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Bobby Jindal: ignorant genius

Some of you know that Bobby Jindal was just elected as the governor of Louisiana. Jindal has an interesting story, he's the son of Indian immigrants, received degrees in biology and public bolicy from Brown, passed on Harvard Medical School for a Rhodes Scholarship, and took over the Louisiana Public Health System at the age of 24. He is also a convert to Catholicism, and extremely politically conservative. Conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini had a political orgasm a few days ago in response to Jindal's victory; and it was typical on the Right blogosphere. I really don't think that Bobby…

Uncles & nieces hittin' it to clean out the gene pool

Inbreeding is bad. At least that is the take home message of my various posts. But biology doesn't have one final answer, it is a serious of approximations which capture part of a given system. My posts on racial hybridization point to this issue. Today in the West we live in an anti-racist age, so the intuitive benefits of hybridization known from agriculture are often tacitly promoted in the discourse, but the reality is more complex. 100 years ago eugenicists set out to prove the inverse because the norms of society demanded it (e.g., Charles Davenport's studies of Jaimaican Mullatoes…

Belief & belief in belief

In my post below I engage with some commenters in my perceptions of "what religion is." To understand where I am coming from, I thought I would be explicit in some of my assumptions and models. 1) Modern religions often have some very specific beliefs about the nature of God. For example, the Western religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) tend to hod that God a) is omniscient b) is omnipotent c) is omnibenevolent There are deeper philosophical issues, for example, theologians often speak of the deity in negations because to define what God is is very difficult due to the nature of the…

Conservatives & the academy

I am a registered Republican. There, I said it. I'm not a particularly ardent one, but I am not ashamed of being a Republican. I have no idea if there are any other Republican bloggers here at Science Blogs, even nominal ones like myself. Additionally, my impression is that aside from David Ng everyone here at Science Blogs is pretty pale faced. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but someone should chi square this and see if they scry prima facie grounds for discrimination. I kid of course. In any case, Bora has a long post about liberalism and the academy. He talks about a long…

Black moving objects - part n

The New York Times has an article up about the trend of young Muslim women donning the niqab in the United Kingdom, the practice of wearing a veil and covering the body with a shapeless shift. The simple narrative is this: Muslim women are reasserting a particular part of their religious tradition which Westerners feel is illiberal and medieval. Normally I get tired of the anecdotal modus operandi which dominates newspaper reports, though I do understand that it makes for engaging prose. Nevertheless, in the articles about extreme veiling the assertions by Western born women who choose to…

ASPM & Microcephalin & tonal languages?

Note: The authors have a website which summarizes their research (via Language Log). Speaking in tones? Blame it on your genes: People who carry particular variants of two genes involved in brain development tend to speak nontonal languages such as English, while those with a different genetic profile are more likely to speak tonal languages such as Chinese. In tonal languages, which are most common in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, subtle differences in pitch can change the meaning of vowels, consonants and syllables. Nontonal languages, which prevail in Europe, the Middle East and…

Should Tibor "Teddy" Rubin Be President?

By now you might have heard about the faux outrage at Gen. Wesley Clark's obvious statement that being a POW is not a qualification for the presidency--or a disqualification either. As Maha put it: So a televised wingnut hollered that McCain was being swift-boated by Gen. Clark. Hello? Clark didn't make unsupportable claims that McCain is lying about his war record or that he had behaved dishonorably in the service, as the swifties did to Kerry. He's saying that being a fighter pilot and then a POW doesn't qualify someone to be President. Dear wingnuts: This is a simple statement of fact.…

Morality, Utility, and Defending Evolution

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an excellent post, argues that much of the opposition to evolution stems from opposition to (mis)perceived liberal elites (bold original; italics mine): What scientists tend to underestimate is the extent to which many people react viscerally against science just because it is science. Or, more generally, because it is seen as part of an effort on the part of elites to force their worldview on folks who are getting along just fine without all these fancy ideas, thank you very much. In the old-time (1980's) controversies about teaching creationism in…

