The actual, real, serious, honest-to-god name of the bill is…
I’m not joking. Look it up.
They informatively explain to us that This Act may be cited as the “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017”
.
I’m dying. Our representatives have the maturity of two year olds.
It provides some cover when Orac starts raging about quackery at the UM…that is, the University of Michigan. There are a heck of a lot of hospitals embracing “alternative” or “integrative” medicine, which is a way to sucker patients with feel-good bullshit that does nothing for them, but does dilute the credibility of real medicine.
So it’s nice to see Michigan get the full broadside, while the University of Minnesota, which would never make snake oil a prominent part of their image, gets to hide in the shadow of that big bold “M”.
Wait, what am I saying? I want this crap publicly exposed! We in Minnesota need to pay more attention to the lies the university blandly encourages.
Related question: has anybody else noticed how ‘spirituality’ sites are always splashing crepuscular rays all over their web pages? It’s weird. Sure, they’re pretty, but it’s almost as if a theme is the use of obscuring clouds to partially block the light in random patterns.
I’m reading Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society –it’s my airplane reading for today, as I travel east — and am getting increasingly enlightened. It addresses these terrible myths about men and manliness and sex that afflict us all, and most importantly, knocking down a lot of scientific fables that seem to be readily disseminated and accepted. Here’s an example from chapter two. She quotes a psychologist who describes a common hypothetical scenario, it’s even one that I think I’ve used in the past, the idea that the reproductive capacity of men is vastly greater than that of women, because we produce lots of cheap sperm, while they are limited by all that pregnancy and child-rearing stuff. Beat your chests in pride at your immense potential virility, men! She quotes a psychologist who makes this kind of facile quantitative argument.
Consider that a man can produces as many as 100 offspring by indiscriminately mating with 100 women in a given year, whereas a man who is monogamous will tend to have only one child with his partner during that same time period. In evolutionary currencies, this represents a strong selective pressure—and a potent adaptive problem—for men’t mating strategies to favor at least some desire for sexual variety.
Then — and this is what I love about this book — she takes it seriously and introduces all the factors involved in conception and does a simple calculation, assuming a man seriously goes on a crusade to impregnate 100 random women.
So what’s the likely return on this exhausting investment? For healthy couples, the probability of a woman becoming pregnant from a single randomly timed act of intercourse is about 3 percent, ranging (depending on the time of the month) from a low of 0 to a high of nearly 9 percent. On average, then, a year of competitive courtship would result in only about three of the one hundred women becoming pregnant. (Although a man could increase his chances of conception by having sex with the same woman repeatedly, this would of course disrupt his very tight schedule.) This estimate, by the way, assumes that the man, in contradiction with the principle of “indiscriminately mating,” excludes women under twenty and over forty, who have a greater number of cycles in which no egg is released. It also doesn’t take into account that some women will be chronically infertile (Einon estimates about 8 percent), or that women who are mostly sexually abstinent have long menstrual cycles and ovulate less frequently, making it less likely that a single coital act will result in pregnancy. We’re also kindly overlooking sperm depletion, and discreetly turning a blind eye to the possibility that another man’s sperm might reach the egg first. In these unrealistically ideal condition, a man who sets himself the annual project of producing one hundred children from one hundred one-night stands has a chance of success of about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000363.
(Number of zeroes only approximate — I just estimated from the layout on the page, which is hard to do. If only she’d used exponential notation!)
Let’s make the math even simpler and more stark.
Indeed, a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.
Suddenly, my preferred reproductive strategy, monogamy and paternal investment in offspring, seems to be the best evolutionary strategy. It’s much less exhausting, too, and has given me time to do other things in my life.
Anyway, this is a delightful book that has made me question ‘facts’ I’ve long taken for granted multiple times so far, and I haven’t yet finished it. It really pays to think about one’s assumptions now and then, and it’s making me aware of how badly a lot of gender essentialism has poisoned our culture with lies.
She also takes a lot of swift, sharp pokes at evolutionary psychology, if you find that entertaining. I certainly do!
Tomkins is at it again. He’s a creationist who, for some reason, detests the idea that human chromosome 2 is the production of a fusion of a pair of ancestral ape chromosomes. I don’t understand why; all he’s got to do is invoke The Fall and claim it’s an error of Biblical origin, it’s not as if the Bible has anything at all to say about chromosomes. But he does like to go on and on about searching for evidence of a fusion at the fusion site, like he’s expecting an intact centromere and telomere to be right there, fossilized in the sequence. He’s written another article for Answers in Genesis that is an amazing welter of obfuscation.
