More on Freeze Peach
This is a topic I address from time to time, but it seems a new post is needed now because of various nonsense that ' s going on. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear, as a man we would all like to forget used to say: free speech and academic freedom are not the same. Legally, the only meaning of Free Speech ™ is the First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts. Originally it applied only to the federal government, but the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to the States, so it now applies to all government entities within the United States, and that includes your small tow n Board of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 4, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Disability Activist: Take Great Care When Seeing Bias Toward Disabled Citizens
By RANDY SOUDERS
During the years I served as Chairman of the Board for Jean Kennedy Smith’s Arts and Disability program, Very Special Arts (VSA at the Kennedy Center), I had there opportunity to meet a wide range of remarkable and courageous disabled Americans. Among the lasting friendships is a painter and visual artist, Randy Souders, who was rendered quadriplegic at the age of 17 in a 1972 accident. His concerns of late have been heightened by Trump and MAGA Republicans. I share his communication with his permission here in the hope that tech designers and others will be alert to the fact that great care is requir...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 20, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Disability eugenics Holocaust Mike Magee Randy Souders Trump Source Type: blogs
How do we stop a resurgence of fascism?
Is it bad to write for hard-right outlets?
There is no doubt that the Overton window has shifted to the right during the last decade or two. It is now common to hear people saying things that, even in 2010 would have been thought to be frankly fascistic.
I recall a conversation with the great biophysicist, Sir Bernard Katz, in 1992. He had come to UCL in 1936 to escape from the Nazi regime in Leipzig. When I suggested to him that he must have been very pleased about the reunification of Germany, he pulled a long face and said “hmm, let’s wait to see what crawls out from under stones”. ...
Source: DC's goodscience - March 11, 2024 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: Uncategorized Alan Sokal anti-vaccination antiscience Deborah Cohen fascism Margaret McCartney Paul Marshall Quillette sceptics skeptics Spiked Toby Young transgender UnHerd Source Type: blogs
The ‘Barbie Speech’ – How Much Has Really Changed For Women in America?
By MIKE MAGEE
In our world where up is down, and black is white, there is a left and a right – it’s the middle we appear to be missing. Does it exist, or was it make believe all along?
Into this existential despair enters Britt Cagle Grant, the 47-year old Federal Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The Stanford Law graduate, blessed by the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, and former clerk of Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate on July 31, 2018.
Now six years later, her words in rejecting DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” (otherwise kno...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 11, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Barbie De Santis feminism Mike Magee Terry Sciaivo Source Type: blogs
We Freeze People, Don ’ t We?
By KIM BELLARD
Perhaps you’ve heard about the controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling about in-vitro fertilization (IVF), in which the court declared that frozen embryos were people. The court stated that it has long held that “unborn children are ‘children,’” with Chief Justice Tom Parker – more on him later – opining in a concurring opinion:
Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 27, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Frozen Embryos IVF Kim Bellard Pro-life Source Type: blogs
Welcome to the nuthouse
Despite having his Precious Bodily Fluids depleted and polluted by the feminist succubus and the Bill Gates microchip vaccine, Travis Kelce turned in a Hall of Fame-worthy performance to lead the KC Chiefs to the Superb Owl. So, right on cue, MAGAland is in hysteria becausethe game was obviously rigged, presumably by an Italian satellite, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hugo Chavez.“Taylor Swift is an op,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing media
personality who boasts millions of followers across different social
media platforms, wrote on X. “It’s all fake. You’re being played.”“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift electio...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 30, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Reforming new drug development
So what to do about the misalignment between incentives under the current drug patenting and licensing regime, and public health? (To summarize recent posts in a pistachio shell, the pharmaceutical industry is motivated solely by profit, the most profitable drugs are not necessarily the ones that contribute the most to population health, and the prices are too high for many people to afford in any case.) It is true that if there were an effective international regime to limit pharmaceutical prices, the investment in new R&D would be severely limited. As Thomas Pogge puts it (Pharmaceutical Patents and Economic
Inequali...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Reflections on the Dumpster
