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Ever wonder whether you should heat water for tea or coffee in an electric kettle, a resistance coil cooktop, a gas cooktop, an induction cooktop or a microwave oven? Wonder no more! https://angrybearblog.com/2023/11/comparing-energy-efficiency-of-boiling-water-household-appliances#more-120571

  Jason Aldean and his anthem to vigilantism. I haven't listened to country-western music since junior high, so Jason Aldean's song "Try That in a Small Town" would have escaped my attention were it not for the articles it inspired. If art is meant to provoke, Aldean's CW song qualifies. Its lyrics are plainly meant to appeal to white rural grievance, but it provoked many of us to recall the sordid history of vigilantism in this country. Having grown up in the American South at the end of apartheid, racist violence and lynching was part of the soundtrack of my youth. Anyone who wants to return to the days where citizens routinely deputized themselves as judge, jury and executioner is simply anti-American. Here's an essay that recalls the bad old days that Aldean's song valorizes: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/jason-aldean-song-triggered-renewed-attention-on-racist-vigilante-justice-and-small-town-nationalism

  From over at Common Dreams: 7 Questions to Ask to Protect Yourself From Medicare Advantage Scams 1. What’s the biggest difference between traditional Medicare and a Medicare Advantage plan? 2. Should I trust an insurance agent’s advice about my Medicare options? 3. Why can’t I rely on my friends or the government’s star-rating system to pick a good Medicare Advantage plan? 4. If I’m enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, can I count on seeing the physicians listed in the network and lower costs? 5. Doesn’t the government make sure that Medicare Advantage plans deliver the same benefits as traditional Medicare? 6. If I join a Medicare Advantage plan, can I disenroll and switch to traditional Medicare? 7. If I have traditional Medicare and Medicaid, what should I do? For answers, click the link: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/protect-yourself-from-medicare-advantage

 From my friend Lori Wallrath: The votes are in for this year’s frozen pumpkin pie competition. For a fourth year in a row, Marie Callender’s comes in first place! The flaky crust and tasty, firm pie filling wins the family over every year. In second place, Sara Lee’s crust was too dense and the cinnamon in the filling overpowered the other spices. In third place, Kuhn’s bakery out of Drakesville, Iowa, was all natural; however, the crust separated from the filling and the filling lacked spices - “too gourd” were the comments."

I've always been amused at the sight of guys in their 50's and beyond who appear to be pregnant. You know those guys with bulging "beer bellies." But that visceral fat isn't a sign of a jollity, it's a sign of inflammatory tissue. And the inflammation can transmit itself to the brain, advancing the processes leading to dementia, among other serious pathologies. If you have significant visceral fat, consider asking your doc about semaglutides as a pathway to weight reduction. Turns out, visceral fat is easier to lose than subcutaneous fat. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/health/belly-fat-alzheimers-wellness/index.html

  It is hard to overstate the transformational public health benefits of anti-hypertensives and statins for blood pressure and serum cholesterol control. For a modest cost, these drugs not only mitigate human suffering but save billions, if not trillions, of dollars by avoiding costly surgical interventions. The repurposing of anti-diabetic drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide for weight loss in obese populations promises to be similarly transformative. I’ve witnessed this anecdotally; one of my sisters lost 90 lbs in 2.5 years on semaglutide, and for the first time in decades has a BMI in the healthy range. “The need for the medications is undeniable. Obesity is a major contributor to preventable death in the U.S. It can lead to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, several forms of cancer, mental illness, difficulty with physical function, kidney failure, and many other maladies. It is stubbornly resistant to behavioral and dietary changes in many people. “Obesity and its myriad con...

"Factions have fought for decades about sexuality and Scripture at the General Conference, the church’s top legislative body. After the church strengthened its bans on partnered LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage in 2019, many Methodists argued a split was likely inevitable in the second-largest Protestant denomination in the US. "In recent decades, several of the traditional mainline Protestant denominations have split up over homosexuality or related issues, including the American Baptist Churches USA, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church USA. "On Saturday, the requests of four of the Georgia congregations seeking to be disaffiliated were not ratified, “following discussion by the members of the Annual Conference,” according to a news release. "The exits of the 261 other churches will go into effect at the end of November." Jesus was silent on the subjects of homosexuality, LGBTQ and gay marriage. True C...

I see where another SpaceX rocket just blew up. Yes, it got a couple minutes further than the last one. And like the last one, SpaceX cheerfully announced this as a success and the stenographers in the main stream media dutifully and uncritically recorded this as a success. I guess SpaceX is using the word "success" in the same way that Elon's other big project, the platform formerly known as Twitter has been a "success" since he took over. Keep a grip on your dictionary, peeps.

