Up From Facebook

Don’t ask me why, but I was listening to Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” yesterday. If you’re familiar with it, you’ll recall a tune that appears five different times: 1.       Part I, No. 21   – "Erkenne mich, mein Hüter" 2.       Part I, No. 23   – "Ich will hier bei dir stehen" 3.       Part II, No. 53   – "Befiehl du deine Wege" 4.       Part II, No. 63   – "Ergötze dich, mein Seele" 5.       Part II, No. 72   – "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden"   The tune was originally composed by Hans Leo Hassler in 1601 for a secular love song before Bach repurposed it. More recently, Paul Simon re-purposed the melody yet again for “American Tune.” Music is choc-a-block with plagiarism. Handel did it in Messiah. Jazz does it all the time. Hearing it in St . Matthew Passion was like hearing the voice of an old friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

My mom led an extraordinary and full life. The youngest of three, she was raised in Johnstown PA, northern Appalachia. Her dad died when she was a teenager. Her mom, who never finished high school, went to work as a domestic.     She was able to attend William and Mary thanks to money provided by an older brother who was a football star at W&M and briefly went pro. She met my dad there. They raised five children. Shortly after her youngest was born, she started taking graduate school classes, and in her early 40s, earned a PhD in experimental psychology. After a two-year postdoc at The Rockefeller University in Manhattan, she returned to East Tennessee to teach, and as part owner/operator of The Energy Outlet, a store that sold window heat pumps and woodburning stoves.   A few years before my parents retired, they bought a place in rural Washington County NY. After they moved there, my mom declared that she would live there until she died. She loved the area, and deve...

This is what the MAGA GOP supports: “Workers are earning record low wages and other compensation compared to their labor output, according to the BLS productivity and costs report published Thursday. Called the “labor share,” this indicator essentially measures how much of the nation’s economic earnings is used to pay wages and other worker benefits.    “At 54.1%, workers are netting the lowest earnings compared to the income they’re producing since the data started being collected in 1947. Meanwhile, labor productivity increased 0.8%, output increased 1.5%, and people worked 0.7% more month over month.”  This is what happens when unions die.  When people talk about “The Greatest Generation,” they seem to refer to the generation that fought in WWII*. But it was also the generation of organized labor. While the US economy traded manufacturing for services, there’s no objective reason why workers shouldn’t demand better treatment. That’s the only way things will change...

A typical administrative response to financial difficulty in large organizations is to hire consultants. The theory is that the expertise of consultants will uncover efficiencies that will (a) relieve the difficulties and (b) repay the investment in the consultants. So how’s that working out for American nonprofit hospitals, many of which struggling and threatened with closure? “ Findings     Nonprofit hospitals in the US (n = 2343) collectively spent more than $7.8 billion on management consulting services from 2009 to 2023. A stacked difference-in-differences design comparing 306 US nonprofit hospitals that used a management consulting firm for the first time with 513 matched hospitals that did not use a management consulting firm during the study period found little evidence of substantial, statistically significant, or systematic changes attributable to management consulting engagements.   “Meaning     These findings raise questions about the net value that ...

I recently retired as a professor in the Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Who was Edward A. Doisy? He was the only Nobel Laureate from Saint Louis University. He shared the 1943 prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the two forms of vitamin K and determining their structure, enabling synthetic production to treat bleeding disorders. Vitamin K is routinely given by injection to newborns to prevent Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding (VKDB), a dangerous condition caused by low clotting factors. Newborns have limited vitamin K stores, breast milk provides low levels, and their intestines cannot yet produce it, making the shot crucial for preventing sudden, severe internal bleeding. Now, in the third decade of the 21 st  century, parents in the richest nation on the planet are refusing to protect their newborns from preventable death because they’ve been duped by conspiracy theories.  “At the morgue,...

  From a PBS post on Facebook yesterday: “ On May 5, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.   “It all began when the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools. The newly-organized American Civil Liberties Union responded immediately, placing an ad inviting a teacher to help test the law in the courts.   “A group of local businessmen selected Scopes to provoke the indictment, both to challenge the law and to draw publicity to Dayton during an economic slump.   “But once the trial got under way, a pair of big-name lawyers—Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution—overshadowed Scopes' role.” I took Biology II as a senior in a public high school in Tennessee, 1972-73. When we reached a section on evolution, the teacher asked if there were any concerns. Nobody voiced any, so we moved on.