Many sane people are baffled by the veneration of the Trump cultists for such a repulsive, worthless excuse for a human being. I ' m going to say what we aren ' t supposed to say. The answer is obvious: the characteristics of the Orange Shitpile that are most loathsome are exactly what they like about him. He gives not just permission, but affirmation, to the base impulses of people who aren ' t very smart and whose basic nature is selfishness, continual anger, and hatred.People who are ignorant, lack critical thinking skills, and whose minds are boxed in by prejudice and bigotry can ' t win arguments with facts and logic,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 27, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Losing my religion
I ' m going to interrupt the series on medical costs for today and talk about religion. I ' m sure it won ' t come as a surprise to anyone that I am very pleased by the graph below.I took it from this Daily Kos diary about the actual meaning of " Christian " identity to Trump cultists, which is not really the main point of this post although it ' s relevant.The majority of poll respondents still say they identify as Christian, but it ' s a sharply declining majority. Furthermore, many people who say they identify as Christian do not attend church regularly. Church is for weddings and funerals and maybe Christmas and Easter...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 15, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
25th Amendment Still Not the Right Response to a Mentally Ill Trump
By MIKE MAGEE
On May 16, 2017 New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.”
That column was the starting point for a Spring course I taught on the 25th Amendment at the President’s College in Hartford, CT. I will not summarize the entire course here, but would like to emphasize four points:
The American public was adequately warned (now 7 years ago) of the risk that Trump represented to our nation and our democracy.
Douthat’s piece triggered a journalistic debate which I summarize below with four slides drawn from my lectures.
...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 8, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy 25th Amendment Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Digression -- an important economic fact
I commend to your attentionJeffrey A. Winters in The American Interest, with the essential truth about our present historical moment, that gets obscured in the deliberate distractions thrown up by politicians and journalists who would rather make us think and talk about something else. Pull quote:Despite polls consistently showing that large majorities favor
increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, policy has been moving for
decades in the opposite direction. Reduced taxes on the ultra-rich and
the corporations and banks they dominate have shifted fiscal burdens
downward even as they have strained the government ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A Speech For The Ages – 83 Years Ago This Christmas
By MIKE MAGEE
On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”
Millions of Americans, and millions of Britains were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.
That very evening, the Germans Luftwaffe, launched their largest yet raid ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 22, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Non-Health Churchill Democracy FDR Hitler Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Maybe giving too much credit
Health reporter Julie Rovner is perplexed thatRepublicans, who she maintains were once big supporters of public health, now seem to want to kill us all. Her examples of former Republican championship for public health are pretty narrow and a bit dubious. Funding for the NIH is mostly about biomedical research, not public health; and GW Bush ' s President ' s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, while certainly a good thing, was focused on Africa and probably as much about international relations as humanitarianism. But it ' s certainly true that the party has turned its back on these programs: The GOP-led House this y...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
AI Could Have “Unimaginable Consequences” For Democratic Societies, Says Expert.
By MIKE MAGEE
His biography states, “He speaks to philosophical questions about the fears and possibilities of new technology and how we can be empowered to shape our future. His work to bridge cultures spans artificial intelligence, cognition, language, music, creativity, ethics, society, and policy.”
He embraces the title “cross-disciplinary,” and yet his PhD thesis at UC Berkeley in 1980 “was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward machine learning based natural language processing technologies.” Credited with inventing and building “the world’s first global-scale online language transla...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 14, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Dr. De Kai Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
Lessons from historical drug prohibitions
New Zealand just rescinded its ban on tobacco smoking at the same time that Donald Trump just suggested the death penalty could cure the drug problem. What did New Zealand learn? And how has drug prohibition worked out in the past? In 1511, the governor of Mecca, Khair Beg, had a serious problem. A powerful
Read more…
Lessons from historical drug prohibitions originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 1, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: L. Joseph Parker, MD Tags: Conditions Public Health & Policy Source Type: blogs
