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Look, I’m a member of the church of the second chance.   "I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent" (Luke 15:7). But perhaps you’ll forgive me for being cynical about MTG’s recent turn on Trump. It’s pegging my crap detector. “ The former congresswoman reposted a social media post on Saturday from Trisha Hope, a self-described “J6 activist,” who wrote that the details surrounding the July 2024 assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, including the perfectly-timed photo of Trump and Trump’s refusal to talk at length about it, are weird.   “Hope added that Corey Comperatore, who was the only person killed during the assassination attempt when he was shielding his wife and daughter, was killed to be “used in the plot,” otherwise people would think the shooting was a hoax. “Extremely important post worth the read and consideration,”  Green...

RFK Jr says   "Many of us have come to the conclusion that [the] government actually lies to us." On that, I agree. Our government lied us into the Vietnam war and lied about the ending: Nixon took a deal in 1973 that he could have had in 1969. The Bush Administration lied us into the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq based on fake claims of WMDs and collaboration with al Qaeda that ended up spawning (a) an Iran-aligned government and (b) ISIL/Daesh. The Trump Administration lied us into the current war with Iran. And JFK Jr is lying about vaccines, autism and the virtue of red meat consumption. “We shouldn't be confused -- MAHA is not a public health strategy. If it were, it would not come alongside plans to underfund care or undermine confidence in science and proven treatments. Its goal would be to move every American toward evidence-based public health practices. “Rather, MAHA is a highly disciplined political and  omnichannel marketing strategy  seemingly d...

When our daughter was applying to colleges, she visited a bunch of college campuses but ended up applying to only two. One was Washington University in St. Louis, which was only a few blocks from where she grew up. The other was Colorado State University in Ft Collins, which she saw on her big college campus tour. Since my wife worked at Washington U, our daughter could have attended WU tuition-free. And Wash U’s tuition benefit extended to any college or university at half of the Wash U tuition, which was equal to or exceeded the tuition at any state university.  Friends of ours at the time said that surely, we would make her go to Wash U. When I asked why, they told me: “because Wash U is a great university.” Here’s the deal. When people talk about a “great university,” they’re usually referring to the research reputation of the university. And the top universities are research universities. Since research is always and everywhere a cost center, universities have to subsidize res...

A couple years back, I attended a town hall hosted by my House representative, Gabe Amo. During the Q&A, a gal who I judged to be in her 20s referred to the current economic situation as “hyperinflation.” That was nonsense, of course. Hyperinflation is defined by prices rising ofer 50% monthly.     Historic examples of hyperinflation include   Hungary in 1946 (41.9 quadrillion % monthly), Zimbabwe in 2008 (79.6 billion % monthly), Yugoslavia in 1994 and Weimar Germany in 1923, where currency became nearly worthless. I’m old enough to recall the double-digit inflation of the early 1980s, and I wouldn’t call that hyperinflation, let alone the inflation of the early Biden years. Where does this come from? In a think piece over at TPM, Josh Marshall takes a stab at this. “ I was reminded of this because in   the new episode of his Strength in Numbers podcast G. Elliott Morris proposes   that if you look at recent economic history through the different prism of “...

“Meg”: Look, the reason Chinese cars are affordable is that they are subsidized by the Chinese government. Heavily. Removing import restrictions on these cars would devastate the American car industry. We are talking hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. How about instead we have the American government subsidize affordable cars here, or return to requiring CAFE gas mileage standards which created all those options in 2012. Clifford Winston: If you want people to drive more fuel efficient cars to help conserve gasoline and reduce emissions, charge them a vehicle-miles-travel tax. Some states are exploring the idea. Eissendad*: Actually if you "want people to drive more fuel efficient cars to help conserve gasoline and reduce emissions" shouldn't you charge a fuel tax? Charging "a vehicle-miles-travel tax" doesn't incentivize fuel efficiency it incentivizes driving fewer miles, something that is harder to do in rural America. Clifford Winston: A VMT tax has the...

Let’s start with some basics. Prior to uniting during fertilization, a human sperm and a human egg are both alive and human. That they are both human is undeniable, based on their sourcing. That they are alive can easily be demonstrated by autoclaving them and then testing whether they can still participate in fertilization (they can’t; autoclaving kills gametes). So in a real and meaningful sense, human life precedes fertilization. Indeed, there has been no point in the history of our species when human life began, since it is a continuum. Are you with me so far? So if by “human life,” you mean human diploid life, then does it begin when the sperm head (containing the paternal haploid complement) fuses with the oocyte (containing the maternal haploid complement)? Well, no, because it takes several hours for the two pro-nuclei to fuse. Then there’s the small matter of when the zygote implants in the uterus. Without implantation, the zygote is lost. Most human conceptuses are lost that ...

“ . . . nationalism in its early eighteenth-century stages was closely aligned with liberalism. Early liberals, seeking to establish a political foundation for their countries other than monarchy, appealed to sentiments of national unity built on language and culture. This early nationalism wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a political project built on aspirations for self-determination, a better life, and respect for other peoples.   “Such liberal nationalism is connected to collective aspirations for better things and healthy pride in one’s national history, both of which are closely connected to the capacity to feel shame. A person feels shame when he recognizes that he has failed to live up to his high standards and ideals, when he has failed to demonstrate the quality of character of which he is capable. A nation feels shame when its people recognize they have failed to live up to their principles, to the image of themselves as a noble people pursuing a better future. In bot...

