Republicans: ABORTING the 47%, before they are born, will greatly reduce the federal deficit

ABORT the 47% ???

Eugenicists , such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, believe in putting all their eggs and sperm in 53% of the baskets , writing off (permanently) those who are down today (but who might be up again tomorrow).


But tomorrow, some of the surviving 53% might also be down  and hence would also be written off,  in ever new rounds of 'tough love'.

Regarding 'the down and out' as permanently down is like a circular firing squad

In this numbers game, after a series of round of recessions and booms,  very few people would be left in America, period - either to pay federal taxes or simply to breath free.

If Hitler had won the war and the world, the Nazis would have had round after round of purification trials, till almost nobody would be left alive - sort of like the Russian Politburo under Stalin or what happened in the last days of the French Revolution.

Purity and perfection tests never end, never are satisfied.

Ditto for Romney and Ryan who, unknowingly, are both advocates of seeing the world through the unvarying spectacles of the K-selecting eugenicist.

The world, to the K-selecting eugenicist, is simple, predictable and static.

In their view of world ecology, the whole world is one big niche, yesterday-today-tomorrow , and their job is to find the beings that best fill that permanent niche and discard the rest.

Commensalists, such as myself, feel differently : call us r-selecting types.

We don't believe in putting our eggs and sperm in one basket.

We see the world as dynamic and unpredictable, always changing.

See it filled with many constantly changing niches that are only partially and temporally filled by many different types of beings: we welcome diversity and feel it to be the best protection possible against tomorrow's unexpected massive changes.

We are not at all surprised to learn that some "pure-blooded" aboriginal tribes were almost totally wiped out by something like childhood measles, with the only survivors being a few "half-breeds", the children of tribe members who married Europeans with built-in resistance to measles.

We prefer to think of them as displaying hybrid resilience, not half-breed decadence, and we think the hard scientific evidence to prove it is on OUR side.

Romney's soaring political rhetoric sounds so good but it is based on outmoded, incorrect, science and when it collides with physical reality, it will always crash and burn....

Journal Atherosclerosis may be more dangerous than atherosclerosis itself - to your science career

STATINs vs EGGs

If you are a friend of the statin industry, enduring a successfully peer-review in Elsevier's journal Atherosclerosis must be like being beaten by marshmallows : the true peer-review, much more savage, only happens when your article emerges in the real world and in blogs.

A Dr David Spence, a friend of the statin industry and a foe of all things egg-like, is certainly finding this out in the most brutal fashion --- as are the PR flacks and flakettes at his and their employer, the University of Western Ontario, once upon a time a well regarded research centre.

Are eggs as (almost as) dangerous as cigarettes as the headlines scream (and as the PR spinners at U of Western Ont more subtly, (nudge, nudge, wink,wink) hinted ?

Most experts who looked at the study don't think so.

And these experts are not all shills for the egg industry, not be a long shot.

The scientific value in (or danger of) eating eggs is a highly contested popular science issue --- as SVE believes all scientific issues to be.

Science statements are not just peer-reviewed by six science reviewers cloaked in secrecy and then accepted by an ever grateful public, as if delivered carved on tablets of stone.

Instead the meaning of all such statements are initially constructed by the originating scientists and their friends (including the rarely-critical science cheerleaders in the science journalism trade).

Then these meanings are critiqued by ordinary members of the non-scientific public in organized groups (perhaps as patients' groups and industry groups) as well as by citizens acting alone based on their individual opinions.

The Dance of the Dialectic , revisited 

A sort of dialectic, back and forth, process follows.

Over time a temporary truce is called and a widely-accepted  meaning of that science statement is declared the temporary winner, but new conflict can and does break out at any time.

Science's uncivil War is, in fact, endless. It runs on far longer than any Cold War Warrior could ever imagine...

(FULL DISCLOSURE : I have high blood pressure, believe in the worth of statins and take them. I love eggs but frequently do not get enough exercise and endure far too much stress. I do not smoke or drink....)

Lying now almost as common as Not Telling The Truth, U of Western Ontario's new study suggests

KILLER EGGS ?

Or maybe not. Maybe the study does not suggest that at all ---- maybe it is just all about healthy eggs ------ or maybe it is all about an unhealthy expansion of university PR spin and " Doing Science by Press Conference."

Everyone, please please please trust an email asking for money postmarked Nigeria, before you trust anything a University Public Affairs officer tells you in a press release about the newest gosh-dare wonderful thing coming out their employer's labs.

A shill is a shill is a shill.

Anyway, here more about the whole squalid affair here and here.

But remember : popular science is a process, not an event. Its a big messy, muddy, pool.

The lead scientists, the institutions and friends that support them, their personal opponents  and institutional opponents, the divided press and a divided public all are busy jockeying and elbowing trying to define this science story their way.

So-------when I wrote this blog post, I, too, became part of the whole "Spence & Eggs & Overstating-The-Results"  popular science process .....