Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2008A couple of weeks back I posted about the Office of Human Research Protections' shutting down a highly effective infection control program. In the NY Times, Jane Brody discusses the program further. Here's the list of the five things the hospitals used to combat hospital-acquired infections:
When inserting a central venous catheter, doctors should do the following:
1. Wash their hands with soap.
2. Clean the patient's skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic.
3. Put sterile drapes over the entire patient.
4. Wear a sterile mask, hat, gown and gloves.
5. Put a sterile dressing over the catheter…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008I'm posting about this because I want Orac's head to explode. Apparently, the first episode of the ABC legal drama, "Eli Stone", involves the protagonist taking up the mercury militia, anti-vax cause:
While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network's audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.
With "Eli Stone,"…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann (MN) is trying to prove that she is more stupid than the Gingrich disciple who thought we could eliminate the National Weather Service because the Weather Channel had it covered (really). To wit:
Today, Rep. Eric Cantor (VA), the chief deputy Republican whip in the House, unveiled his proposal to stimulate the economy. His legislation -- the so-called Middle Class Job Protection Act -- does nothing for the middle class. Instead, it reduces the corporate tax rate by 25 percent.
At a press conference today unveiling the stimulus proposal, Rep. Michele Bachmann…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008According to the NY Times' John Tierney, post-Sept. 11th fear of terrorism might be detrimental to one's health:
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people's fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2008TEH STUPID. From Bob Somerby:
The second trait is the corps' sheer stupidity--an artifact of palace culture. Did she cry on purpose? they're asking today. Well, no, she didn't, we confidently state. If you think she did, you may not understand why acting schools exist. Or why they can be ineffective.
But our press corps is deeply, Antoinette-level dumb. They love what's silly--and despise what is "hard." Hence the striking account of Social Security offered by ABC News during Saturday's Dem debate. Like that phone call to C-SPAN in yesterday's HOWLER (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/7/08), we…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2008Once again, someone in the traditional media is projecting their personal opinion onto millions of people without any evidence. Washington Post reporter Dan Balz in one of those hideous 'news analysis' pieces:
Edwards has offended many Democrats with his candidacy. They question his authenticity and see his shift from optimism to anger as the sign of an opportunistic politician. He and his most loyal supporters argue that that's not the case, that the Edwards of 2008 is a reflection of a changed country and his and his wife's changed personal situation.
We're offended, huh? I know some…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2008In most cases, assuming that the Bush Administration is up to no good and plans to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing is a good first principle (unless you have a "kick me" sign staple gunned to your ass). The CDC alerting passengers that they were seated near a symptomatic TB patient is not the slippery slope of tyranny, but a responsible public health response. At firedoglake, there is an idiotic post about the CDC's response to a person infected with TB on an airplane:
TB on planes: another excuse to restrict our civil liberties? You heard it here first....
This is great…
mikethemadbiologist | January 5, 2008Who ya gonna believe? The Mighty Pundit-ji or your own lyin' eyes? Matthew Yglesias writes (italics mine):
Everyone's gotten to the fact that Newsweek's Evan Thomas is factually wrong to say that increased partisan polarization turns people off from politics. It's worth stopping to pause the fact that Thomas had a false, empirically verifiable, CW [conventional wisdom]-reaffirming thesis in his head and a major newsmagazine went ahead and published it without either the author or any of his editors stopping to check the evidence, which would have proven him wrong. Meanwhile, it's a foregone…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2008You 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…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2008...and scuttle one of the best efforts going to reduce the problem of antibiotic resistance. I discussed before how the antibiotic resistance problem is, in the context of hospital infections, an infection control problem:
One of the hidden stories in the rise in the frequency of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains is that this has also been accompanied by an absolute increase in the number of infections. In other words, it's not the case that you used to have 90 sensitive infections and 10 resistant infections per year in your hospital, and now, you have 50 sensitive and 50 resistant…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2007That would be William Kristol, their new op-ed writer. It's nice to see that stupid people are being mainstreamed into society. Of course, I never thought of them as a historically oppressed minority...