On Car Insurance and Public Health Programs: The Swine Flu Edition

Back when I owned a car*, car insurance payments were always depressing. In the best case scenario, I'm paying money for no purpose; in the worst case, I've been in a collision. Public health is a lot like car insurance, in that it's really important when something bad happens, but when something bad doesn't happen--either because it didn't happen due to dumb luck, or because other public health measures prevented the problem--public health appears to be wasteful spending. Once the waste charge get bandied about, some people won't be content with that--they have to start indulging in…

Saturday Sermon: Post-9/11 Panic Syndrome

A while ago, I mentioned that I like the idea of keeping Sheila Bair on because she didn't panic like a ninny, unlike most of the other Bushies--who panicked like ninnies about everything. Gary Kamiya says it better: The miasma of repressed fear that has hung over America for so long will not dissipate overnight. Right-wing pundits are shrieking that we must keep torturing to keep America safe, and claiming that if Guantánamo detainees are moved into ordinary prisons, America's cities will be the targets of terrorist attacks. These boogeymen have been effective for years, and they will not…

I've Figured Out How to Increase Science Funding: Tell the Republicans If They Don't, Abortions Will Increase

Because that's how Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was able to kill a provision that would have helped the State Department prevent child rape. No, really: Non-governmental organizations, women's rights advocates, and lawmakers from both parties spent years developing and lobbying for the "International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010," which the House failed to pass in a vote Thursday.... Even still, supporters in both parties fully expected the bill to garner the 290 votes needed -- right up until the bill failed. After all, it passed the Senate…

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

tags: Evil Genes, borderline personality disorder, machiavellian behavior, successfully sinister, Barbara Oakley, book review I have lived and worked with people whom I have decided, in retrospect, were more than merely hateful and mean-spirited, they were just plain evil. So when Barbara Oakley asked me to read and review her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Prometheus Books; 2008), I readily agreed. This well-written and very readable book is an exploration of evil people who exhibit an extreme form of Borderline…

Why You Should Vote for GrrlScientist as your Official Antarctica Blogger

Your future Penguin whisperer? [book title: Maailman Pingviinit translates as Penguins of the World (Amazon USA :: Amazon UK)] Image: Bob O'Hara, 19 July 2009 [seriously, do you want to look at a larger view?]. Several endorsements are coming my way and they've asked me to write an essay that outlines specific reasons why I am the best qualified for the "Blog Your Way to Antarctica" job offered by Quark Expeditions as the official blogger for their February 2010 Antarctica Cruise. First and foremost, Quark Expeditions is seeking a blog writer. As they say in the rules; The successful…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: JFK on religion in politics, 1960

Sunday and the day before the US midterm elections. Pundits are speculating on the role religious conservatives will play. We are now so inured to politicians invoking their faith it sounds strange to think it has been any other way. But it has been, and within my voting lifetime. Over a year ago in one of my first Sermonettes in this space I recalled those days. It seems appropriate to do it again. On Monday, September 12, 1960, Democratic Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy faced the Southern Baptists at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on the subject of religion in American…

Gaza is dying

There are many ways to kill innocent people. Suicide bombings against Israeli and Iraqi citizens we hear about. The starvation and strangulation of a whole population is one we don't. From The Independent: Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq. A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily…

Portrait of the blogger as an old man

As a blogger, I'm apparently in the minority in more ways than one (I speak here as one of the Reveres and for myself only). A telephone survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life project estimates that half of bloggers are below the age of 30 (not me, alas), are interested in blogging as a form of self-expression (not me, alas), documenting personal experiences or sharing practical knowledge (not usually) or just keeping in touch with friends and family (like they read our blog, right?). More than half live in the suburbs (nope) and are equally split between men and women (the…

The outfielder problem: The psychology behind catching fly balls [Cognitive Daily]

