The former German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”) was a police state in which neighbors spied on neighbors and family members spied on one another. If you were named by a friend or colleague as a potential subversive, the Stasi—the secret police—would arrest you and you could be imprisoned for years on trumped-up charges. After your […]
The COVID pandemic in the US began five years ago. It wasn’t declared a pandemic then, but in retrospect, that’s when it began. My university has an NIH-designated vaccine testing and evaluation unit. In late January 2020, I attended a lecture by the clinical director about the recently named SARS-CoV-2. That was the first time […]
The White House Counsel to provide the White House Security Office and Acting Chief Security Officer with a list of personnel that are hereby immediately granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances for a period not to exceed six months and that these individuals shall be immediately granted access to the facilities and […]
In honor of Dry January, I propose a drinking game: you take a shot every time an ICE raid results in the arrest of an employer who illegally hired an undocumented worker.
The way to make money in America’s private health insurance industry is to deny coverage. There’s no question about that. The question is whether the denials are valid. According to one long-time doc, industry is valorizing speed over accuracy. “In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. […]
From my brother, who lives on the Colorado front range: “An excerpt from today’s National Weather Service’s Area Forecast Discussion: “The mountain valleys are expected to see the coldest temperatures where lowsare expected to fall to -20 to -30F. The coldest locations could approach -40F.” “[we’re] due to get to -10F…we’ve seen lows of -20F […]
Here in Southern New England, morning temps have mostly been in the 20s. We have a natural gas furnace and forced air keeping the house at 68°F. We had a heat pump in our house when I was growing up in East Tennessee. My dad, an MIT-trained engineer, was proud of the money he was […]
For much of the world, simply getting enough calories to sustain life is a daily challenge. Among the relatively affluent citizens in the west, wave after wave of dietary fashions encourage us to medicalize food. A recent example is the demonization of “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods. This has been validated by the Trump nominee for […]
My track record in prophecy is certainly mixed, but based on what I’ve seen so far, RFK Jr will be the next HHS secretary. He’s certainly no more unqualified than Pete Hegseth is to be secretary of defense, and it looks like Hegseth is headed for approval. “Amid reports that the adults in Donald Trump’s […]
Kevin Drum has a post up at jabberwocking.com about Trump’s proposed “External Revenue Service.” This agency, which would duplicate the work currently done by Customs and Border Protection, would allegedly be responsible for collecting tariffs from exporting countries. Only that’s not how tariffs work—they’re collected from US importers, who in turn pass them on to […]