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

Sen. Cassidy accepts RFK Jr’s vapor-clad promises

Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.) is a physician. I’m sure he’s pretty smart, but as I’m frequently caused to observe, the traits of high intelligence are unlinked. Dr. Cassidy is exercising poor medical judgement by supporting RFK Jr.’s nomination for Secretary of HHS, although he may be showing good political judgement. “Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD […]

CAR IV

Since this is off topic for AngryBear I will post future CAR posts at my personal blog Robert’s Stochastic thoughts This post is a restatement and extension of the first post in the series CAR Crazy which discusses ex vivo treatment of killer T-cells with Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) designed to cause the T-cells to […]

Development Assistance Cut Short by the World’s Richest Person

World’s richest person making life difficult by cutting development assistance and aid Somewhere within all the issues Congress has to deal with, with this administration, there must be a day of reckoning coming. I can not imagine Republicans being too thrilled with the damage trump and his pissant are creating. In less than two years, […]

Some Breaking Medical News on February 1

rjs at r.j.’s space sent this pice as written by MD Jeremy Faust. Apparently’ the CDC is going to restrict the use of certain words in research manuscripts. Gender, transgender, etc. appears to be the forbidden words as well as non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, etc. This was also done […]

Taking semaglutide? Stick with the program

Personally, I’ve never had a weight problem. Always had a BMI under 24. But I’ve known plenty of people who were overweight or obese. For the ones who started taking semaglutides, the results have been transformative and the risks for most have been negligible. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Dr. McGowan, a […]

The covid echo chamber is alive and well on the libertarian right

Don Boudreaux has reprinted a few paragraphs from a George Will column under the heading:  George Will explains that RFK, Jr., is what people get “when trust in government collapses.”  Here are the quoted paragraphs, my bold: Indifference to evidence, and an appetite for startling hypotheses, are well-known characteristics of cranks. Kennedy is a man-child […]

CAR not crazy

Pulled up from a comment by Linda Eissenberg the community has been exploring them [CAR crazy ideas] for some time.  For example, in the “Gene edited CAR-T” method section of this paper (Cooper, et al.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6102094/), T cells were treated with IL2 and IL15 before putting the CAR gene into the T cells.  This work was […]

Yglesias on Biden

Matt Yglesias has a critical piece up on Biden.  I am largely in agreement with Yglesias’ take, although I tend to see his failings as due to longstanding character traits, while Yglesias puts more emphasis on Biden’s age.  A couple of snippets (the whole thing is worth reading, but not sure if it is public): […]