As a professor of biochemistry, I’ve always been puzzled by the equation of red meat with dietary protein. Setting aside the fact that fish, crab, shrimp and lobster are as rich in protein as red meat and poultry, what do people think plants are made of? There’s protein in nuts, fruits and vegetables, too. “Meat is indeed packed with protein, but it comes with some well-established health drawbacks. “Saturated fat we’ve known about for decades,” said Dr. Sarah C. Hull, a cardiologist at Yale Medicine. It’s common in red meat and contributes to increasing LDL cholesterol levels, hardening the blood vessels and, in turn, raising the risk of heart attack or stroke. “Moreover, “all mammalian meat tends to be very inflammatory,” said Hull, who studies the diet-related risks of heart disease and cancer. “More recently we’ve come to understand that the many pro-inflammatory compounds found in red meat” can have other downsides, she said, including “deleterious interactions with the gut microb...

  I just saw a headline in the Independent that “not even Hitler attacked the pope so directly.” Well, OK but there’s a big difference: the Nazi government signed a concordat (a treaty) with the Vatican on July 20, 1933, known as the Reichskonkordat. The Church agreed to keep priests and religious orders out of political activity. There is no similar treaty between the Vatican and the Trump Administration. I’m not justifying Trump’s uncivilized behavior, but Hitler wasn’t more civilized, he just sidelined the Vatican in advance, something the Vatican agreed to in exchange for the rights of Catholic education and worship, and the protection of Catholic organizations.

It’s important to note that [Orbán] was defeated by what is essentially a center-right party, led by a defector from Orbán’s party. But from appearances, at least, it’s a center-right party that plans to operate within the structures of civic democracy. I wanted to note that, perhaps in spite of himself, Orbán, bad as he is, managed to again illustrate just what a weak and fraudulent man Donald Trump is. He managed to do what Trump has never been able to do: concede defeat. ~Josh Marshall

When I was growing up, my dad (who was nominally Jewish) told me that our family name was German and meant Iron Mountain. I only learned decades later that both of his parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the time my paternal grandfather arrived in New York as a child, the name was spelled “Aizenberg.” He grew up in Argentina, and when he returned to the US, had the name spelled in its current form, doubling the s to capture the soft s sound. Because my mom was Roman Catholic, my parents had to agree to raise their kids Roman Catholic in ordered to be married in the Church. Which is why I’ve had five of the seven RCC sacraments, how I came to be an altar boy at St. Mary Catholic Church, why the boy scout troop I was in was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, and how the first date for my wife and I was an ice skating party sponsored by the CYO. While I no longer identify as Catholic, I also don’t identify as Jewish, even though Israel would consider me Jewish for the right...

We’re used to thinking about DNA in containers: nuclei, mitochondria, bacteria, viral particles. But there’s lots of DNA pieces flowing through our bloodstream all the time. This cell-free DNA can be captured and analyzed, just like the DNA in sewerage can be tested for COVID. “UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analyzing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream.  “The test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer a powerful and more affordable approach to early disease detection and comprehensive health monitoring. “Early detection is crucial,” said Dr. Jasmine Zhou, the study’s senior author, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Survival rates are far higher when cancers are cau...

You may have read about how a colonel was rescued deep inside Iran using a technology dubbed “ghost murmer.” Great marketing, bad physics. “ By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. ” This is just BS on stilts. “ It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me. “Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. T...

In a resurrected recording of one of his lectures, Christopher Hitchens says that he cannot definitively rule out that the virgin birth of Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, since parthenogenesis has been observed in other animals*. Here’s the thing, though. The Y chromosome is sex-determining in humans. If Mary had a child by parthenogenesis, it would have to be female, since Mary carries no Y chromosome. So, it would be impossible for Jesus to be the result of parthenogenesis. *for example,   Drosophila mercatorum   can reproduce by facultative parthenogenesis  

Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny, fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason . . . ~Christopher Hitchens

I came of age near the end of the golden age of science. Stampeded by Sputnik, America revised its science curriculum in the early 1960s and I was a beneficiary. As a PhD student, I was supported for three years on an NIH training grant, and as a postdoc, I was supported for three years on an NIH fellowship. I got my first NIH grant in my second year as an assistant professor. But by then, federal funding had already declined in real terms. By 1989, a Nobel Laureate molecular biologist at MIT wrote in a major journal that NIH funding criteria had taken on a “mask of madness.” In his 2026 budget proposal, Trump proposed major cuts to federal science funding which were mostly ignored by Congress. Now, Trump is proposing to slash American science again, while meanwhile attacking the immigrant labor force that has been fueling science in America. “ In recent years, various metrics have called into question America’s supremacy in science and technology. For example, the Australian Strategic...

