When I was growing up, our vacations involved camping each night. With five kids, it was a way to maximize vacation travel while minimizing costs. We would often camp at national parks. And of course, having grown up in East Tennessee, I visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park many times. Our national parks are […]
I grew up in Oak Ridge TN in the 1960s. It would have been hard to find any city in the world more pro-nuclear at that time*. Since then, nuclear power plant building went into decline in the US, partly because of concerns over safety. But any serious effort to decarbonize the world’s energy will […]
Back in the early 80s, Marshall and Warren made the link between gastric ulcers and Helicobacter pylori infections. Suddenly, a painful chronic condition that increased the risk of stomach cancer was curable with antibiotics. A major public health scourge today in America is dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. There’s growing evidence that periodontitis is linked to […]
As the American population ages, the burden of dementia care is increasing. While the GOP congress hopes to ease that burden by cutting Medicaid funding and letting those folks die*, RFK Jr is tackling the prevention side to make sure more Americans and their loved ones suffer from this awful condition: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., […]
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine; • US health officials are reevaluating a $590 million contract for bird flu shots that the Biden administration awarded to Moderna; • A meeting of a committee that advises the FDA on vaccine policy has […]
“As the measles outbreak in Texas keeps spreading, parents who previously chose not to vaccinate their children are now lining up to get their kids the shots needed to protect them from the serious illness. “People are more and more nervous” as they watch the highly contagious virus spread in their communities, mostly among children, […]
A former mentor once explained to me why America would be better off if scientists ran the country. While technocracy isn’t inherently anti-democratic—America could simply elect scientists and engineers—the notion smacks of elitism. Of course, this country was founded on the idea of elitism. Only property-owning White men could vote. The president was appointed by […]
This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the word “efficiency”: “The Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” shows that more than one-third of the […]
“One point about the Musk firing spree that was barely getting any attention at first is now starting to break through into mainstream media accounts: veterans are hugely overrepresented among federal civil servants, and even more so among probationary employees. They’re getting hit hard by these erratic and needless firings.” So vets are DEI hires? […]
“Donald Trump plans a $200 million anti-immigrant ad campaign in the US and overseas. . . .Apparently we can’t afford to fully fund medical research at CDC or NIH these days, but we can find a few dollars under the sofa cushions to thank President Trump for closing the border.” We can’t afford Medicaid for […]