It's football season in America: The NFL playoffs are about to start, and tonight, the elected / computer-ranked top college team will be determined. What better time than now to think about ... baseball! Baseball players, unlike most football players, must solve one of the most complicated perceptual puzzles in sports: how to predict the path of a moving target obeying the laws of physics, and move to intercept it. The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a…

The Technical Side of Research

Last month we reported on the first people who, around twelve thousand years ago, were lining their loved ones’ graves with flowers. This month, we have a piece on the “extinct” frog that was “resurrected” and then discovered to be a living fossil. Both of these studies were led by Israeli researchers from other institutions. The Weizmann contributions were what you might call technical: precise radiocarbon dating and x-ray micro-tomography. While the findings, themselves, were publicized in many scientific and popular publications, the technological advances that make these findings possible…

The Truth About Bunker Busters?

There's been a lot of talk recently about the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker discussing the White House' plans for stopping Iran's nuclear program, which claims: One of the military's initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. Someone at the Seed office asked the question, "Is a nuclear weapon really the only way to destroy an underground bunker?" I decided to look into it.... I emailed several scientists who've worked on the…

Reading Diary: Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler and Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War

Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball and Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon R. Brown are two of the best history of science books I've read in a very long time. And even though they're both about World War II, some seventy years in the past, they've both also very topical because they are both very much about the relationship between politics and science. In a sense, what comes first, the political chicken or the scientific egg. Are scientists responsible for how their work is put to use by their political "masters?" Do scientists…

Breaking Water Taboos

(Photo: Peter Gleick 2008) The recent severe drought in the Western United States -- and California in particular -- has shined a spotlight on a range of water-management practices that are outdated, unsustainable, or inappropriate for a modern 21st century water system. Unless these bad practices are fixed, no amount of rain will be enough to set things right. Just as bad, talking about many of these bad practices has been taboo for fear of igniting even more water conflict, but the risks of water conflicts here and around the world are already on the rise and no strategy that can reduce…

Down the Drain: The Power and Potential of Improving Water Efficiency

by Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley Debates about water in California, the western U.S., and indeed, worldwide, have traditionally focused on the question of how best to further expand water supply to meet some hypothetical future increase in water demand. And the solution frequently offered is to build massive new infrastructure in the form of dams and reservoirs, drill more groundwater wells, or expand water diversions from ever-more-distant rivers, in order to “grow” the supply available for human use. “Build more traditional water infrastructure” is increasingly the wrong answer to the…

On the back of an envelope: That glass of water in a restaurant?

California, and much of the southwestern US, is in a severe drought. Again. And as appropriate, there is growing debate about what we, as citizens, communities, corporations, and governments should do to tackle water shortages and the bigger question of sustainable water policy. Suggestions range from the large-scale and comprehensive (build more dams, transfer more water from farther and farther away, rethink the entire agricultural sector, use high-quality treated wastewater to meet certain needs) to the small-scale and local (replace your lawns and inefficient water-using fixtures, stop…

Dr. Oz asks who can we trust when it comes to Genetically Engineered Crops?

Click here to see the Dr. Oz show on GE crops with yours truly. I tried to provide a science-based perspective to the audience. It was a tough go, though, because one of the other panelists (Jeffery Smith, a former Iowa political candidate for the Natural Law Party with no discernible scientific or agricultural training) believes that eating GE crops causes infertility, organ damage and endocrine disruption. Of course, the scientific evidence for these statements is about as strong as saying that looking at carrots will give you brain tumors. Can the audience glean that from the information…

Meet the Winners of the 2014 Kavli “Science in Fiction” Video Contest

Congratulations to the Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest winners!! 1st Prize Winner: Zachary Katko Video:   "Superluminal Communication" Age : 17 School: Dansville High School, Dansville, Michigan What are your favorite subjects? Science and Social Studies mainly, though I also enjoy English. Can you tell us what inspired you to make this video? Firstly, my engagingly ruminative English teacher, Ms. Pauline Lee. She introduced me specifically to the Kavli Video contest. Secondly, I drew inspiration from numerous captivating science shows (eg. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, How The Universe…