In 2013, it was shown that the alleged interstitial telomeric repeat site of the human chromosome 2 fusion corresponding to chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B of a hypothetical common ancestor was actually a second promoter in the DDX11L2 long noncoding RNA gene. Additional ENCODE related data are provided in this report that not only debunk evolutionary criticism and obfuscation in response to this discovery, but solidify the original finding. New data come from epigenetic-modifications, transcription factor binding, and transcription start site information. It is also shown that the alleged cryptic centromere site, which is very short in length compared to a normal centromere, is completely situated inside the actively expressed protein coding gene ANKRD30BL—encoding both exon and intron regions. Other factors refuting this region as a cryptic centromere are also discussed. Taken together, genomic data for both the alleged fusion and cryptic centromere sites refute the concept of fusion in a human-chimpanzee common ancestor.
This is remarkable. His entire ‘evidence’ consists of looking in a region of poorly conserved, non-functional DNA, and failing to find a conserved sequence, as if that’s what is expected. It’s the wrong approach. He has to ignore all the other cytological and sequence data that show that chromosome 2 is similar in structure to two chimpanzee chromosomes. This makes no sense. I explained all this before.
…what they do is focus on just the region of the fusion, and complain that it is a tangled mess and hard to interpret — that it is a degenerate telomeric region, rather than a complete and intact telomere, which is what they demand be present. This is an unrealistic expectation, given that every paper on the structure of the fusion region makes the point that it is degenerate.
An analogy: imagine a red Ford Mustang and a blue BMW X6 are in a head-on collision, and both have totally wrecked front ends, with bumpers and radiators and headlights interlocked and everything about their grilles in tangled confusion, and with bits and pieces torn loose and flung about. You’d be able to look at the crash and still tell by everything in and behind the engine compartment that Car #1 was a Mustang and Car #2 was an X6.
Bergman and Tomkins are the bewildered and incompetent investigators who ignore every other factor in the crash, look at a few particularly mangled bits of the wreckage, and declare that they can’t identify it, therefore…the two vehicles were assembled at the factory in this particular configuration, and no crash occurred. But they use lots of sciencey language to explain this at tendentious length, which is sufficient to convince non-scientists that the interpretation of an obvious historical event has been refuted. And that’s all they need to do to accomplish their goals: fling about unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win over the ignorant.
Tomkins has done it again. He stares fixedly at the debris and fails to pay any attention at all to the intact, functional regions of the human chromosome and ape chromosomes, which are all you need to tell the tale.
I’m watching this video of Ben Carson’s recent speech, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know everyone is aghast at his trivializing of the slave trade, and that’s the more important example of negligent ignorance to focus on, but good grief, I was trained as a neuroscientist, and his remarks about the brain are appalling.
It remembers everything you’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away. You just have to learn how to recall it. But that’s what your brain is capable of. It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You can’t overload it. Have you ever heard people say, “Don’t do all that, you’ll overload your brain.” You can’t overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.
None of that is true! Not one bit of it! I can’t imagine anyone who learned the slightest bit of neurobiology in the 20th century believing any of that. The brain throws away most of its sensory input. We don’t know what the “storage capacity” (and it’s fundamentally wrong to think of it that way, as if it’s a flash drive) of the brain is, and we don’t know the storage requirement of a “fact”, so that’s just a bullshit estimation.
Do you even need to know anything to be a brain surgeon? Somebody wack him upside the head with a copy of Kandel and tell him to start reading this stuff he pretends to know.
Apparently, he’s been reciting this pseudoscientific claptrap for years, in his books and speeches before religious groups, but we all know that anybody who read or listened to that stuff wasn’t competent to criticize his bad science.
Thank God for Jason Chaffetz. He’s perfect. He’s such an excellent representative of the Republican party. About the fact that the Republican replacement plan for ACA is more expensive and enriches the wealthy, he says,
You know what, Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.
There are facts that illustrate how clueless his argument is.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average premium for an individual health care plan in the United States is just over $235 per month. Buying an iPhone 7 through a wireless carrier and paying for it in installments over a two-year period costs $27 per month.
But for now, just set aside the facts — Republicans don’t care about them anyway — and savor the flawless Marie Antoinette-ness of the moment. And remember what happened to Marie.
Oooh, beautiful. Starfish larvae are covered with beating cilia that they use to swim, and also to swirl bacteria towards their mouth…and in this video that visualizes the motion generated by the cilia, you can see that they do both at the same time.
