Category Archives: Health

SCOTUS

More opinions coming today. Follow live at (where else?) Scotusblog.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Heh. From Amy Howe: “Don’t type the phrase ‘the Ninth Circuit is affirmed’ that often. My fingers rebelled.”

[Update a couple minutes later, scrolling through]

Court ruled against the government in Horne, in favor of the raisin farmers. This is potentially huge. It could be major blow to idiotic anti-market agriculture policies dating back to the Depression.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here is Amy’s round up of today’slast week’s court action, prior to today’s rulings [oops].

[Late-morning PDT update]

Hearing that more decisions will be announced not only on Thursday, but Friday as well. Both King v. Burwell and the same-sex marriage rulings will be huge.

[Late-afternoon update]

Ilya Somin discusses the implications of the Horne ruling:

whatever one thinks about the compensation issue, the Court’s holding on the question of whether a taking has occurred is an important victory for property owners. It ensures that personal property gets the same level of protection as real property under the Takings Clause, and that the government cannot avoid takings liability by giving owners a small share of the proceeds from the disposition of their property.

The ruling also calls into question a number of other similar agricultural cartel schemes run by the federal government. In addition to property owners, consumers of agricultural products are likely to benefit from the decision, if these cartel schemes can no longer operate. Freer competition between producers in these agricultural markets will increase the amount of goods sold, and thereby lower prices. Lowered food prices are of particular benefit to poor and lower-middle class consumers, who generally spend a higher proportion of their income on food than the affluent do.

Republicans don’t emphasize enough how these market interventions by the government hurt the poor. Including minimum wages laws.

Nanobots

bloodstream nanobots.

Eric Drexler foresaw this sort of thing three decades ago. It’s just the beginning.

[Update a while later]

Biotech’s potential new cancer cure:

Newly marketed drugs called checkpoint inhibitors are curing a small percentage of skin and lung cancers, once hopeless cases. More than 60,000 people have been treated with these drugs, which are sold by Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The treatments work by removing molecular brakes that normally keep the body’s T cells from seeing cancer as an enemy, and they have helped demonstrate that the immune system is capable of destroying cancer.

Faster, please.

Federal Dietary Guidelines

…are based on “pseudoscience.”

I think that’s being kind. They’re based on junk science. And they’re deadly:

The confluence of self-interest, institutional inertia, and scientific incompetence has led us to where we are today. The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer’s money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year. This inertia and self-interest are exacerbated by the exorbitant amount of grant funding established researchers receive. As with many things in life, follow the money.

Say, isn’t there another field of science with profound public-policy implications that operates under the same incentives and pressures?

Treating The “Transgendered”

Are they different than LGBs? It does seem like a different situation, in that there is no “treatment” required for LGBs. And the treatment seems to be extreme, and in the long run, perhaps not helpful, or it makes things worse.

And no, it’s not “bigoted” or “phobic” to ask the question.

[Thursday-morning update]

A plea for insanity.

[Bumped]

Treating The Obese Like Smokers?

The worst thing about this piece is this:

Americans are fat because we eat large portions, and because we eat foods that are high in sugar and fat. Americans are fat because we eat large portions, and because we eat foods that are high in sugar and fat. Perhaps it’s time for the surgeon general to put scary warning labels on sugary and fatty foods.

That is a profoundly ignorant statement, nutrition wise. People don’t get fat from eating fat.