Celebrating African American History Month with Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Stephanie C. Hill

Stephanie C. Hill – Computer Software Engineer and Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President and General Manager of Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions Civil line of business; recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year Award for 2014 Looking back recently on her lengthy and high-profile career at Lockheed Martin, engineer and executive Stephanie C. Hill said, "I've worked for Lockheed Martin for 27 years. Most of those years have been in the technological field, and I have never been bored. I have had the opportunity to make a difference in a way that I never imagined…

Celebrating Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Sonya Kovalevsky

Sonya Kovalevsky – Russian-born Mathematician One of the world's best mathematicians of her era; established first major result in general theory of partial differential equations; first modern European woman appointed to full professorship; advocate of women's rights Sonya Kovalevsky (also known as Sofia Kowalevski) was born in Russia in 1850 and became a noted mathematician in spite of a father who "had a horror of learned women," according to historical accounts. As a young woman, she could study math and physics only in secret. She married a man she did not love just to get away from her…

Celebrating Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Chien Shiung Wu!

Chien Shiung-Wu -- Experimental Physicist One of the foremost physicists of the twentieth century, this Chinese-born American researcher was often called the "First Lady of Physics" for her pioneering work, which included radically changing scientific views on the behavior of nuclear particles Chien Shiung-Wu once said: "I sincerely doubt that any open-minded person really believes in the faulty notion that women have no intellectual capacity for science and technology. Nor do I believe that social and economic factors are the actual obstacles that prevent women's participation in the…

The Discovery Institute is bleeding credibility

More than once, I've said that I think the Discovery Institute is on the wane; Dover dealt a serious blow to their credibility, and demonstrated that their strategy was not an effective one for helping creationists get their way. That's really all they had, was the promise that their pseudo-secular approach would give anti-evolutionists an inroad into the public school system, and it is clear now that that is not true. I've also noticed that people give me a leery look when I say that—the DI has been a recent but ubiquitous feature in the Creation Wars—but now I can just tell you all to read…

Don't pine for me - some parts are not edible

On pinene and inhibiting enzymes. People of a certain age may remember a series of really funny commercials featuring Euell Gibbons and his famous question about whether you've ever eaten a pine tree.  "Some parts are edible" said Euell. Perhaps some parts are, but other pine tree products aren't so nourishing.  Crystallography365, aka @Crystal_in_city  had a couple of fun blog posts about pinene, a chemical made by pine trees, that also inhibits cytochrome P450  2B6. I was inspired by their posts and by my experience with Cytochrome P450 to go a little farther.  We like to use cytochrome…

Mining the job search sites for life science positions

Disclaimers - just so you know... This information is cross-posted at www.bio-link.org All the data and graphs in this post were obtained from Simplyhired.com.  I do not have any kind of commercial affiliation with this company I found their site via GenomeWeb. Having worked around biotechnology for several years, I thought I was pretty familiar with biotech job descriptions. I decided to test this assumption by playing with the data at SimplyHired.com. Being able to quickly search with different terms and examine trends in job postings has proved to be an enlightening experience. These…

Windows Phone Is Actually Awesome

Windows takes a lot of crap from fanboys, and Apple products do the same, but while our prejudices can be well-founded it's always worth taking an honest look at the opposition.  With its Windows Phone mobile OS, Microsoft has built a very fun and functional platform that in some ways exceeds the user experience of Android and iOS. Microsoft's presence on mobile platforms somewhat changes its historical relationship with hardware.  In the days when you were a PC person or a Mac person, one advantage of the personal computer was an open hardware standard, allowing not only for custom computer…

Will the availability of C-sections give humans bigger brains?

