We're Really Fucked
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2010Here are some 'interesting' results from a poll conducted by Research 2000:
QUESTION: Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63Not Sure 16No 21
But that's not the crazy part. There's more:
QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
Yes 24Not sure 33No 43
Moving right along....
QUESTION: Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
Yes 21Not sure 55No 24
Yes, three-quarters of Republicans are open to the idea that a cash-strapped community group composed of a lot of poor and working class people created millions of illegal votes. But we're still not at the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2010Too bad. You don't really get a choice. Is the beef industry trying to turn its customers into vegetarians? From the NY Times:
Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.
The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2009It's between fifteen to twenty one cents of every dollar spent by hospitals. A recent study examined the costs of antibiotic resistant infections in hospitals. The main finding (italics mine):
The total attributable hospital and societal cost ranges for ARI in the expanded sample were as follows: hospital, $3.4-$5.4 million; mortality, $7.0-$9.2 million; lost productivity, $162,624-$322,707; and total, $10.7-$15.0 million. The total medical cost, if distributed to all sample patients, added $2512-$3929 (16.8%-26.3%) to the mean unadjusted hospital cost for all sample patients.
(An aside:…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2009What's $24 billion of potential losses among friends? If you want to know what a zombie bank is, the foreclosure situation in California is textbook:
Later on they add, "The increase appears to be primarily due to the fact that lenders are willingly postponing foreclosure sales." Why postpone? Keep reading, and the answer pops out: "The average California foreclosure has a total loan balance of $425,134 on a home that is now worth $236,739."
If the bank sells these homes now, at these prices, the bank will have to book the difference between the loan balance and the home sales price as a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 14, 2009...shitty. I don't see how the economy will substantively improve without getting rid of the zombie banks--those banks that are insolvent, that have more debts than assets. Since they are unable to make loans, they're essentially non-functioning banks. The federal government for the first time since the banking crisis erupted has decided to make banks report on a quarterly basis how much their loan portfolios are actually worth. Not the original value of the loans, but how much the underlying properties could be sold for:
Check out the footnotes to Regions Financial Corp.'s latest…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2009One of the goals of several of the federal interventions was to keep subprime loans high. If the prices for these loans dropped too much, then the banks holding these loans would be insolvent (loans are counted as assets under the assumption that they will be paid back)--the amount of money they owe to stockholders and bondholders, and other debt payments would be greater than their assets.
That's why I call the pile of ridiculous loans Big Shitpile: these loans, due to plunging property values leading to defaults (or walkaways), are only worth only a fraction of their face value--and far…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2009From Alegre's Corner:
Karen Tumulty was on a press call with the HELP committee to hear about Kennedy's bill, and she just posted a tweet with the following...
Senate HELP bill: If u hate ur employer's coverage, u have to keep it, unless it costs 12.5% of ur salary. No public plan 4 u.
Looks like you were right ML - anyone above a certain income level is f*cked with this new reform bill. It's Mass-Care all over again :(
Admittedly, this is a Tweet, but, if true, this sucks. I hate Romneycare. Yes, it led to a one-time reduction of about ten percent in healthcare costs, but since then,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 19, 2009Admittedly, you won't hear credit card companies call Congress' failure to cap credit card interest at 15% annually (which is what credit unions are forced to do) that, but, as Ian Welsh notes, that is exactly what Congress' inability to enact a cap means:
The Senate just stopped limits on credit card rates. Sometimes it takes a socialist to say the obvious:
"When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available," said Mr. Sanders, who noted credit unions are limited to 15 percent. "They are engaged in loan-sharking."
The banks have been given, loaned and…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2009Probably not. I have no idea how serious this swine flu outbreak will be. As I noted yesterday, it could evolve to cause less severe symptoms or more severe symptoms--right now, nobody knows for certain. But I find the possible overreaction by the public to be disturbing (I think the public health system has adopted the right tone--and kudos, in part, to Richard Besser. Gerbeding who?). Why?
Every year, roughly 36,000 people die from seasonal (or annual influenza). That's double HIV/AIDS deaths. But nobody gets paranoid about handwashing (WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS!!). There's no serious…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2009At this point, diversity in the Obama administration means you've never worked for Goldman Sachs. Meet the newest Obama nominee, Gary Gensler for head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (italics mine):
Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage. Sanders gets right to the point: "Mr. Gensler worked with Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has resulted in the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2009The emerging MRSA strain ST398 has found a new home--chickens.
MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) was first found to have swept through European swine herds from 2003-2006. Then it entered the hospital system.
In the U.S., it had not been observed in agriculture until very recently (it's ScienceBlogling Tara's fault--on a serious note, she studies this critter). It hasn't been seen in hospitals in the U.S. yet.
