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Politics Religion

Was it patriotism or religion that’s the last refuge of the scoundrel?

It figures. What does a guy like Jim McGreevey, former Governor of New Jersey who resigned in disgrace nearly three years ago when it was revealed that he had cheated on his wife with a man and that he had tried to appoint his boy-toy to a government position for which he was utterly unqualified […]

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Anti-Semitism History Holocaust Holocaust denial Politics

Diving deeper into the slime

After the Virginia Tech shootings, as you may recall, a lot of people started using the shootings as a convenient excuse to start pontificating about their favorite cause or to attack their most hated enemy, be it secularism or even vaccines. In fact, politicians, pundits, and just plain annoying whackjobs are blaming the rampage on […]

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Medicine Politics Science

Interesting NIH grant tidbits

This is a bit science policy wonky, but here’s some interesting news from Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship: My *favorite* new factoid from the NIH … the oldest “new investigator” to date received his first R01 last year at age … 82. You go, guy! On the other hand, a nobel laureate was triaged. As […]

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Medicine Politics Science

Wiley & Sons: When “fair use” equals “no use”

This is the sort of thing that really irritates me. Shelley, over at Retrospectacle posted a rather nice analysis of a paper that appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture entitled Natural volatile treatments increase free-radical scavenging capacity of strawberries and blackberries. She was skeptical about news reports and press releases […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics Science

NIH budget woes: Spin versus reality

As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I’ve written about this […]