Barack Obama
gregladen | January 23, 2017April 2016, white house correspondents dinner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxFkEj7KPC0
oracknows | September 18, 2016The Cancer Moonshot. It’s a topic that I’ve been meaning to address ever since President Barack Obama announced it in his State of the Union address this year and tasked Vice President Joe Biden to head up the initiative. Biden, you’ll recall, lost his son to a brain tumor . Yet here it is, eight months later, and somehow I still haven’t gotten around to it. The goal of the initiative is to “eliminate cancer as we know it,” and to that end, with $195 million invested immediately in new cancer activities at the National Institutes of Health and $755 million proposed for FY 2017. My first…
oracknows | July 31, 2016During the political battle last year over the recently implemented California law SB 277, which eliminates nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates and then later during the campaign for the Republican nomination for President, I used a term regarding antivaccine views. That term was “antivaccine dog whistle.” In politics, as you probably now, a “dog whistle” is a term for coded messages that sound like advocating principles with broad acceptance but to a certain subgroup are recognized as code for something else. The analogy is obvious. Just as humans can’t hear much of a dog…
oracknows | July 29, 2015Antivaccine activists amuse me.
Obviously, I think they are a major risk to public health. Their relentless demonization of vaccines as causing autism, autoimmune diseases, "shaken baby syndrome," and even sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) serves no purpose other than to frighten parents and discourage them from vaccinating. As despicable as some of their antics are—for instance, blaming vaccines for SIDS and shaken baby syndrome or comparing the vaccine program to the Holocaust because it's a "mass poisoning program" (I'm talking to you, Jake Crosby)—some are just as entertaining as others…
gregladen | May 6, 2014As you know, the National Climate Change Assessment report is out. I'm actually rather overwhelmed with it all. It is a turning point by way of full acknowledgment of the importance of climate change and the need to act. Good for you, government of the United States!
One small item has crossed my desk this morning tangential to the assessment but so deliciously hilarious that I did not want to let it pass without comment.
Part of the roll out of the assessment will involve President Obama speaking with meteorologists across the country. Friend of mine made the remark that Fox News wanted…
oracknows | November 19, 2013While I've been all tied up paying attention to the developments in the Stanislaw Burzynski case, it figures that President Obama would go and do something like nominating the next Surgeon General. Normally, this is not such a big deal, because there really hasn't been a Surgeon General who has really been particularly well-known or had much of an impact since Dr. C. Everett Koop, although back when President Obama first took office Dr. Sanjay Gupta's name was floated as a possibility for the position. Obviously, he didn't get it. (I'm guessing that being a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief…
gregladen | February 24, 2013Is there a problem with John Abraham’s argument about Obama’s Legacy?
John Abraham wrote a piece in the Guardian titled Keystone XL decision will define Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change: Does the president have courage to say ‘no’ to a project that will lock us into decades of dependency on this dirty energy? in which he states:
Alberta has 1.8 [trillion] barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (0.7 degrees F). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
cevans | March 17, 2010
Last November, in Florida, I had the opportunity to see my first Space Shuttle launch. For the hundreds of millions of people who don't pay more than a passing notice to the fact that human beings still go into space on a regular basis, this is a fairly banal thing. But to those who camp out all day, plan trips around Cape Canaveral launch windows, and scrupulously follow the ins and outs of NASA politics, this is the bread and butter.
Unless you score tickets to the Kennedy Space Center, which has the official ambiance and a giant countdown clock, the best place to watch a NASA Shuttle…
gregladen | June 18, 2009PETA has become the laughing stock of the Planet Earth when it called for a change in US government policy regarding the swatting of flies by the POTUS.
From the PETA web site:
Well, I guess it can't be said that President Obama wouldn't hurt a fly. The commander in chief was recently pestered by a fly during an interview. He swatted at the insect and killed the little guy instantly.
Believe it or not, we've actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA's official response to the executive insect execution.
In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn't the Buddha, he'…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009Check this very scary projection of what current trends in health-care spending will mean for our economy: a growing weight that will account for half of GDP by 2082:
Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, shows that slide in his standard talk on what's wrong with our budget. It shows why, as Ezra Klein puts it,
an odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare.…
ddobbs | February 8, 2009The health-care system's maddening inefficiencies -- high per-capita spending with poorer overall health outcomes; tens of millions uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured; insane-making battles with insurers to get reimbursements you're entitled too -- are reason enough to spur reform.
But "The Big Fix," David Leonhardt's marvelous-but-long piece on the fiscal crisis in last week's Times Magazine, argues that these inefficiencies are a) a prime example of a vested elite's ability to manipulate the economy for its own good and b) one of the most serious obstacles to the nation's…
grrlscientist | January 20, 2009tags: politics, President Obama
Presidential hopeful (Now President) Barack Obama
greets the packed house at Fogelman Arena at Tulane University
after he speaks.
Image: Michael DeMocker
FINALLY! After eight long, miserable, horrible years of unmitigated failure at the hands of GW and his goons, this nation has a real PRESIDENT that was voted into office by the PEOPLE instead of sneaking in through a series of criminal behind-the-scenes machinations that resulted in the first peace-time coup that this nation has ever experienced. I know that this nation will see more GWs in the future who…
oracknows | January 12, 2009The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of "alternative," that it is in fact mainstream and even "scientific." That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why "alternative" medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the "alternative" label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical…
scientificactivist | November 25, 2008Clearly, I owe my readers some true post-election analysis--something that has been slowed down by the insanely busy schedule I've been keeping in the lab and the totally overwhelming implications of the fantastic and historic recent election of Barack Obama. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out a particularly insidious aspect of the Bush legacy that has so far gone underreported, although it has been publicized by AAAS president James McCarthy and was recently reported in The Washington Post:
The president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply…
amillikan | November 16, 2008With the announcement of Barack Obama's plan to deliver a weekly YouTube address, speculations are arising of how the new administration will make use of "facebook age" technologies to communicate with the public. ScienceBlogger Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock discusses this and the potential clash between traditional policies requiring the president to abstain from informal communications—because everything is recorded—and modern inclinations to use networking programs and technological devices.
cevans | November 6, 2008
Barack Obama's achievement of the American presidency is significant for an endless litany of reasons, but here's a few more.
The lives that will be saved due to his support of stem cell research. All those ideological, anti-science Bush cronies that are going to be booted off scientific advisory boards. The as-yet-unknown discoveries that will come from his promised investments in basic science research. The school kids that are going to get a huge boost in STEM education. No more wildly upsetting dismissals of science in policy speeches. No more censorship of climate change research. A…
grrlscientist | November 6, 2008tags: Ralph Nader, politics, Fox News, Barack Obama, Uncle+Tom, streaming video
Ralph Nader proves once again that he is nothing more than an immature, attention-seeking bully (something I was acutely aware of when I was in college since I knew people who worked in his political campaign), but now he knowingly portrays himself as a racist as well -- I am so glad that I never fell for his double-speak when he was playing spoiler to the 2000 election, and I wonder what my grad school colleagues think about their support for this racist pig? While it's true that Nader ONCE was a useful consumer…
grrlscientist | November 5, 2008tags: Barack Obama, politics, victory speech, election2008, streaming video
This is the first part of Obama's victory speech delivered on 4 November 2008 [4:12]