That description is exactly right: Logan is not a movie for kids. It’s grim, gory, and extremely violent, and much of that violence involves a child (who does give better than she gets, but still — that’s not a lesson you want your child to learn).
It’s also played as an “end” to the X-Men franchise, but it really isn’t. Everyone is dead, except for Wolverine (Logan) and Professor X, and a few rare, scattered individuals who are being hunted down. The ending (which I won’t reveal) puts close to the saga, and Hugh Jackman has said he won’t be reprising the role, but that’s no real termination — it leaves a heck of a lot of questions wide open that could, in a sufficiently venal film industry, justify a few more prequels to this story to explain how it ended up in such a deplorable state.
But still, I enjoyed it. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an engaging one, and it focused on the human side of the story. What happens when demi-gods grow old and have to face their own mortality? What do you do when old dreams die, you’ve lost hope, and the vitality you relied on begins to fade? That’s far more interesting than trying to see how many city blocks an overpowered superhero can demolish in an afternoon.
Recommended. It makes you think a little bit in addition to keeping the action flying.
I agree that the administration’s Russian connection ought to be pursued, but I am not happy that that is being treated as the primary reason to delegitimize Donald Trump. The man is a destructive incompetent with a fist full of bad policies, and the most effective way to bring him down is to expose the fact that his campaign staff talked to the Russian ambassador? What? Have you looked at what he is doing to the country right now? Because there is a whole lot of crap going down while we’re busy looking for Russians under the bed.
For instance, look at his proposed budget for the EPA.
- Puget Sound. Funding for restoration work in the country’s second-largest estuary would be cut from $28 million to $2 million.
- The Great Lakes. Funding to combat algae blooms, invasive species and other water pollution problems in the world’s largest group of freshwater lakes would be cut from $300 million to $10 million.
- The Chesapeake Bay. Funding for restoration in the country’s largest estuary would be cut from $73 million to $5 million.
- Research on endocrine disruptors. The EPA’s work studying chemicals that can interfere with the body’s reproductive and developmental systems would nearly be eliminated, dropping from $7.5 million to $445,000.
- Diesel emissions. Since 2008, the EPA has issued grants to accelerate the country’s transition from old, dirty diesel engines to cleaner burning trucks and equipment. They’ve been responsible for most of Oregon’s progress in addressing cancer-causing diesel soot, a major air pollution source.
- Beach water quality testing. The EPA spends about $9.5 million to fund state testing of bacteria levels at beaches around the country. In Oregon, it funds state testing during the summer. That would be eliminated.
- The U.S.-Mexico border. Sewage and garbage from Mexico frequently sweeps into San Diego during winter rainstorms. The EPA has funded work there to slow the flood of garbage into the Pacific Ocean. Its program to address problems like that would be cut from $3 million to $275,000.
- Environmental education. The EPA spends $8.7 million annually on programs to educate children. Spending on them would be cut to $555,000.
Meanwhile, he’s increasing the bloated defense budget by 10%, and covering that by cutting other programs, like education.
These are standard Republican policies. Are we planning to rely on finding Russian connections in order to get rid of bad stewards of our country’s resources forevermore? Because you know that most of the Republican congress is going to be untainted by Russians, but is still going to be promoting these same bad ideas.
There is no single reason to rise up and throw these assholes out — they’ve provided an embarrassment of causes that make them terrible leaders, which is part of the problem, that the reasons for taking action have been diffused so widely. It seems to me that our targeting is off when conversations with Russian diplomats become the strongest reason for investigating the president, rather than his habit of appointing incompetents and looters like DeVos and Pruitt to run major government agencies.
Kathy Watson is stupid. She has diabetes, high blood pressure, and two cancers. Her husband lost his job, she lost her health insurance, and because of her pre-existing condition, no one was going to insure her at a reasonable rate…until the Affordable Care Act came along.
She voted for Trump.
Yeah, you know that was going to be the kicker. She voted for Trump.
Watson also voted for Donald Trump, believing the businessman would bring change. She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster.
Jesus Christ, Ms Watson, but you are a dumbass. Not only did you make a choice that is probably going to kill you, you made a choice that is going to wreck our country.
Also, LA Times and every other goddamn newspaper on Earth, I’m getting more than a little tired of these inane stories written to squeeze out a little sympathy for Trump voters. They’re not working. I have no sympathy for the Kathy Watsons of the USA, and all you’re doing is convincing me that humanity doesn’t deserve any more chances.
