"Wouldn't Hurt a Fly." "Of Course Not, Mrs. Bates."

• They're gunning for Medicare and Social Security and lying about it.  (Zandar Versus the Stupid)

  Republicans aren't stupid enough to cut Social Security, are they? After all, the average Trump voter is on the older end of the scale of the American electorate and the oldest Boomers will be 72 starting next year, with millions retiring over the next four years of the Trump administration. The famous Tip O'Neill political adage that "Social Security is the third rail of American politics, you touch it and die" still has to apply in the Trump era, right?
  
  Funny story about Republicans, to "save" things they like to burn them down.

• Syphilis is returning, and it's drug-resistant.  (ars technica.com, via Andrew Ducker (andrewducker on Lj and Dreamwidth), who scatters many links every day.)

  Researchers studying syphilis have been aware of a growing problem with macrolide resistance, says Stamm. “At first, the macrolide treatment failures were in US patients, but then there were reports of macrolide treatment failures in patients in several other countries.” Macrolide resistance is now a “global public health problem,” she says.
  
  But researchers haven’t known how widespread this resistance is, because a lot of research has been done on strains of syphilis that were obtained from humans (sometimes a long time ago) and then kept in labs, passed down in generations of lab animals. The information from these strains is useful, but it doesn’t tell us much about what strains might be prevalent in the real world or how they might have evolved differently from the strains in lab animals.
  
  [...]
  
  They found that modern syphilis infections fall into two main strains, called Nichols and Street Strain 14 (SS14), that appear to have split from each other sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s. Syphilis research has largely focused on the Nichols strain, but SS14 was actually more common in their samples. “We didn’t expect to see something so widespread,” says Arora. “We expected regional clusters, maybe, but instead we see something that apparently has crossed frontiers and boundaries.”
  
  [...]
  
  Isolates of both strains show up with resistance to azithromycin, but resistance is far more prevalent in SS14. A quarter of the Nichols samples had the genetic pattern that leads to macrolide resistance, but 90 percent of the SS14 samples had it. Together, this evidence suggests that SS14 is a relatively new strain of syphilis that’s far more widespread than we thought and far more resistant to macrolides than we thought.

• The return of The Rude Pundit.  It's rude of course.  Adults at leisure only, 18 and under not admitted.