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I’ll preface this post by repeating something I’ve said before: social security, Medicare, public schools, public libraries, immigration, reproductive choice, sensible gun control, racial tolerance and getting the state out of the marriage business are all bedrock conservative values that are also shared by liberals. I grew up on a blue island. Oak Ridge TN was a highly educated and tolerant community when I grew up there, in a state that was pretty right-wing. Later, I moved to the People’s Republic of Chapel Hill, a blue island in the state of Jesse Helms. From there, I moved to St. Louis, a blue island in a state where the Confederate flag of treason is displayed proudly. After 40 years, we finally moved to Rhode Island, a tiny blue state, but not a blue island, since it is surrounded by blue states. I don’t have a problem with political diversity. It’s just that we don’t really have it in America today. Because of our electoral system, there can only be two stable parties. Today, t

  I was raised Roman Catholic, but I'm not a practicing Christian. That said, I'm not blind to the marketing of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, in the service of right-wing politics.    To the best of my knowledge, there is no place in the Gospels where Jesus stated an opinion on abortion, homosexuality or gay marriage. Happy to be educated here, but if Christians are followers of Christ's example and Jesus was silent, so should faithful Christians be silent (or at least not claim the mantle of Christianity on those topics). In re: immigrants, Jesus was not silent, however. "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" and "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me". So xenophobia is obviously not Christian.   Jesus did say that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, and judge not, lest you be judged. So I won't judge those who claim to be evangelicals but ignore the Bible. I

The popular right-wing grievance is that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants are taking all the jobs. In particular, they’re stealing jobs from US citizens. What’s the evidence? If it were true that immigrants were stealing jobs from citizens, then if you plotted labor force participation by citizens and non-citizens over time, they would have a reciprocal relationship. As non-citizen participation rose, citizen participation would fall. Over at jabberwocking,com, Kevin Drum posts the graph, and it shows that both citizen and non-citizen participation move in tandem. I don’t see any evidence for job stealing there. One problem with the job-stealing hypothesis is that it is based on the lump-of-labor fallacy. In this model, there are only a finite number of jobs in America. But that’s not how it works. When a person works, they don't just light their paycheck on fire. They use their salary to pay for goods and services; IOW, they’re creating jobs. This is true regardless of citizens

I had an email exchange a couple days ago with Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo about polls (which he’s written a lot about recently) and the election betting market (which he had never mentioned). Yesterday, he used our exchange as a jumping off point to explain why he doesn’t believe the betting market is reliable and certainly no improvement over polling. The money grafs: “First of all, as I said, bets are largely made on the basis of polls. But let’s go a bit beyond that. In theory at least in equity markets you have armies of industry analysts studying industries and providing insights into the future challenges and profitability of businesses. Same in commodities, currencies, bonds, etc. Investors make investments on the basis of this and other kinds of information. To the best of my knowledge there’s really nothing like this informing political betting markets. Again, it’s mainly polls and the “analysts” who you see in the media. If we’re talking about calling most race

Donald Trump and JD Vance are campaigning on xenophobia. There’s no evidence that immigrants are any sort of threat to America, and the data show that immigrants commit crimes at *lower* rates than American citizens. Sadly, though, fear of the other seems to work in America: “Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that event that he feels strongly about Trump’s proposals on immigration. He shared that he felt uncomfortable recently when he went to rent chairs from a business and five men who spoke a foreign language were standing outside waiting for a bus. “Not one spoke a lick of English,” he said. “You see a whole different environment.” Actually, Jeffrey doesn’t know whether these men do or don’t speak English. He only knows he didn’t hear it during the brief time he was in earshot. If he heard me speak, he probably wouldn't know that I can speak some French. Look, I’ve traveled to plenty of places where I don’t speak the language—Spain, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Greece, Ru

The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic. When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance companies would pay a premium to be seen by docs in an academic health care practice. Managed care put an end to that, and the medical school from which I recently retired is struggling to stay in the black after many years of deficits. At the other end of the food chain are private practice docs. As America ages, more and more of their patients are on Medicare (as am I). And the government is proposing to slash Medicare payments again. The only way to weather these cuts is through joining group practices, which can achieve an economy of scale. “Will his independent practice be able to survive another Medicare payment cut? That's what Terre Haute, In

 I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared. But lets be clear: the survivors weren’t necessarily healthy. Many polio survivors spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung. Others had a permanent limp or other neurological disability. With COVID, many survivors report neurological impairments like loss of taste, brain fog, anxiety or depression, as well as respiratory issues. Recent imaging studies of the brains of early COVID survivors have pinpointed the sites in the brain that are affected: “The 31 patients included in the study had all been hospitalized with COVID-19 towards the beginning of the pandemic, before  vaccines  were available. Like many patients admitted to hospit

While I was raised Roman Catholic, I had already rejected the RCC teaching on abortion by the time I started high school. It was not grounded in Biblical teaching nor was it grounded in biological science.   Most human conceptuses never make it to term, making God the greatest abortionist of all time. And mammalian stem cells have the potential to become a complete animal in every case where it’s been tested, so destroying a “potential” human life extends to the removal of human organs and amputations. But if you want to believe that human cellular life is sacred from the moment of conception, that’s on you. Just don’t try to impose your beliefs on others, particularly in cases of life-or-death medical decisions. “When Anna Nusslock showed up at her local hospital 15 weeks pregnant and in severe pain earlier this year, she said, a doctor delivered devastating news: The twins she and her husband had so desperately wanted were not viable. Further, her own health was in danger, and she ne

