Social Issues

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin's Press, 1987. There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading -- despite being in excess of 600 pages. Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of…
In 1996, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 ("Freedom to Farm Act") called for elimination of government stockpiles of grain.  I'm sure someone thought it made sense, at the time.   Now, the United States government has no reserves of butter, cheese, dry milk, barley, corn, oats, sorghum, soybeans, wheat, rice, sugar, honey, peanuts, canola seed, crambe, flaxseed, mustard seed, rapeseed, safflower seed, sunflower seed, peas, lentils, chickpeas, and cotton.  [Source: US Farm Service Agency, href="http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/webapp?area=home&subject=coop&topic…
Consolidation of media is but one step in the consolidation of power, another brick in the wall.  It is a grave threat.  Watch Bill Moyers, speaking at the National Conference for Media Reform, give an impassioned speech about this topic. Seriously, consolidation of media is more of a threat to "our freedoms" than Osama even could be. (HT: freepress)
Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I'm recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP: On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change. Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon…
A while back, href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2007/11/sherwin_nuland_a_history_of_el.php">Gred Laden and href="http://ectweb.blogspot.com/2007/10/video-of-lecture-on-electroconvulsive.html">Dr. Shock independently linked to a remarkable video.  In it, a famous author-surgeon-professor reveals that he had had an episode of severe depression.  Moreover, he underwent treatment with electroconvulsive therapy.  It worked, he got back to work, and went on to have a distinguished career.  The video can be seen here -- href="http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/189">Sherwin Nuland…
On April Fool's Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences -- at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those "in the know" will recognize what's funny, and that those who don't see the humor are failing to find the funny because they're not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person…
Another Earth Day rolls around, and I still have major qualms about the typical American approach to it (which seems to boil down to "Consumer choices will save the world!"). Possibly, viewing ourselves and each other primarily as consumers explains how we have had such a dramatic effect on the environment in the first place. Still, while we try to muster the political will and get ourselves together to respond collectively to the challenges to the Earth we all share, it's undeniable that our individual choices do have impacts. Here in the U.S., some of those impacts can be pretty big. So…
Judith Warner has some insightful essays in the NYT column, pertaining to the long-raging question about whether psychiatric patients are style="font-style: italic;">overmedicated or style="font-style: italic;">undermedicated. One of the essays addresses the question directly: style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/overselling-overmedication/">Overselling Overmedication Judith Warner February 14, 2008 ...In the book, Barber argues that Americans are being vastly overmedicated for often relatively minor mental health concerns. This over-…
A fellow blogger, Logtar,  href="http://blog.logtar.com/2008/02/18/bodies-revealed-boycott/">tipped me off to a controversy, and asked if I had anything to say about it.  The controversy has come about over an exhibit: rel="tag" href="http://www.bodiesrevealed.com/index-home.html">Bodies Revealed.  It's a traveling exhibit that displays plastinated human cadavers.  The exhibit was organized by href="http://www.prxi.com/prxi.html">Premier Exhibitions, Inc. A bit of background can be gotten from an article in Scientific American, href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=…
Via Bint Alshamsa, this is a version of a "social class awareness experience" used in the residence halls (and possibly also classrooms?) at Indiana State University by Will Barratt et al. In the classroom, students are asked to take a step forward for each of the statements that describe them; they don't talk about the exercise (and how they feel about it) until after they've gone through the whole list. Doing this online, I'm bolding the statements which describe my background. Also, I'm including a second list that Lauren added based on the suggestions Bint's commenters made as to other…
In February 2005, a bunch of smart people met to eat Chinese food and talk about a new way to make money.  This included Greg Lippman, a trader at Deutsche Bank; Rajiv Kamilla, a trader at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. with a background in nuclear physics; and Todd Kushman, who led a contingent from Bear Stearns Cos.  There were about 50 people at the meeting. What did they discuss?  The design of a new financial product: securities based upon subprime mortgages.  As reported at href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=special_report&sid=aA6YC1xKUoek" rel="tag">…
America missed her chance to elect a sane pro-environmental candidate in 2000.  Or rather, the Supreme Court missed its chance.  Whatever.  The critical point is that environmentalism cannot be understood as an isolated issue.  Pro-environmental thinking must pervade everything we do from now on. That is not to say that it is the only issue.  In some cases, it will not be the most important issue.  But it should be considered in all aspects of governmental activity. Economic growth is totally worthless, if not sustainable.  Sometimes, it is worse than worthless.  I believe we shall see…
People who advocate alternative energy (i.e. not oil or natural gas) often fail to appreciate the true cost of developing the necessary technology.  Courtesy of href="http://cryptogon.com/?p=1597">Cryptogon, I now present a chart that illustrates these true costs, in proper perspective. As you can see, development of alternative fuels costs almost nothing, compared to fighting a war against even a third-rate opponent.   Imagine what a real war would cost. And you want to vote for a pro-war candidate?  Please explain.
