Just stop pandering to adult's sense of entitlement to make and experiment with babies

Medical dilemma of 'three-parent babies': Fertility clinic investigates health of 17 teenagers it helped to be conceived through controversial IVF technique - Science - News - The Independent


Why the hell is Britain so keen to be pressing ahead with "3 parent" embryo techniques to cater for the tiny, tiny number of women who want to be pregnant with their own genes, but should not because of mitochondrial problems?

I cannot fathom this.

As much as I dislike surrogacy, even it using a donated healthy egg from a woman with a similar genetic profile of the mother would be preferable.   Sure, surrogacy also involves the commodification of babies; it doesn't involve direct experimentation on how to make one in a completely unnatural way with completely unknown consequences for their future health.

Why are people so prepared to experiment with their own children, and why is the government prepared to facilitate the use of science in support of experiments for the tiny number of potential parents so affected?

It seems the near universal sense of entitlement to a baby has become so overpowering there is no scandal in a patent desire to experiment on human lives.   

TV comedy noted

Been meaning to say, I quite like Brooklyn Nine Nine.   It reminds of some 80's ensemble comedies, but sped up somewhat.

Do other countries have to put up with McTorment

How McDonald's conquered France.

Here's a somewhat interesting article on how McDonalds got to be a big success in France, of all culinary places.

I see that the company has recently suffered poor sales in Australia, and as I think I have said here before, I'm pretty sure it is because of both a price increase for their standard fare that pushed lunch time boundaries of what is reasonable to pay for family of four, and the ridiculous amount of changes that have been going on menu wise.

I mean, look, the McFeast must be a popular item if they chose to run a whole ad campaign about how you would travel across the world to get one while it's making one of its "limited time" appearances.   But doesn't this just reek too much of cynical marketing to keep taking it off, and putting it back on, the menu?  

I know they have done limited "special" burgers for ages, but why take off a menu item that was on for years and then start tormenting your customers by saying "you'd better come back and get it while it's here [because we believe in "treat them mean, keep them keen".]

Do they follow such marketing in other countries?  I see you can get something that looks like a McFeast in France on the permanent menu:

Why can't we get the equivalent permanently here?

And while you're at it, drop most of the "loose change" items save for the cones.  They are all low quality crap that surely don't develop brand loyalty, and I'd prefer they dropped them and made the main items just a little bit cheaper.

We now resume normal programming.  

Out of the IPA, still good enough for Catallaxy?

Ooh, that's interesting.   Professional renewable energy demoniser Alan Moran has been booted out of the IPA for being over the top in the last week or so about Islam (and on other politics too, apparently.)

Yet only a couple of days ago, he was still posting at Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy blog (where open threads are full of similar sentiments to those of Moran.) 

True, Sinclair makes the odd appearance in threads (as do a couple of the regulars) saying that people are carrying on too much about the religion,  but it's rather interesting nonetheless if Moran will continue to be able to post there if he's too extreme for the IPA!

Ideologue looks at medicine - evidence, not so much

There is so much pure ideology running through David Leyonjhelm's take on medicine, I really don't know why anyone takes him seriously.   (I'm looking at you, Jason Soon.)

His whole comparison of doctors being like car mechanics ignores things like, oh, how not everyone needs a car mechanic, but every single person needs a variety of medical services during their life; and the almost universally accepted view that the more privatised US system has helped make for an unhealthier population at greater expense.  And what's with this line?:

Opposing the Government’s proposal [for co-payments] in its entirety will only maintain a situation where the well-off and healthy receive the same level of medical support as the poor and chronically ill, a level that is inadequate for those most in need.

While I accept that some highly socialised medical systems in other countries do have co-payments, I would still like to see the evidence that a "price signal" is really needed in Australia.  As I have noted before (although I forget which expert said it), the rate of use of GPs here is not unusually high  compared to other countries, and the increasing cost in the health system is not coming from there.

Leyonjhlem goes on to have his ideological fantasies about how medicine could work:

In an ideal world we would shop for health services based on quality and price, protected from unaffordable costs by insurance. The government’s role would be limited to ensuring that the poor and chronically ill are insured, and collecting and publishing information about the providers to help us make better choices.

The bald one also seems to think that if people have too much access to doctors, they don't take responsibility for their own health via diet, exercise, etc.  Yet I'd be pretty sure that in those areas of Australia with less access to doctors do not show such an effect at all.   I imagine this is because doctors help identify health problems earlier, and thereby increase the general health of the population.   David's just off on one of his ideological day dreams again.

Libertarians never get want fully they want, because most people can readily recognise that their ideas won't and don't work.

This'll be controversial...

Some can’t be satisfied: multiple partners points to marriage misery for women, researchers say | The Australian

The Huffington Post has a lengthier article on the study, which includes some somewhat skeptical takes:

"There are a wide variety of reasons that may lead people to have multiple partners before marriage and, independent of how many partners they have, also be less satisfied in marriage," Dr. Jim McNulty, a social psychology professor from Florida State University who has published a plethora of research on the topic, wrote in an email.

"For example, people who tend to avoid commitment in general may have more
sexual partners and be less happy when they settle down. It’s not the fact that they have more sexual partners that leads them to be less happy, it’s the fact that they don’t really like commitment. I would be very surprised if having multiple sexual partners before
marriage, independent of any other factor, has a direct causal influence."

In other words, correlation should never be confused with causation.

"We cannot make any conclusions about cause-and-effect," says Justin Lehmiller,
PhD, sex educator and researcher at Purdue University, adding, "Could it be that multiple premarital partners impacts marital happiness? Maybe. But it could also be that people who have more partners have different personalities or different attitudes toward marriage or relationships."

