midwestdoc's Comments (22)

“Agreed.”

“Right- vaccines do not promote resistant strains. Antivirals, on the other hand, do lead to resistance strains, in exact analogy to antibiotics. They shouldn't be used except when needed.”

“You've misunderstood my point. I take antibiotics when appropriate. I'm just saying that there's a long-term bad public health effect to consider.
The rate of evolution of new viruses, in contrast, is probably slowed by vaccines. The main public health effect is herd immunity, a very strong plus.”

“This is a surprisingly long-winded and fact-free post from a guy as sharp as Maher. It's full of red-herrings. Sure, the people who are hit hardest are usually ones with some other condition. Lots of people have some other condition, sometimes without being aware of it. Sure we need to consider the evolutionary effects of any medical measure. For antibiotics those are bad, hastening the development of resistant strains. For vaccines they tend to be good, shrinking the pool of viruses in which nasty new mutations and combinations can occur.
It would be good to see the same length of article used to discuss the actual pros, cons and uncertainties of vaccines in serious, quantitative terms.”

“Bravo Rep. Slaughter. I wish half the Congress had half your brains.”

“Seriously? A rocket scientist can't take sqrt(142) and figure out that this is a 7 sigma effect? Doesn't know that the principle non-random error in the early studies (tendency of higher SES patients, more at risk for this paradoxical disease, to volunteer for the vaccine) cause underestimation of its efficacy.

Really dangerous crackpottery.”

“The name (PLST, without vowels) goes back to some northern Sea Peoples who unsuccessfully invaded Egypt and were settled in what's now Palestine as colonists by the Egyptians. So the biblical Philistines were not so directly ancestors of the current 'Palestinian' Arabs, who probably trace ancestry mostly to semitic groups. Of course these other groups (the Canaanites, Amurites, ...) also fought with the Hebrews over land, so your basic point is still right, regardless of the history of the names. Can the US play Persia, and get everybody settled down? Not easy.”

“Your claim that the court decided Bush v Gore "precisely because Florida's recount procedures varied dramatically by county, and thus did not treat all voters and ballots equally" buys into a transparently bogus rationalization. The different voting systems in FL already had dramatically unequal rates of failing to count votes. The recount would have significantly reduced those disparities by examining votes for clear intent. It's very cute and post-partisan to pretend that the decision was something other than a power grab.

In the case of MN, it's hard to believe that there's any serious chance that including some more absentee votes would give Coleman a win. If there was, his lawyers would have prepared something like a rational argument about why that was possible, and made some effort to explain specifically why those individual further votes were wrongly excluded. One of the more Republican MN SC judges noted a remarkable failure to even attempt those sorts of argument. Since, overall, MN absentees seem to have been significantly shifted toward Franken compared to election-day votes, what Coleman really needs (but knows he can't can't get) is a very rigidly exclusionary standard applied retroactively.”

“whoops: release, not 'realize'”

“@calinitative- It sounds profound to say that we don't know whether CO2 causes heating or vice versa, but actually a great deal is known about this. The mechanisms are based in very well-understood chemistry and physics, and born out by detailed records. BOTH effects occur. However, the realize of CO2 from heated oceans is a very long-term process, while tyhe heating from infrared trapping by CO2 occurs relatively quickly. Both effects are included in the climate models. The bottom line is that it's a very bad idea to keep adding to CO2.

@Laurie- The role of climate change in particular weather effects, like tornadoes, is a little more complicated than the role of CO2 in climate change. So people who express a little uncertainty might be sincere.”

“"Ron Kirk and Hilda Solis...ja­untily sparring over free trade with Colombia"?
Yeah, such trivie. Try Googling "Columbia trade-union killing". From the first item:
"In Colombia, 445 trade union members received death threats and 99 were murdered ". That's the issue they 'jauntily' disagree about.

Politics is all about life and death questions. You may be right on Warren (although it could play the other way) but it's hard to listen when you devalue everyone else's lives.”

“"influence the morays of our culture." ? They have important eels in OH?
Is that Blackwell's word or his transcriber's?”

“Chu's obviously a good scientist and his positions on the key issues are good. He does have a snotty way of treating peers, and a tendency to pretend to have deep thoughts on topics he doesn't know much about, so he might not be the best possible department head.”

“Aren't you leaving out the biggie? The $500k + home built by 'contractor friends' in Wasilla? Reportedly the same friends who built the big ice-rink boondoggle and just happened to have $1.1 Mil over-runs approved by Palin in the process.
If the reported facts are accurate, this is much more blatant than what Stevens was convicted for.”

“Lynn- Good point. Like your dad I lived through an era when the top marginal tax rate was as high as Obama's proposed 39.5%. Even a little worse: 91%. But thankfully those gray days of the Communist Eisenhower regime have passed.”

“Not so, Arianna. Tomorrow he'll be the guy who thought the economy was sound eleven days ago,”

“We need a very simple way to put this for the people who like McCain and his tough talk.

McCain blinked.”

“It's a great idea, and has been on a lot of people's minds for a while. Unfortunately it's illegal to campaign by directly or indirectly offering a federal job to any person. The legal squabble might create a distraction.”

“Your sociological ideas are interesting and plausible, but I've got to disagree with two technical points you make. You consider both nuclear energy and carbon-sequestered coal to be impractical. The technical consensus is that they can both represent significant fractions of our energy supply. Nuclear energy already does so in some other countries, e.g. France. Sequestered coal would be particularly suitable to the U.S., and well worth some pilot programs to try to get a better idea of the cost. Bush, by the way, just canceled the main pilot program, days after it was announced that it would be made in Illinois rather than Texas.”

“In case anybody thinks that our retinas have to be the way they are for some deep reason, they should remember that squids and octopuses got it right, with the nerves coming out the back. It was just an initial accident that their ancestors headed for the right hill and ours headed for the wrong one. Then the gap became too big to switch.”

“Ok, as a physicist (and with zero financial interest in this) this is one issue I know about.
The basic calculation of the direct effect of extra CO2 on temperature is actually a non-controversial exercise, using simple thermodynamics. That result is already big enough to worry about. The modeling problem comes in because indirect effects (mostly from increase in water vapor caused by warming) are trickier to estimate. However, a variety of models all show that fitting our actual data to a combination of solar effects etc. without the greenhouse effect just doesn't work. Including the greenhouse effect from our CO2 + some positive feedback does fit, and so the results are more worrisome. Those who think the warming comes from increased solar input have a BIG problem explaining why the upper atmosphere is cooling, but that's just what the models predict for increased greenhouse trapping of heat near the surface. You can forget CNN, HuffPost, etc. The conclusion is not controversial according to Science, Nature, etc. even if the wingnuts don't like it.”

“Hilary- As an Obama supporter, I want to thank you for contributing a reasoned and polite argument, unlike most of the ranting on both sides of the blogosphere. Your argument about electability could be made a little more quantitative by looking at the very sophisticated and sensible statistical site http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ by the famed Poblano. As a snapshot today, HRC has a 64% chance of winning, vs. 52% for BHO. These numbers have drifted around quite a bit over the last weeks, so who is really more electable depends a lot on factors we can only guess at. The predictive markets still give the Dem, almost certainly BHO according to them, around 60% chance of winning, presumably because some angry Dems are expected to return home. In light of their different stances on war and peace, one might also argue that BHO is enough better than HRC to justify the slightly higher risk.

At any rate, the more voices of reason that speak out, the better for the Dem. nominee.”