Athletic regulatory bodies have a new headache.  This time, the pain is being caused by placebos (an unexpected side effect!)   As href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626285.400-placebo-boost-is-a-conundrum-for-sports-regulators.html">reported in New Scientist, athletes have found that they can exert themselves to a greater extent, while under the influence of opioid pain killers.  That is not permitted in competition, of course, but there is a wrinkle.  If they train while under the influence, then get a placebo prior to competition, their brains react to the placebo as if…
A recent study indicates that the lifetime cost of medical care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will be greater than the cost of the war to date.  We really have no choice, but it is going to cost us.  A lot.  Of course, the ones really paying are the troops themselves.  From Medscape (free registration required). href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565407">High Rate of PTSD in Returning Iraq War Veterans Bob Roehr November 6, 2007 (Washington, DC) — Estimates of the rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans returning from Iraq range from 12% to 20%. With…
href="http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2007/crazy.htm">Nov. 5 event at U-M will feature top experts discussing alternatives to “criminalization” of America’s mentally ill ANN ARBOR, MI – Across America, prisons serve as an unofficial holding system for the mentally ill. Families desperate to get treatment for their loved ones’ psychiatric issues instead wind up retrieving them from the police station. And judges wrestle with the prospect of sentencing the same people again and again for minor offenses, instead of steering them to effective mental health programs. These…
Dr. Gerberding's congressional testimony was heavily edited by the Administration.  Fortunately, that fact was picked up by the MSM.  As of now, there are 711 mentions on Google News.   In the interest of completeness, however, I noted that Dr. Gerberding herself denies that there was censorship.  As href="http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/news/stories/2007/10/24/cdcgerberding_1024.html">reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Gerberding said Wednesday she was happy with her testimony and that the review process was normal. In a lunch-hour speech before the Atlanta Press Club,…
Maybe you remember that fund-raiser we did for DonorsChoose last June. We're kicking off another today. But this time, it's not just ScienceBlogs bloggers -- partners like Google, Yahoo!, Six Apart, and Federated Media are watching the efforts across the whole blogosphere to see which blog has the most generous and engaged readers. But before we get to the frenzy of competition, let's start with what matters: the school kids yearning to learn. As I wrote last year: Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the…
In the most recent debate among Presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party, there was an exchange regarding the so-called "ticking bomb" question.  The question itself, and the way it was handled, reveals shortcomings in the way we evaluate our candidates. TIM RUSSERT: I want to move to another subject, and this involves a comment that a guest on Meet the Press made, and I want to read it as follows: “Imagine the following scenario. We get lucky. We get the number three guy in al-Qaeda. We know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days, and we know this guy knows where it is.…
Tara notices that social networking site Facebook has decided, in the enforcement of their policy against "nudity, drug use, or other obscene content", that pictures of breastfeeding babies are obscene. As such, the Facebook obscenity squad had been removing them -- and has deleted the account of at least one mom who had posted such pictures. Break out the Ouija board and get late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously claimed that he couldn't define obscenity, but he knew it when he saw it. As far as the legal definition goes, "obscene" seems to be roughly equivalent to "…