Vaccines are an unalloyed triumph of public health. That Donald Trump is attacking vaccines—any vaccines—is obscene. “ . . . on at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. Campaign spokespeople have previously said that pledge would apply only to schools with COVID mandates. But speeches reviewed by  KFF Health News  included no such distinction -- raising the possibility Trump would also target vaccination rules for common, potentially lethal childhood diseases like polio and measles. “The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on this article. Trump has presided over a landslide shift in his party's views on vaccines, reflected this campaign season in false claims by Republican candidates during the primaries and puzzling conspiracies from prominent conservative voices. Republicans increasingly express worry about the risks of vaccines. A September 2023 from  Politico  and Morning Consult showed a narrow maj

Last year, mRNA vaccines won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This morning found RNA once again the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  By the time I finished college, RNA was familiar to me as a family of biopolymers that together specified the manufacture of proteins in cells. Ribosomal RNA made up the platform and enzyme that performed the assembly of amino acids into proteins. Transfer RNAs were the small adapter molecules that brought each amino acid to the assembly plant. Messenger RNAs were the blueprint used to specify the order in which chains of amino acids were assembled into proteins. Importantly, the messenger RNAs in different cells dictated the properties of each cell, analogous to the combination of apps you’re running on your laptop dictates the tasks you can perform on it. During my scientific career, I witnessed the discovery of how messenger RNA from a single gene can be cut up and the pieces pasted together in different combinations i

From Prof. Timothy Snyder's substack "Thinking about..." Shared with permission: "Think about the politicians Trump idolizes, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The first undid a democracy through fake emergencies, the second through persistent constitutional abuse. It is not hard to see why Trump likes them. "Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country. The profits from its oil and gas are in the hands of a few oligarchs. Hungary sits in the middle of the European Union, the most successful trade project of all time. And yet Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors, in part because the Orbán regime corruptly channels EU resources to friendly oligarchs. "The lesson is clear. Democracy is a method of checking corrupt rulers. When there is no functioning democracy, corruption is unchecked. "And democracy is an element of a more fundamental guarantor of

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is everywhere—salad dressings, catsup, carbonated beverages. Fructose is sweeter, per unit mass, than cane sugar (sucrose), and apparently keeps better, so is a favored sweetener by the food industry. Unlike glucose, fructose in converted to free fatty acid in the liver and thus can contribute to hyperlipidemia, diabetes and heart disease. So stay away from fructose, right? Well, I’ve avoided high fructose corn syrup mostly because ever since I stopped eating desserts, my taste for sweet flavor has become more acute and I favor savory foods over sweet foods. But is my aversion to HFCS-containing foods also healthier? “. . . is HFCS  more  of a health risk than other sweeteners? Many of the sources that demonize HFCS list alternative sweeteners — cane sugar, honey, agave syrup, etc. — that they claim are healthier than HFCS, but those claims usually rest primarily on the fact that these alternatives to HFCS are “natural” rather than any actual data showin

I was married by the time I started graduate school. I suspect that being in a committed relationship, and in particular with someone who was also a grad student, kept me centered during the stressful times. Perhaps these were different times, but a recent study shows that today’s PhD students are struggling with mental health issues: “The researchers compared the rate at which PhD students, people with master’s degrees and a sample of the general population accessed mental-health services. Before starting a PhD, students and people with master’s degrees used these services at similar rates. But use of psychiatric medicines, such as antidepressants and sedatives, increased among PhD students year-on-year during their studies. This peaked in the fourth and fifth years — the average length of a PhD programme in most countries — then fell in the sixth and seventh years. “Those at highest risk of being prescribed psychiatric medication during PhD studies were women and people who’d taken s

The recurring bleat of vaccine denialists is that COVID should be addressed through “herd immunity.” Well, OK, a vaccinated population has herd immunity, but that’s not what they mean. They mean herd immunity in the sense of the Black Plague—the people who didn’t die were immune. Apart from all the deaths caused by COVID infections in unvaccinated people, there’s the issue of long COVID. While its etiology is poorly understood, its reality is certain. Vaccination not only keeps you out of the ED and the morgue, it also reduces your chances of long COVID. For victims of long COVID, there isn’t a cure, but there may be some relief: “In September 2021, Systrom was among the first clinicians in the nation to demonstrate a measurable change in the physiology of patients suffering from long COVID — and explain how those changes might account for the crushing fatigue that is among its most debilitating symptoms. The study helped establish long COVID as a legitimate condition and overcome the

I just finished reading “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq” by Steve Coll. By the onset of the US invasion and military occupation, I was convinced that (a) Iraq had no WMDs or active WMD programs, and (b) there was no collusion between Saddam and al Qaeda.  The idea that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were allies was facially absurd. Bin Laden was a religious zealot and Hussein was a secular dictator. They were enemies, not allies. And after years of searching, there was not an atom of evidence for Iraqi WMDs or WMD programs after the year 2000. Yet to the Clinton and Bush administrations, absence of evidence simply proved Saddam was hiding them. Coll confirms this, of course, and brings the receipts. So why did I read this book? Mostly to gain insight into Saddam Hussein and his behavior. To cut to the chase, Hussein was smart but paranoid and insular. After his failed invasion of Kuwait, he destroyed his WMD programs

  The existential threat to humanity in this century is climate change. It is estimated that upwards of half a billion people will be displaced by flooding, fires and desertification due to global warming.  But such frightening predictions are based on climate modeling. How reliable are these models? It turns out, remarkably reliable: “Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn’t accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models—some half a century old—shows most of them were indeed accurate.”   *snip*   “The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old t