Impeachment: What’s the Message? The mantra of the moment is that impeachment is not a trial and shouldn’t be governed by the same rules that apply to a court of law. True, but that means it’s really a political event, where the verdict matters less than the message. What’s coming through the media reporting is […]
Joel Eissenberg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Associate Dean for Research at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In Our Image: The Ethics of CRISPR Genome Editing , Joel C. Eissenberg, De Gruyter | 2021 Humanity has been busily modifying plant and animal genomes for centuries. It has long been a dream to speed up […]
Normalizing Foreign Trade Relations The Biden admin has not yet made moves to undo elements of Trump’s trade war, and some parts of it may not get undone, perhaps especially some directed at China. But at least one move towards normalization with the rest of the world has just happened as the Biden admin has […]
We made many mistakes in our response to the coronavirus over the past year. One of the most critical was our failure to massively expand our capacity to produce coronavirus tests and masks and other PPE. As many economists including Paul Romer noted last spring, mass testing and wide distribution of high quality masks would […]
Before Science, treating the symptoms of an illness was all we had. Along our way, using trial and error, we found a few things that worked. The big breakthroughs came when we started to look for the causes of an illness. The association of an illness with toxins was deducible. Then, as we knew more […]
Several comments on my last post on the economic difficulties of the people who attacked the Capitol took aim at their characters in one way or another. I certainly do not want to defend the Capitol invaders in any way. I think they should be vigorously prosecuted. However, it is critically important to step back […]
The Slightly Less Than August Back in the days of Adm. Rickover’s Navy, we were taught the technical term CRUD for the radioactive metallic deposits found in the reactor’s coolant system, that the word stood for Chalk River Undetermined Deposits, Chalk River being a river in Canada with a Nuclear Lab named after it, which […]
As is very rare, I find myself disagreeing with Josh Marshall who asked “What Were the Democratic Senators Thinking?” when they agreed to accept Representative Jaime Herrera-Beutler’s assertions (that Trump sided with the insurgents over minority leader McCarthy’s) in writing when Trump’s lawyers stipulated that they could be assumed to be accurate. First, I will […]
Strategy New Media Inc is our new host and IT fix-it company. MEV, our previous host, had ceased supporting WordPress platforms. so a move was mandatory. As of last night, Strategy is migrating AB to a new server, so as some have experienced difficulties in commenting I apologize. I have alerted Strategy to these glitches.
Is Bitcoin Really Real Money? Ontological and Epistemological Questions The movement to make Bitcoin into a de facto form of money has taken a step forward when Elon Musk declared that he would be purchasing over a billion btc. Some are claiming that Musk did this to pump up an alternative asset because Tesla stock […]