While Steve Jones might think human evolution has stopped, I have to say that that is impossible. If human technology removes a selective constraint, that doesn't stop evolution — it just opens up a new degree of freedom and allows change to carry us in a novel direction. One interesting potential example is the availability of relatively safe Cesarean sections. Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution…

The discoordinated message on bird flu

Sometimes it's good to have a "coordinated message" and sometimes it isn't. The UN agencies dealing with bird flu certainly don't have a coordinated message and that's just fine with me. I don't trust anybody to have the right "message" and we're better served by each agency calling it as they see it. Even if the way the see it seems, well, distinctly odd: Avian Flu Virus May Be Nearing End as Fewer Birds Die, OIE Says The avian flu virus that threatens to spark the first pandemic in almost four decades may be nearing the end of its natural cycle after it killed fewer wild and migratory…

Those Three are on Our Minds

Today is a holiday in the United States. It commemorates Martin Luther King, Jr., a martyr of the American struggle for civil rights. But there were many more. During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 three civil rights workers, James Chaney a 21 year old black man from Mississippi and Andrew goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white youths from New York, aged 20 and 24, were murdered in Mississippi: The murders of the three men occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, just one day after the trio had arrived in Mississippi. The men had just finished a week-long training at the Miami…

Bird flu: paying the premium

I just returned from our University bird flu task force. We aren't ready. We aren't even close. The good news is that we know we aren't ready and we know we aren't even close. At least we're worried. This isn't some penny ante crowd of mid level managers, either. These are the top dogs at one of the biggest private universities in the country. They take it seriously. But it's tough. Our community is larger than many small cities but not as self sufficient. But if it's the planning and not the plan, we've made progress, because we're meeting regularly although we still don't have a plan. That…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - The Birds Do It....

You should check out all of my SiBlings' Friday Blogging practices, then come back here for a new edition of Friday Weird Sex Blogging. Last week you saw an example of a corkscrew penis. But that is not the only one of a kind. See more under the fold... Some birds also have spiral tools. For instance, see this 20-cm penis of an Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata) (from this paper: The 20-cm Spiny Penis of the Argentine Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) (pdf)): The same author, Dr Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, later found an even longer one in the same species. It was…

Is swine flu producing a second flu season and for whom? [Correction added]

Data from the Emerging Infections Program (EIP), one of the component parts of the CDC national influenza surveillance system, is showing that for some segments of its population the US did indeed experience a second flu season. The segment of particular concern are children between the ages of 5 to 17 years old, and to some extent adults between the ages of 18 and 49. The EIP counts only laboratory-confirmed hospitalizations in 60 counties located in 12 metropolitan areas in 10 states (if you are wondering, the 12 metro areas are San Francisco CA, Denver CO, New Haven CT, Atlanta GA,…

Human seasonal H1N1 flu in Giant Anteaters

The natural reservoir for most influenza viruses is birds, especially aquatic birds, but some versions of the virus have also become adapted to the host cells of other species, among them sea mammals, horses, dogs and of course pigs and humans (among others). How long is the list? We really don't know, as there has been little systematic inquiry into influenza hosts in the natural world. While human influenza is seasonal in the northern and southern hemispheres, where it goes in the "off season" is a matter of debate. Most flu experts think it remains at low levels in the community, spiking…

Overturning Overton: a venerable rule goes down [Updated]

You might think it is an arcane subject, but a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes" by Grime et al., is quite a stunner. This paper is about a century old formula called the Overton Rule (or Meyer - Overton Rule), used extensively to predict how fast chemicals get into cells and which ones do so most easily. It has been used to predict which anesthetics would work best and how fast and which toxic chemicals would get into which cells and how fast. For those of us who…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Scientists Unravel Intricate Animal Behaviour Patterns: There is a scene in the animated blockbuster "Finding Nemo" when a school of fish makes a rapid string of complicated patterns--an arrow, a portrait of young Nemo and other intricate designs. While the detailed shapes might be a bit outlandish for fish to form, the premise isn't far off. But how does a school of fish or a flock of birds know how to move from one configuration to another and then reorganize as a unit, without knowing what the entire group is doing? New research by University of Alberta scientists shows that one movement…

