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I see where Mussolini wannabe Steve Bannon has been asserting that ICE should swarm election polling places, ostensibly to prevent non-citizens from voting. “During Tuesday’s episode of his War Room podcast, Bannon outlined his vision, which, as I alluded to above, should not necessarily be taken as literal White House policy. But it mirrors concerns that Democratic officials have been sounding the alarm about for months. Bannon suggested that the administration should send in ICE agents to “surround the polls” in the upcoming midterms, supposedly as a means to prevent the election from being stolen. He also proposed invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in the Army to monitor election administration.   “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon  said . “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stol...

Secure at home and facing no rival spheres abroad, Washington is allowing its alliances to slide toward protection rackets, its trade relationships toward trade wars, and major sea-lanes toward militarized zones. The institutions the United States once underwrote are fraying, and the markets it upheld are fragmenting. Some U.S. partners, including Canada and the United Kingdom, now look for short-term security wherever they can find it, even at the cost of long-term dependence on China. The result is not stability but the slow hollowing out of the relationships that once converted American dominance into a durable order. ~Michael Beckley

Mark Twain famously observed: ”A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes ." Yesterday was the 16 th  anniversary of the retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent report claiming a link between vaccination and autism. Sadly, RFK Jr and his fellow anti-vaxxers got the lie but not the truth. Americans, particularly American children, are paying the price.

I grew up in Oak Ridge Tennessee in the ‘60s. At the time, it was a town with one of the highest concentrations of scientists and engineers in the nation. Both of my parents were college grads. So, I took it for granted that most Americans graduated from college. I didn’t know until I was in college that  in 1977 (the year I graduated), approximately  15%  of American adults aged 25 and older were graduates of four-year colleges or universities.   Today, that number is nearly 40%. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that a bachelor’s degree from a 4-year college or university isn’t the meal ticket it once was. “ The unemployment gap between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with occupational associate’s degrees - such as plumbers, electricians and pipe fitters -   flipped in 2025, leaving trade workers with a slight edge for six months out of the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the first time trade workers have had a leg up since ...

Apart from their utility in criminal finances, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (other than stablecoin) are manifestations of The Greater Fool Theory of Investing. So how is the Bitcoin investment performing for ya? “ The world’s largest cryptocurrency slipped below $76,000 in thin weekend trading, dropping about 40% from its 2025 peak and revisiting levels last seen in the aftermath of the “Liberation Day” tariff fallout.” *snip* “ Bitcoin fell nearly 11% in January, marking its fourth straight monthly decline — the longest losing streak since 2018, during the crash that followed the 2017 boom in initial coin offerings. “I don’t think we’ll see a new all-time high for Bitcoin in 2026,” said Paul Howard, director at market maker Wincent.” So a buying opportunity, right? “ Even more striking than the drop itself is the relative lack of optimism around it on social media. In a space known for relentless bravado and “number go up” memes, Bitcoin’s slide has been met with little cheerlea...

I spent my entire research career working on animals. In this case, the animals were Drosophila melanogaster, or “fruit flies.” I dissected tens of thousands of larval salivary glands because their giant polytene chromosomes afforded a relatively high resolution map of the genome. I made over 100 transgenic lines to gain insight into gene function. I screened tens of thousands of flies in mutagenesis screens to identify mutations that answered questions about genetics. And of course, much of my research rested on a literature of science using flies. Now I understand that some folks consider flies to be vermin. Their status as invertebrates places them beneath the notice of the NIH rules on animal care. But much of our lifesaving vaccines, drugs, devices and surgical techniques relied on research using vertebrate models, rodents and primates in particular. Yes, I know we’ve cured cancer in mice hundreds of times in ways that didn’t translate to cancer in humans. But I wouldn’t take a va...