That point about causation may well be right, but nonetheless, if the study is correct, doesn't it indicate that men should legitimately be cautious about marrying a woman who has many partners (and be increasingly cautious the more she has had?)

Thanks, Medical Board

Cocaine-addict surgeon linked to sex workers' deaths, continued to operate on patients - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Dr Yong said not every regulatory system is perfect and the NSW Medical Board acted on the information it had on Dr Nair.

"Inhindsight now we can see that he, at some stage, even under our
program, was still affected by drugs. He was able to conceal that from
us, from his colleagues, from his patients, from his supervisors," he
said.


In May 2009, a psychiatrist said in a report to the Health Care Complaints Commission:

"It is my belief that Dr Nair is in stable remission from cocaine and
alcohol abuse and that he is fully fit to practise medicine.

I further believe that matters came before the Medical Board that would
have been more suited to a casual chat between colleagues rather than a
s.66 inquiry."

At least with alcohol, you can have a simple and quick breath test  at the start of every work session to see that a suspect addict is not under the influence at that moment.

The inability to so readily test for other drugs is another reason I am leery of the "legalise it, and nearly everyone will work out their own safe level of consumption" idea.

If the electrical brain stimulation doesn't help me in old age, maybe this will

Young blood to be used in ultimate rejuvenation trial - health - 20 August 2014 - New Scientist

A stimulating future

BBC News - Warning over electrical brain stimulation

I still think that the intriguing research into brain stimulation for increased cognitive performance hasn't attracted as much general attention as it should.   But hobbyists are apparently running current through their heads with amateur equipment, and that might just not be that good an idea, yet...

Don't you dare speculate, lay person

I forget where the story first ran recently about some new research on anaesthesia being possibly supportive of the Penrose suggestion that quantum effects in the brain might be at the heart of consciousness.

In any event, it appeared last week in a post at Mysterious Universe, but it has made the doctor who did the experiment very cranky.  From the comments following the post:



Followed up by the post writer:



Dr Turin responds in rather arrogant fashion:



The good doctor goes on to explain in more detail, but he does sound a bit of a jerk.

Steven Moffatt has killed Dr Who

This is my considered opinion after the first 20 minutes of the awful opening episode of the new Dr Who.

As far as I'm concerned, lurid quasi science fiction with a large children's audience is not a place to compulsively go on about sexual politics.  It now does so pretty much continuously, and is ludicrous, boring, not funny, and only worth viewing to see how bad it has become. 

Time slip government

Guy Rundle writes amusingly in The Saturday Paper about a strange aspect of the Abbott government:

Good political fun with out-of-touch ministers. Traditional, except for one thing: the hopeless targets of this stuff are usually relics of a bygone age. Joe Hockey is 49, Christopher Pyne 47. They were toddlers in 1969 – the year of Woodstock and equal pay for women. They are products of a post-’60s Western world, bound within it, but their mindset comes from somewhere else. It’s as if they’ve had a Philip K. Dick-style mind implant from an earlier era.

Perhaps the whole frontbench got a bulk deal on such, for what can explain this government’s unique inability to understand the real-life impacts of many of the measures it is proposing? The Howard government had the basic nous to refrain from antagonising low-income people who voted for them on culture-war grounds. There seems to be none of that on display in the Abbott government. Indeed it is worse. They seem to have no conception of the life-world of those on low incomes, the everyday structure and texture of existence for those in precarious or poor situations.

What else can explain Joe Hockey’s remark that the $7 Medicare co-payment is no more than a “couple of beers”? Quite aside from the inherent anachronism – it’s barely one beer in a pub – it suggests Hockey is unaware that many people on benefits have to budget with the expectation that they will spend the last two to three days of a fortnight with no ready cash at hand. How else to explain the six-months-on/six-months-off dole scheme for the under-25s, which would make it impossible for a dole recipient to, among other things, rent a flat with a standard 12-month lease. How are they then supposed to move to areas of lower unemployment to seek work, as they have been urged to do? The scheme is meticulously designed to punish initiative and reward stasis. It is anti-brilliant. You don’t have to come from a low-income background to understand these demands. You only need to buy a pie and a Coke at a convenience store – close to $10 – to realise that it constitutes about 10 per cent of a week’s discretionary income on benefits, or the part-time wage of a worker who needs a full-time job.

While I don't disagree...

....that the militarisation of the US police forces has become ridiculously over the top (and note that a significant part of it is due to Congress and the Pentagon thinking that recycling military equipment is a thrifty and useful thing to do), I find myself a bit chagrined when those Americans of a libertarian bent get upset about it, because of their support of the other side the ledger (the public) being armed to the back teeth.

Mark Steyn's recent column, for example, quotes with approval the tiny number of police shootings in other Western countries compared to the US.   Yet this is him talking before about his home State:

New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate.  You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t.  But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do.  If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world panty-waist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventy dollar TV.

Is it such a stretch for Steyn to imagine that police in a place where (as he thinks is fantastic) nearly every household has a gun (or on the street, anyone might be carrying a concealed gun) might be more inclined to shoot first in many situations?

Wayne talks Kevin

This is the full extract from Swan's book in last weekend's SMH.

Don't get too carried away with your bacteria

Microbiology: Microbiome science needs a healthy dose of scepticism : Nature News & Comment

I forgot to mention that Catalyst last week was the start of a 2 part story on microbiome science, and was very good.


But perhaps my "time travelling doctors who change history with fecal transplants" series needs to wait....