  The biggest near-term threat to human civilization from global warming is loss of fresh water and arable land for crops. It turns out that nature has confronted the challenges of increased temperature, increased salinity, disease resistance and violent weather. Recently, as strain of maize called “Jimmy Red corn” has been resurrected from a population bottleneck in which only two ears remained. Why should we care about Jimmy Red? “Jimmy Red dwindled because it’s not the kind of corn that is edible straight off the cob. It has to be dehydrated to extract its flavor and high oil content – ideal for making moonshine, but not valuable for large commercial farming. “Its value is in its genetics. “Heirloom grains, vegetables and fruits have developed traits that make them less vulnerable to climate change, Ward said, because they have been grown over hundreds of years in wildly different conditions.” *snip* “Ward has been growing Jimmy Red corn for a little more than a decade to better...

I see where the right-wing GOP is comparing Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" to Trump's "vermin." Setting aside the very clear and explicit Trump reference to Hitler, let's go with this. Clinton lost the electoral college vote. I'll accept the equivalency if Trump also loses the electoral college vote in 2024. Agreed?

I'll start this post by saying that the central premise of homeopathy, like chiropractic, is quackery. But just like back massage can be experienced as a therapeutic benefit, so too, homeopathy can be beneficial, if only as a placebo. That said, I was recently reading about variolation, an old technique to innoculate against smallpox. The practice involved sticking a needle into a pustule of a smallpox patient and scarring the skin of the innoculated person. The small amount of virus transferred was too little to kill a person but enough to trigger a protective immune response. George Washington mandated smallpox innoculation for the Continental Army, which I guess is an affront to modern-day antivaxxers. Anyway, it occurred to me that the idea of variolation is a kind of homeopathy: something that in large doses is lethal, in small doses is protective.  

  Remember that Ohio constitutional amendment protecting the right to an abortion? You'd think having the plain language in the state constitution would be bulletproof. You'd be wrong. "Republican legislators put out a statement saying the amendment wouldn’t stand in their way and floated what seems to be their plan for defeating it. They say they will vote to remove abortion from the state Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. “Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative.” "In other words, by removing jurisdiction over the abortion issue the amendment would become meaningless text. Here’s the order of events: The state legislature passes an abortion ban. Litigants sue arguing that the law violates the express language of the state constitution. But the Supreme Court now lacks jurisdiction over the issue. So nothing happens. End of story. "The additional part of the puzzle is that state Supreme Court is no...

When I started as a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1977, my stipend as an NIH trainee was $3900/year (ca. $20K in today's dollars). When I started as a postdoc at Washington University in 1982, my salary was $12,800 (ca. $41K in today's dollars). At the time, I regarded this as the opportunity cost of PhD and postdoc training. 2023 me is satisfied that I was able to make up that opportunity cost on the spreadsheet, not to mention job satisfaction that cannot be monetized. Times change. The job market for STEM PhDs in America has changed dramatically. Add to that, the cost of living in Chapel Hill NC and St. Louis MO is lower than on the east and west coast. I've been on both sides. Before I closed my lab and went on phased retirement, I had to figure out how to pay my staff for over 30 years. If you don't pay enough, your talent gets poached. If you go low, you end up with someone who can't/won't do the work you need to renew your grant. I'm not surprised...

The media have had a field day over the losses by the anti-choice extremist right in Tuesday's election. Granting the importance of Dobbs in re-shaping the discourse on reproductive choice, there was another victory against right-wing ignorance that didn't get nearly so much coverage: "Moms for Liberty crows about its success in helping its chosen candidates win their elections; of the 500 right-wing candidates the group endorsed for school board last year, three-quarters of whom had never before run, 275 won their races. "But this year, Moms for Liberty’s luck appears to be running out—last night, many of the group’s favored candidates lost." I'd quibble with the use word "many" here; it was the vast majority of their candidates that lost. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/parents-rights-moms-for-liberty-lost-big-in-elections-last-night/

  Democrats did well yesterday and a pro-choice Constitutional amendment passed in Ohio, even though this was an off-off-year election. The reproductive choice issue unites liberals and conservatives, both of whom want the nanny state out of women's personal medical decisions. The Democratic Party *is* the conservative party now, there is no liberal party. I see where right-wing extremist Rick Santorum blames all this on democracy, which he opposes. Color me unsurprised. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4299354-santorum-ohio-results-pure-democracies/?fbclid=IwAR3-Jd4LMZ-Wc-st3kQGwm-5p1ykLRJaGOY8YMxwPHbZjXWPzFKmk_y3sAQ