Epidemiology at the state level is shrinking

I'm an epidemiologist and I train epidemiologists so you expect me to think epidemiology is important to public health. Epidemiology describes the pattern of diseases in the community and tries to figure out why some patterns exist and not others. It is used for both applied health research (causes of disease and disease outbreaks), disease control and for administrative purposes (how many hospital beds will we need, for example). When I was in medical school most epidemiology, such as there was, was done by medical doctors or employees of federal, state and local health departments. Starting…

When schedules don’t work for hourly workers

With much of the country still suffering the effects of the last recession, many hourly workers are trying to scrape by with part-time jobs that don’t give them as many hours as they’d like. Worse, their schedules are often unpredictable, with little advance notice -- and workers may scramble to coordinate childcare and transportation, only to arrive at their jobs and learn their shifts have been canceled. Businesses may lower their costs by rearranging schedules at the last minute or sending workers home in response to fluctuating numbers of customers, but they do so at the expense of…

Worker victory in Houston: City passes ordinance punishing wage theft

This week, Houston became only the second major city in the U.S. South to pass a law to prevent and punish wage theft. It’s a major victory for all workers, but it’s especially significant for the city’s low-wage workers, who lose an estimated $753.2 million every year because of wage theft. Passed unanimously by the Houston City Council on Wednesday, the new wage theft ordinance provides workers with a formal process to lodge wage theft complaints and puts in place real penalties for employers convicted of stealing workers’ wages. Businesses convicted of wage theft — either civilly or…

Turning new page for transparency in worker safety rulemaking

Who paid for the study?  That's an important piece of information to have when considering a study's methods and reported findings.  Financial ties are the most obvious conflicts of interest, but others include pre-publication review and other requirements imposed by a study’s sponsors. Scientists publishing papers in the leading biomedical journals have, for at least ten years, been providing readers with disclosures of real or potential conflicts.  The editors of more than 1,300 medical journals require authors to comply with specific disclosure policies. Researchers from other disciplines…

CDC classifies three antibiotic-resistant bacteria as urgent threats

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill 23,000 people in the US and sicken two million each year, and the problem is getting worse, warns a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2013 ranks several strains of bacteria according to their current and projected health and economic impacts. It describes 18 microorganisms whose threat levels are "urgent," "serious," or "concerning." CDC identifies three bacteria as urgent threats: Clostridium difficile, Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and Drug-resistant…

Lessons from Boston about the role of community preparedness

The New Yorker's News Desk blog features an excellent piece by Atul Gawande called "Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready." It's a riveting read about how emergency medical teams, the city's emergency command center, and hospital staff all responded immediately and with admirable coordination to the needs of those injured in the bomb blast at the Boston Marathon: The explosions took place at 2:50 P.M., twelve seconds apart. Medical personnel manning the runners’ first-aid tent swiftly converted it into a mass-casualty triage unit. Emergency medical teams mobilized en masse from around the city,…

More Doubt About 10 Billion

From Yale Environment 360, more questions about future UN population projections: For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a…

Haitians Eat Dirt, Cars Eat Corn Redux

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post with the above title, about the way that biofuel and meat production in the US was pushing up world food prices. I observed, as has been documented in any number of studies, that when the world's poorest people and the world's richest people's vehicles (or their pets, to their appetite for grain fed meat) compete for food, the cars, pets and rich folk always eat first - the rich come to the table once for their share of staple grains, then three of or four more times for more grains in the form of meat. We then come to the table again for a share for…

When the Road is Your Workplace

The scene was an icy morning in western Maryland, along the Garrett County and Allegany County lines.  Mr. Dwight Samuel Colmer, 41, a truck driver with Western Maryland Lumber Company was hauling a load of coal just before 11:00 AM when his truck began to slide.  The State of Maryland's "Motor Vehicle Accident Report" says: "...hit guard rail, and overturned to the passenger side.  Driver was ejected and crushed under the dump truck and died from the injuries." The report indicates the incident occurred on a public road called Bartlett Street.  Is this a work-related fatality?  Well, it…