“Congress is considering proposals that could change Medicaid financing and eligibility. “Some of these proposed changes could cause millions of people to lose access to care under Medicaid. People without coverage often skip necessary care, leading to worse health outcomes. For people in poor health, the results can be dangerous. “Cuts will put a greater […]
This certainly isn’t pro-life: “The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” […]
DOGE is claiming to have saved $55 billion so far. The NYT calls bullshit: “The math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes…. Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by […]
The weight of evidence—scientific and epidemiological—points to a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 with the epicenter at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, China. Although the virus is endemic in bats, there’s little evidence for a direct jump of the virus from bats to humans in Wuhan. The most parsimonious hypothesis is that some other mammal […]
The current House and Senate budget proposals both include defense increases of about $100-150 billion over ten years, or about $10-15 billion per year in nominal dollars. Toy Sec Def Hegseth is proposing a cut in defense spending of -$70 billion per year. Anyone who thinks the House and Senate will pass a bill with […]
“In the facilities—the artificial ecosystems—that now house much of Earth’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are “a response to the selection pressures that exist in a […]
For those who were duped into believing that DOGE is serious about defense budget cuts rather than centralizing control of spending and aligning spending with the political priorities of the Trump/Musk Administration, here’s Secretary of Defense Hesgeth: “Hegseth said beginning immediately, the Pentagon will pull 8% — or roughly $50 billion — from nonlethal programs […]
Both my dad and my father-in-law worked throughout their post-military careers at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. During the war, Y-12 was the site of uranium enrichment by the calutrons (K-25 was the gaseous diffusion plan, enrichment by gas chromatography). Having grown up in Oak Ridge, I’m quite familiar with its role in national security, unlike […]
“Palantir stock fell 10% for a second day on Thursday, adding to Wednesday’s 10% drop following a Washington Post report that said the Trump administration has told the Pentagon to plan for massive budget cuts over the next five years, casting doubt on a major source of the tech firm’s revenue.” I’d be happy to […]
So-called “pro-life” extremists want to define the beginning of life as the moment of conception. Setting aside the fact that both the sperm and egg are also alive so life doesn’t begin at conception, one might ponder why those who want to criminalize abortion as murder don’t similarly criminalize miscarriages as murder or assault when […]