in Portugese agriculture led to an increase in highly virulent Salmonella. What are nitrofurans? There are several different nitrofuran antibiotics (furazolidone, nitrofurazone, and nitrofurantoin), but the one drug some readers might have heard of (or taken) is nitrofurantoin, which is used to treat urinary tract infections, in…