You may have seen that Speaker Mike Johnson wants Social Security to be “fixed” after the midterms. The fact that he wants to wait until after the midterms tells you everything you need to know. He’s using “fixed” in the sense of what you do to your dog if you don’t want puppies. Republicans know […]

The NYT published an article reporting that RFK Jr has abandoned most of his responsibilities: “Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the article. “Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations […]

It astonishes me what passes for reasoning among “conservatives.” “Steve Gruber, host of the conservative network’s morning program Day Break, made the announcement Wednesday alongside his guest and wife, Ivey Ramos Gruber, who agreed sunglasses might also be unnecessary. The segment fits neatly into the MAHA movement’s growing anti-sunscreen wing — and straight into a […]

How many of us heard some variation of this from their mom: “If your friends jumped off a cliff (or bridge), would you do it too?” If RFK Jr told you to treat measles with vitamin A, would you do it too? “A team from Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts analyzed Google search trends data […]

I somehow missed this, but a couple months ago the Trump Administration abandoned its effort to cut indirect cost reimbursements for federal grants to colleges and universities to 15%. Just before I retired, the indirect cost rate at Saint Louis University was 51.5%, so this cut would have been devastating to research at SLU. When […]

Thanks to climate change, which the Trump Administration is actively promoting, and the Trump Administration defunding of USAID and a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America, screwworm is back in the US after decades of successful containment. What is screwworm? “New World screwworm is a fly that lays its […]

To follow up on a previous post about Tesla autonomous driving vehicles: “Tesla has retroactively modified “Full Self-Driving” purchase agreements to add “supervised” language that did not exist when owners originally bought the product. In some cases, the original documents have been made entirely inaccessible. “Electrek has confirmed the issue with multiple owners. The contracts […]

One of the larger ongoing non-Trump grifts in America is the “Ark Encounter” in Williamstown, Kentucky. It’s been open for nearly ten years. I don’t know whether or not it’s hit its evangelistic benchmarks, but it has never met the financial benchmarks promised to Kentucky taxpayers. “When Creationist Ken Ham and his team at Answers […]

The Office of Management and Budget is proposing a set of new rules that would put OMB officials in charge of all federal scientific grants, allowing them to overrule peer review panels. They can also cancel grants at any time for essentially any reason. This would end the current grant review mechanism and turn it […]

The world is a much-changed place since I was born. While that hasn’t always been for the better, there are technologies that I have embraced enthusiastically and wouldn’t want to retreat from: Word processing on computer: I learned touch typing on a typewriter. My parents gave me a portable manual typewriter as a high school […]