Until now, Iran has eschewed the manufacture of nuclear weapons, ostensibly based on a fatwa by Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Since Khameni’s assassination by Israel and his replacement by his son, it’s not clear that Iran will continue to observe that fatwa. “ What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades,   publicly   framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam. If that position represented a genuine religious constraint rather than mere diplomatic rhetoric, then his death may have removed more than a leader: it may have weakened the doctrinal restraint that helped keep Iran a threshold nuclear state.”  The elective war on Iran by the US and Israel has underscored the importance of the North Korean nuclear breakout. I’d be very surprised if Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon in the next couple of years. Trump, Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia and the UAW would be to blame. ht...

When I was growing up in East Tennessee, there were some who claimed that water fluoridation was a communist plot. If that’s the case, then God is a communist because in many parts of the world, water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, it was the recognition that natural fluoridation was associated with fewer dental caries that helped drive artificial fluoridation. The anti-fluoridation fear mongers never said exactly what the commies intended by fluoridating the water supply, but if they were trying to dumb us down, that was a fail. “ A massive 40-year study in the US has concluded that adding fluoride to drinking water does not reduce people's cognitive ability. In fact, kids who grew up with fluoridated tap water performed slightly better in mathematics and reading in later life compared to those who didn’t.” Seems to me that the anti-fluoridation folks were the subversives. By attacking sound science, they were not only undermining dental health, they were undermining Americans’...

My dad would stop by the airport LaRouche booths and argue with the nutjobs. Not sure why he found it amusing. He knew they were nuts, but he did it anyway. “It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation political aberration, a shooting-star buffoon. But when you tear him down to his studs, LaRouche was a white supremacist: a man high on his own supply who positioned himself as the sole savior of the planet; a man to whom no founding American ideal was sacred; a wealthy white man preying on both the insecurity and the credulity of others to enrich himself, while claiming to fight for the everyman; a bully who flipped on his loyalists whenever they ceased to be useful to him; a man who trafficked in myths of nonwhite savagery and conspiracies of absurdist proportions in which he was either the scapegoat or the savior. He was also a convicted felon running for office. He seemed so fringe to many that he co...

In his low-energy April Fools Day speech last night, Trump showed he hasn’t a clue how the world supply chains work: “In Wednesday night’s address to the nation, President Trump declared, “We're now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet, we are there to help.” “We don't have to be there — we don't need their oil, we don't need anything they have.”   Uh, no. “ Trump is . . . overlooking that while the US is a net exporter of crude oil, it remains an importer of refined gasoline in many regions. “The president is also factually wrong on other key goods that pass through the strait and whose absence has been felt directly in the US. “Helium and fertilizer are two notable products made in high quantities in the region and relied on by an array of American industries. “Helium is key in the production of semiconductors. Economist Andreas Steno Larsen, founder of Steno Research, recently told Yahoo Finance that the stoppage "could potentially turn into a bottlen...

In  the film “Being There,” Chance the gardener is a simple-minded gardener who had never left the confines of his employer’s Washington D.C. townhouse. When the elderly man he worked for dies, Chance is forced to leave the house for the first time in his life.  He encounters Eve Rand, who brings him home to meet her husband, Benjamin Rand, powerful and ailing industrialist who immediately believes Chance is a man of depth and insight. Chance’s vague gardening metaphors are mistaken for deep political commentary. The President of the United States seeks his advice and Chance’s slow, measured speech and simple observations about growth, seasons, and patience are interpreted as revolutionary political philosophy. He is soon being discussed as a future presidential candidate. Well, OK, where Chance is taciturn, Trump is bellicose. But both are clearly bubbleheads and both enthrall people who ought to know better.  Sadly, the GOP and the Trumpenproletariat who they proport to...

I was a principal investigator on three NSF grants. I served on six NSF grant review panels.   During this period, the NSF applications had a section called “Broader Impact.” Included under this rubric was how the applicant would disseminate the research results to the rest of the world. But a critical part of success was explaining how your project would impact and advance communities underrepresented in science: women and ethnic minorities.  I was fine with that, but in the age of Trump, the acceptable DEI appointments are mostly blondes and alcoholics.  I interviewed to be a program officer at the NSF because I believed that the NSF reflected my inclusive views about how fundamental science should be pursued and supported. I made it to the penultimate stage but didn’t get the offer. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m glad they turned me down. My career and my pocketbook are better off. In the Trump era, being politically correct is paramount. That’s not how this homie ...

The right-wing prophecies: “Leading Trump sycophant Sean Hannity claimed tariffs would generate “a new golden age of American wealth and exceptionalism.”    “Fox Business' Elizabeth MacDonald stated Trump was trying to “reignite a manufacturing golden age.”  “Newsmax host Carl Higbie declared, “American jobs being created because we want to make things more fair.”   Reality, as we know, has a well-known liberal bias: “The American economy actually supports fewer total jobs than before the sweeping tariffs were announced.   “The manufacturing industry lost nearly 100,000 jobs in the 10 months following the announcement.   “The trade deficit has barely narrowed.   “Families have been burdened with an estimated annual cost ranging from $1,000 to $2,000.” The good news for Trump and his supporters is that his mad war in Iran has taken tariffs out of the headlines and war-driven inflation is likely to dwarf the tariff costs to middle and working class Ameri...