Social Issues
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008Randy 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…
j7uy5 | June 9, 2008In 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…
j7uy5 | June 7, 2008Consolidation 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)
jstemwedel | May 15, 2008Because 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…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2008A 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…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2008On 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…
jstemwedel | April 22, 2008Another 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…
j7uy5 | February 28, 2008Judith 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-…
j7uy5 | February 25, 2008A 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=…
jstemwedel | January 24, 2008Via 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…
j7uy5 | December 18, 2007In 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">…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007America 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…
j7uy5 | November 10, 2007People 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.
j7uy5 | November 8, 2007Athletic 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…
j7uy5 | November 7, 2007A 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…
j7uy5 | October 30, 2007
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…
j7uy5 | October 25, 2007Dr. 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,…
jstemwedel | October 1, 2007Maybe 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…
j7uy5 | September 30, 2007In 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.…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2007Tara 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 "…