  Count me among those who hope for the dawning of the driverless car age to happen soon. If I live long enough, the day will come when someone—my wife, my daughter—will extend their hand to demand the car keys. The prospect of being able to summon a driverless car to take me to the grocery store, hardware store, doctor’s office, theater, etc. is alluring. If I lived in Manhattan, I could take the bus or subway to any place I’d likely want, but public transportation coverage is too incomplete here in Rhode Island. There’s a lot of discussion around whether driverless cars are safer than the average driver. But the average driver won’t be able to afford their own driverless car for decades. Waymo is targeting the taxi business, where cars will be on the road most of the time earning money for their owners. It looks like driverless taxis will be a practical reality sometime in the next decade in parts of the US that never see snow or rain. That’s not New England. https://jabberwock...

The claim by Republicans that Social Security and Medicare must be cut in order to reduce the budget deficit is a lie, full stop. FICA revenues are dedicated to the programs of Old Age, Survivors’ and Disability Insurance and cannot be used for any other purpose. The ‘unified’ budget that included SS and Medicare as part of the general fund is a fiction, and did not reduce the deficit, defined as the difference between annual appropriations and revenue authorized by Congress. It merely made the Trust Funds into major lenders to the Treasury, displacing some private purchases of Treasuries. The bonds held in the Trust Funds are a special issue and cannot be transferred; currently, bonds are being redeemed to supplement current revenues and maintain payments to beneficiaries, including the large cohort of baby boomers, as intended.

Lifted from a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com: "Once again, the critical voting bloc, that is "working class" whites who don't benefit from actual Republican economic policy, feels that it is under threat. That threat is real, not imaginary - it is the loss of White Christian Supremacy. This arouses powerful basic tribal instincts. These instincts take precedence over rationality and even self-preservation. They typically involve the elevation of some quasi-superhuman leader. Loss of this supremacy is felt as catastrophic - it's like losing a war. This kind of thing is probably happening in several places in the world at any given time. "Republicans are fairly open about the "Christian" part, but it is still not acceptable for national politicians to be openly racist. They pretend that the Republican base is agitated about other things, such as the supposed dominance by the liberal economic "elite" or the threat of Marxism."...

In a previous post, I mentioned an effective way to curtail illegal immigration—require all employees to be screened through E-Verify—and some reasons why it won’t be adopted. Another disincentive to deterring illegal immigration is that it subsidizes Social Security and Medicare: “ . . . illegal immigrants as a group are net contributors who partially pay into the trust funds while receiving little in return, but amnesty would transform them into net drains who receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes. CIS has estimated the per-recipient cost of this dramatic change in status to be $129,000 in present value. If 10 million illegal immigrants receive amnesty, the total cost to Social Security and Medicare would be roughly $1.3 trillion, equivalent to a one-time transfer of 6 percent of GDP.” I doubt this subsidy is much on the minds of those who prefer the status quo and peformative political posturing over real solutions to illegal immigration, but it is another disincent...

  I see where the latest gambit by House Republicans is to tie Ukraine aid to immigration “reform.” Setting aside the fact that aid to Ukraine is, like most foreign aid, a subsidy for US business, the linkage to immigration is a red herring. All the current approaches are failing, are doomed, and are a waste of taxpayer money, something the GOP pretends to care about. I’ve long held that the solution to most undocumented immigration is to reduce demand: • fines and prison for any employer found to be employing undocumented immigrants; • fines for anyone (yes, you and me) who uses the labor of undocumented immigrants (produce, hotels, golf clubs, lawn services, etc). Draconian? You bet, but it would work faster and more efficiently than a wall and troops at the borders. Kevin Drum over a jabberwocking.com takes a similar but less coercive approach: “The United States should require employers to adopt E-Verify for all new hires. ICE “raids” can then be aimed solely at employers, who ...

  The October 30 issue of The New Yorker has a piece on Xi’s China called “China’s Age of Malaise.” While the mainstream media continues to promote the idea that China has become a wellspring of creativity and economic competition, the reality is that China is retreating into the rigid, sclerotic political dogmatism that characterized the Mao era and that brought down the Soviet Union. The money grafs: “Early this year, the Party launched a campaign to educate citizens on what Party literature habitually refers to as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” All manner of institutions—laboratories, asset-management firms, banks, think tanks—are expected to make time for regular lectures, followed by the writing of essays and the taking of tests. Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on “thought work,” including reading an average of four books a month. A microchip engineer at a university lab told a friend, “Going to mee...