What's disturbing is that a recent study from Belgium indicates that MRSA is on the rise in chickens and that it's due to ST398 (this isn't a trivial thing; most…
mikethemadbiologist | October 30, 2008ScienceBlogling Revere links to a news article about high levels of VRE, vancomycin resistant enterococci in beach sand. While Revere and the article both describe how this indicates that VRE are established in the community, I think a far more chilling problem isn't mentioned at all: VMRSA.
What's VMRSA? Vancomycin resistant MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
Every instance of VMRSA has involved an MRSA strain acquiring a plasmid (mini-chromosome) from a VRE strain. So far, most of these cases have occurred in Michigan. Apparently, the VRE strain that carries this…
mikethemadbiologist | September 22, 2008Before I get to the letter I sent to my Congressional delegation, I want to discuss why the proposed bailout matters if you consider yourself a friend of science.
It's very simple: if we sink $700 billion or more into propping up brokers you can kiss any science-related initiatives goodbye. No increases in certain basic research areas. No increases for public health. No research and development of green technologies. None of the things that a bunch of ScienceBloglings are talking about here. Instead, it all disappears down the porcelain crapper.
There is no science fairy: the most…
mikethemadbiologist | September 17, 2008Here's another resounding success of the Bush Doctrine. Erm, not so much (italics mine):
"It's like the good old days," Oleg Mikhailishchin, a pilot in camouflage uniform, told reporters during a rare visit by foreign media to the Engels base last month, before the war with Georgia further raised tensions with the West. More than 20 Tu-160 and Tu-95 bombers could be seen on the runway near the Volga River at this once top-secret base, where the two Tu-160 "White Swan" planes that landed in Venezuela on Wednesday flew from.
Russia is also dispatching a nuclear cruiser and other warships and…
mikethemadbiologist | September 12, 2008New data show that antibiotic resistance genes travel together, at least in E. coli isolated from farms. Lookee, a picture:
(click to embiggen)
These are the major types of antibiotics. Anytime you see a "+", that means that a gene that provides resistance to some or all of the antibiotic in that class*. For example, the second "+" in the first column means that E. coli with a tetracycline resistance gene are more likely than those without a tetracycline resistance gene to also have an aminoglycoside resistance gene. And by more likely, it's usually five to fifty times more likely.
When…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2008
This is not good. A recent article in Emerging Infectious Diseases describes two separate cases of community-acquired ST398 MRSA--and neither case was associated with agriculture. Let me explain what this means and why this is really bad news.
MRSA--methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus--is a serious problem: in the U.S., it kills more people annually than AIDS. Typically, the therapy used to treat MRSA is vancomycin, and strains resistant to vancomycin can't be treated on-label with any commercial antibiotics*. ST398 is a new clone of MRSA that is thought to be associated with…
mikethemadbiologist | August 10, 2008This story should, if you care at all about the rule of law, make your blood boil:
I, Galloglas, went to vote today and encountered difficuly. And, it is important to point out that this was not the first time I've run onto problems this year.
When I voted in Missouri's Presidential primary in February, 2008, I took the proper identification to my precinct and attempted to cast my ballot. The identification requirements are spelled out graphically on our Secretary of State's Web Site which can be found at http://www.sos.mo.gov/... /.
And, as I am of the belief that the "Voter Fraud" question…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2008...seven years later? The bad news--for years, cephalosporin antibiotics (antibiotics derived from penicillin, such as ceftiofur, cephalothalin, cefoxitin, and ceftriaxone) were used 'off-label' (meaning irresponsibly) in agriculture (italics mine):
Inspectors found a common antibiotic has been misused in animals through practices such as injections into chicken eggs and ordered farmers to stop the unapproved treatments because of the risk to humans.
The drugs, called cephalosporins, were given in unapproved doses to chickens, beef, pigs and dairy cows, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration…
mikethemadbiologist | July 11, 2008One of the things I find fascinating about the Weather Channel is that after watching it for a while, you actually start to worry about that cold front moving through some other part of the country. You become quite paranoid about things that won't affect you. Well, I've got an even better way to drive yourself nuts about scary things that won't affect you: HealthMap.org.
I'm kidding. Healthmap.org is actually really interesting--it gives you a visual representation of all of the disease outbreaks globally. You can change the dates, diseases, and locations you want to look at. It also…
mikethemadbiologist | June 22, 2008I expect Republicans to eviscerate the Constitution, but, once again, the Democrats failed to hold the line, and, instead, granted the telecoms immunity in the House legislation. I'll get back to why I emphasized granted, but if you want to know what this is all about, Hilzoy gives the best description I've read so far (although Greenwald is pretty good too; so is Lindsay):
Our President and his advisors believe three things which are wrong individually, but disastrous when combined. These are:
(1) The President can do whatever he wants during wartime, whether or not it violates the laws.
(2…