Politics
gregladen | October 1, 2015______________________
UPDATE: BLM and the St Paul authorities have come to a compromise.
... the Mayor announced that Turner and the St. Paul Black Lives Matter chapter have agreed to refrain from interfering with runners trying to complete the course, as had previously been threatened. Instead, BLM, will demonstrate near the finish line, raising their voices about the issues that have boiled on the front burner since the death of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer.
"The Mayor took the time to listen, he heard our concerns," Turner shared. "We…
jdupuis | September 30, 2015Though not explicitly tied to our current federal election campaign, the début this week of the Science Integrity Project and the publishing of their Statement of Principles for Sound Decision Making in Canada just as the campaign heats up is surely not coincidental.
In any case, election or not, this is a wonderful initiative and I support it wholeheartedly. There's lots of background on their website about the process for coming up with the principles, an FAQ and a few examples of how the principles work in practice.
From their website:
Welcome to the Science Integrity Project. Our project…
oracknows | September 25, 2015Yesterday, I wrote about how pediatric neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson is an excellent example demonstrating how the vast majority of physicians and surgeons, even highly accomplished ones admired as being at the top of their professions, are not scientists and how many of them are disturbingly prone to buying into pseudoscience. In Dr. Carson's case, that tendency to believe in pseudoscience derives from his fundamentalist religion that led him to reject evolution and accept arguments against evolution every bit as ignorant as the ones Kent Hovind or Ken Ham serves up…
esiegel | September 24, 2015“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
There's an attitude that's very, very common in America: the notion of the rugged individualist. Part of that ethos is the idea that, "if I use my brain to its fullest extent, I can figure out any problem as well as any expert." It's the idea that logic, reason, and the power of your own mind to solve literally anything.
Image credit: Science Photo Library/Corbis.
But one of the most important lessons that science teaches us is that…
oracknows | September 24, 2015Early in the history of this blog, I had a running gag that I'd use every now and then. Basically, it involved humorously extravagant descriptions of how I wanted to hide my face behind a paper bag in sheer embarrassment at the antics of fellow physicians, particularly fellow surgeons. Over time, the gag evolved to my expressing a mock desire to hide my visage behind a metal Doctor Doom-style mask, again, over sheer embarrassment over the idiocy of my colleagues about a scientific issue, again, usually evolution. Sadly, creationist physicians are a very common source of such embarrassment,…
esiegel | September 23, 2015“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” -Carl Sagan
So, Ben Carson made a speech in 2011 that's making the rounds, for some pretty scary reasons. I'm particularly concerned with what he has…
oracknows | September 23, 2015Our military veterans deserve the best medical care our nation can offer. Actually, I'd say they're owed it, actually. After all, many of them put themselves in harm's way for this country. Others have suffered grievous injury with permanent sequelae. Still others have paid the ultimate price. For those who served, the least we as a nation should be expected to provide, to me at least, is high quality medical care, particularly for service-related injuries and illnesses. Unfortunately, besides the usual problems of inadequate resources devoted to veteran care, other forces are conspiring to…
gregladen | September 20, 2015The second part of the first amendment requires separation of church and state, and elsewhere, the Constitution requires that there be no religious test for office. Ben Carson requires that there be a religious test for office. This is because Carson is, essentially, an Evangelical Christian, in the sense that he believes, as do many other Gops, that Christian belief and doctrine should be part of our governance and law.
In other words, Carson believes first in a higher power, God, to whom he owes primary allegiance and, critically, believes that the belief system that emerges from worship…
oracknows | September 18, 2015Homeopathy is a frequent topic on this blog, for reasons that regular readers no doubt understand all too well by now. Homeopathy is, as I like to call it, again borrowing from Tolkien, The One Quackery To Rule Them All. When it comes to quackery, few can even come close to homeopathy for the sheer ridiculousness of its precepts. Whether it is the Law of Similars, which claims that to cure a disease you need to use a substance that cause's that diseases symptoms in healthy people, a "law" that has no basis in science, or the Law of Infinitesimals, which postulates that serially diluting a…
oracknows | September 14, 2015Note added 9/17/2015: I knew it. The vaccine issue came up during the second debate and Donald Trump repeated basically the same nonsensical antivaccine tropes that he's been repeating for at least eight years. It rather puts the lie to his claim that he listens to experts and changes his opinion based on what they tell him. Hilariously, Mike Adams is painting it as an attempt by CNN to "destroy" Donald Trump using the vaccine issue. Depressingly, Ben Carson, while defending vaccines, fell into the "too many, too soon," trope, something a pediatric neurosurgeon should know better than to say…
pharyngula | August 30, 2015Here's a treat: a congressman who has been in office since 1989, and is on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
https://twitter.com/DanaRohrabacher/status/638022999321538560
claiming Global Warming they create powerful Global gov. Claiming tooth decay they mandate chemical fluoride in our water
He's a Republican, of course.