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2007...and start doing it. Chris Bowers writes:
Few things irritate me more about prominent DLC types than their tendency to preface virtually everything they propose for Democrats with how that something will help Democrats get elected. They do it all the time. I know that an election is close, and electability will be a concern for some... in addition to making Democrats look weak on national security, DLC types like Bayh end up reinforcing a second insidious conservative narrative: that Democrats are a bunch of soulless, liberal elites who think they are better than most of the backward rubes…
mikethemadbiologist | December 20, 2007Driftglass is organizing a letter writing campaign to the advertisers on Chicago's hate radio station WIND. If you live in the area, help him out. Here's why:
Remember, if you choose to contact any or all of the organizations on the list;
1. Polite but firm works best to accomplish what you are trying to do.
2. This is not a Free Speech issue. Like any other American, Michael Weiner Savage is free to vomit his lunacy in letters to the editor, or on his preferred street corner, or on a blog, or scrawled in his own shit on his bedroom walls.
Instead this is about Disinvestment. This is about…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007Driftglass 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 -…
mikethemadbiologist | December 7, 2007There are two recent and very disheartening stories about energy technology. The first has to do with the new standards for automobile gas mileage in the U.S.:
The proposal, which would require automakers to achieve 35 miles per gallon on average, is similar to a measure that was passed in the summer by the Senate but was bitterly opposed by the auto companies, who argued they did not have the technology or the financial resources to reach that goal.
The auto companies gave up their long-held opposition to fuel- economy increases not long before the Senate version was passed, but proposed a…
mikethemadbiologist | December 6, 2007I've described how the Iowa caucus voting procedure is a ridiculous way to decide how might be the next president, but Iowa's and New Hampshire's insistence on being the first states might have cost the Democrats Florida. Here's what the Democrats did:
Fearing likely attempts by big states like Michigan and Florida to disrupt the parties' primary calendars with early dates in 2008, Republicans and Democrats ruled at their 2004 conventions that states trying to butt in before Iowa and New Hampshire would lose half their delegates. The Republicans left it there. The Democrats decided to try…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2007:By way of moonbat, I came across this diagram that explains intelligent design creationism perfectly:
Nuff said.
mikethemadbiologist | November 23, 2007...or run an empire. Paul Waldman, in a fit of coastal pique, critiqued the myth of the informed Iowa voter as a reason to switch the primary calendar. But what's really bothered me about the Iowa primary is the entire caucus process. While I'm not a believer in the idea that a different political voting process would yield dramatically better governance, the Iowa caucus procedure is so stupid that I'm willing to make an exception (italics mine):
Unlike the Republican caucuses in Iowa, which are fairly simple, akin to a straw poll, the Democratic caucuses are arcane, rule-bound Party…
mikethemadbiologist | November 21, 2007I think there's a related disorder to Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Magnanimous Pundit Syndrome. It seems to have hit Kevin Drum pretty hard (italics mine):
I'm on record (several hundred times, probably) saying that Social Security is basically fine and that the best thing we can do is just leave it alone and then revisit it in a decade or so. At the same time, I don't think any of us would (or should) have any serious problem with, say, a 1983-style commission that beavered away for a year and then recommended a basket of modest tax increases and benefit reductions to keep Social Security…
mikethemadbiologist | November 20, 2007
While the most recent misrepresentation of antibiotic resistance at Answers in Genesis by Georgia Purdom is not of the two usual varieties (either resistance evolves through gene transfer, and therefore mutation does not cause antibiotic resistance, or resistance arises through mutations only, and so mutations can't lead to novel 'kinds'--yes, creationists are that stupid), it's still pretty bad, and it shows a profound ignorance of recent work in the field of antibiotic resistance.
Purdom writes:
The mechanisms of mutation and natural selection aid bacteria populations in becoming resistant…