Good things in the stimulus package come in hundreds of millions

Look what Barack Claus brought down the chimney - the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research! This is wonderful news. And I'll even try and convince the skeptics at some point.

"Women like women's things": Chasidic Women's Magazines

The name mentioned most often in the November issue was not Obama but Hashem. This is Binah, "the weekly magazine for the Jewish woman."

Read my article in Nextbook. There's even one reader comment already, about a zillion percent more than I usually get here (what's 1 divided by 0?)! Sure, the comment doesn't make much sense (something to do with the "liberal-arts outlook," whatever that is supposed to mean), but that's the price of free speech. 

A penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

I wish Obama all the best, and I'm excited that health care reform is being contemplated as one of the first orders of business after the stimulus package is passed. Prevention is being touted as a big healthcare money saver.

But prevention of what?

1. Prostate cancer by PSA screening. (Whoops, early detection doesn't decrease mortality.)
2. Breast cancer by self-exam. (Whoops, ditto. Mammograms work, though.)
3. Colon cancer by colonoscopy. (Right-sided cancer might not be caught by colonoscopy.)
4. Pneumonia by vaccination. (Whoops, maybe not - except in high-risk groups.)
5. Heart disease in women by estrogen replacement therapy. (We know how that turned out.)
6. Cancer by vitamin ingestion. (Whoops again.)

So not only is prevention very unlikely to save significant healthcare money, but we have to make sure we're actually preventing what we set out to prevent.

It's not harder to rhyme in Yiddish

Did I say that to the reporter? I certainly didn't mean that. What I meant was, that given a source text in simple rhyme it's hard to maintain such an elementary level in the target language.

Still and all, it's a complimentary article about our menagerie.