Meanwhile, in a small town in Alaska…
In this town of 403 residents 83 miles above the Arctic Circle, beaches are disappearing, ice is melting, temperatures are rising, and the barrier reef Kivalina calls home gets smaller and smaller with every storm.
There…
oracknows | August 28, 2015I must admit that I'm surprised. Pleasantly surprised, but quite surprised. The reason is that yesterday the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs Director Mike Zimmer rejected the recommendation of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Review Panel to add autism to the list of qualifying conditions for which cannabis can be prescribed in the state of Michigan. I didn't expect this outcome, but I am pleased.
Although I've changed my mind over past stands and am now in favor of legalizing marijuana for recreational use, I have been harshly critical of the "medical marijuana" movement. Indeed…
gregladen | August 27, 2015The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-…
oracknows | August 27, 2015After a busy day yesterday and falling asleep early on the couch, I only have time for a quick take today. So file this under "only in America":
A 23-year-old Metro Detroit man robbed a South Lyon credit union earlier this month for his daughter, he told investigators according to South Lyon Police Lt. Chris Sovik.
Brian Randolph, who is currently jailed on a $500,000 bond and facing up to life in prison for robbery of a banking institution, told detectives he recently lost insurance coverage necessary to pay for cancer treatment his daughter required, Sovic said.
Randolph said his daughter…
oracknows | August 24, 2015I don't review books that often. The reason is simple. My posts for this blog sometimes take as much as a several hours to write (particularly my more "epic" ones that surpass 5,000 words), and I usually don't have the time to add several more hours to the task by reading an entire book. Also, by the time I've read a book I might want to review, weeks—or even months—have often passed, and a review is no longer of much interest to our readers anyway.
Today, I'm making an exception for a book hot off the presses. The main reason is curiosity, because the book is about a topic that I've blogged…
jdupuis | August 21, 2015Katie Gibbs and Alana Westwood of Evidence for Democracy wrote a terrific piece in The Toronto Star a little while ago, We need a national debate on science: A question about science policy has never been asked at a federal leaders’ debate. Now more than ever that has to change.
Given the clear importance of science in our lives, why has a question about science policy never — not once — been asked in a federal leaders’ debate?
*snip*
Perhaps it’s time for another first: a debate about the state and future of Canadian science. Once a world-leader in scientific research, recent decisions have…
oracknows | August 19, 2015Readers of this blog of a certain age and above are likely to remember a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named William Proxmire. Sen. Proxmire made a name for himself in the late 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s by issuing what he dubbed "The Golden Fleece Award," which was meant to "honor" public officials who, in Proxmire's view, egregiously wasted taxpayer money. It was a popular and often headline-grabbing device to highlight wasteful spending. There was one big problem with the award, though, that I increasingly appreciated as time went on, to the point where I've referred to the…
oracknows | August 16, 2015The approval of new drugs and medical devices is a process fraught with scientific, political, and ethical landmines. Inherent in any such process is an unavoidable conflict between rigorous science and safety on the one side, which tend to slow the process down by requiring large randomized clinical trials that can take years, versus forces that demand faster approval. For example, patients suffering from deadly diseases demand faster approval of drugs that might give them the hope of surviving their disease, or at least of surviving considerably longer. This is a powerful force for reform,…
pharyngula | August 13, 2015The paper leaves no room for ambiguity.
Note that there's nothing at all wrong with this -- the use of fetal tissue in these kinds of experiments, and many more, is ubiquitous, and it is not obtained by magic, but by the ethical donation of fetal material from abortions and miscarriages and stillbirths. I don't object at all to Carson having participated in this kind of research.
I do object to him now declaring that it is unethical in all circumstances.
Oh, wait. Except he's suddenly backpedaling in all kinds of directions.
The Washington Post picked up Gunter’s story and contacted Carson…
gregladen | August 11, 2015A couple of days ago I assimilated data from a bunch of on line polls where people could informally and unscientifically express their opinion about who won the GOP debate (the big boy debate only, with ten candidates). I suggested a series of hypotheses to isolate the idea that this sort of on line unscientific effort might reflect reality, with the idea of testing the results of those polls with upcoming formal polls.
Now we have a couple of formal polls to test against. I took the raw percentages for the ten GOP big boy debate candidates, recalculated the percentages, and came up with…