Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Fusion power won’t save us

“Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.” Progress, yes, but incremental. “And myriad challenges […]

Is the genome a “blueprint for life?”

Not all genes, their mutations, and the conditions caused by those mutations are overwhelmingly complex. We’ve known for decades that sickle cell disease is caused by a specific nucleotide change at a specific position in the human adult beta globin gene, and we can predict the consequences to a patient with the disease to a […]

Why does the GOP hate capitalism?

From a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com: “The walls are more a sign of desperation than power. A better way is to fix Central America so there is a larger buffer between the US and the problems in South America. Fixing includes making conditions in the continent prosperous enough for all that we don’t have […]

What’s holding back Alzheimer Disease therapy?

My dad died a few years ago with dementia. The diagnosis was Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia (FTD), based on a psychiatric evaluation and brain imaging. After he died, we had a brain autopsy done, which returned a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. So which was it? As far as I know, it could be both. But what […]

Getting control of the border

The single most significant thing Republicans could do to reduce undocumented immigration is to require E-Verify for all hires and jail employers who don’t use it or who hire in spite of it. Why not use this? “At the same time, ordinary economic migrants could be most effectively dealt with via E-Verify. If you make […]

Messaging the 2024 election

This post is long and flirts with the 10% fair use limit, but I’ll try to keep under it. Dave Kellogg has a blog post up from a few days ago comparing the messaging of Team Trump vs Team Biden. Read the whole thing, but here are some core points. Kellogg distills the Democratic two-word […]

Personalized medicine

I went to an optometrist yesterday. Among the various gizmos I was assaulted with was a device that imaged the back of my eye. The doc showed me the images. In addition to my blood vessels, my optic nerves and my macula visible directly, the software also supplies tomography at various position across the field […]

Sports Illustrated RIP

I remember reading SI occasionally when I was a kid. I liked the writing and the photos. As a long-distance runner, I was mostly interested in articles on track, cross-country and marathons. I wasn’t interested in ball sports. And don’t get me started on calling auto racing a “sport.” I see where Sports Illustrated is […]

“On-the-fence voters” are OK with Trump’s contempt

According to yesterday’s navel-gazing piece in the Boston Globe*, “on-the-fence” voters are edging to supporting Trump because they feel looked down upon by Democrats. WTF? Do they seriously believe that Trump *doesn’t* look down on his supporters? It is blindingly obvious that the only person on the planet that Trump cares about is Donald Trump. […]

The medium is the message

The alleged “appeal” of Ron DiSantis is that he’s “Trump without the baggage.” So why is DiSantis (and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other Trump imitators) doing so poorly? The answer is that the Trumpenproletariat *want* the Trump baggage. To them, that’s his appeal. The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan nailed this decades ago: the […]