Wednesday, October 20. 2010
From an article about the wonderful Dr. John Ioannidis of the above title in The Atlantic (my bolds):
In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research.
Clinical research always must be taken with a grain of salt, and today's "best practices" will be tomorrow's worst. The general press is utterly incompetent at evaluating such studies. I think they just grab at potential headlines, eg Study: Broccoli Cures Causes Cancer.
I know plenty of folks who have been told to "Take it - studies say it might help, and won't hurt." Who knows? I find it amusing to think that today we are no longer certain of a direct relationship between cholesterol levels and heart disease.
Stupid Christine O'Donnell. She claimed there was no rule in the Constitution requiring "separation of church and state."
Her opponent and the law students mocked her and laughed at her.
Of course, she was right (but all of our readers know what is said in the Constitution because it is our nation's secular bible).
Shamelessly stolen from TigerHawk (who is welcome to steal from us any time):
Quoted in an otherwise appreciative City Journal review of a Normal Rockwell show, this supercilious comment:
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, who in reviewing the show derided Rockwell as the cowardly, “aw, shucks” epitome of Middle America. Rockwell “doesn’t challenge any of us, or himself, to think new thoughts or try new acts or look with fresh eyes,” wrote Gopnik. “From the docile realism of his style to the received ideas of his subjects, Rockwell reliably keeps us right in the middle of our comfort zone.”
I can't stand people who write like that. I almost thought it was satire, at first.
Whoever decided that art was meant to afflict comfort? Comfort is a good thing, and difficult to obtain. Sure, art ought to be stimulating in some way - like any other sort of entertainment - or nobody would buy it. Art is entertainment. We love looking at pictures and designs of all sorts.
Here's Rockwell's 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover pic, The Connoisseur. It makes me think new thoughts and try new acts, and I think his Pollock imitation is better than Pollock:
The meaning of Prof. Lewis' resignation from the APS, at Pajamas:
Professor Lewis’s action — resignation from a scientific organization that had counted him among its most respected members, based on the perception that they no longer support “good science” over political expediency — is earth-shaking, even if so far in only a small way. But earthquakes are funny — a few small earthquakes can weaken an edifice, through repeated cracks, as thoroughly as one big earthquake.
Professor Lewis’s resignation is another sign that the foundation of certainty about anthropogenic, carbon-dioxide forced, global warming is showing cracks that suggest the weakness of the whole structure.
 Re Code Pink:
The evidence clearly indicates that Code Pink's mission gave aid and comfort to America's wartime enemies in Fallujah, a clear-cut act of sedition made possible by the group's allies in Congress -- Democrats Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Raul Grijalva, and Dennis Kucinich.
Politico: 99 Democrat seats on the wall, 99 Democrat seats …
Surber: Generic polls are worse than Democrats think
Dems have become the government union choice
Amusing: Historic Illiteracy: Idiot Sarah Palin "Party Like It's 1773" After The Election!
America needs more rich, not fewer
Can Tancredo win in Colorado?
It's a screwy election there.
Hey, why not ask them whether it's OK for women to think for themselves?
Many of my more enlightened friends like to ask me: How could someone as intellectually gifted, delightfully urbane, profoundly moral and breathlessly handsome not want to spit at these stupid tea party candidates, with their stupid positions and their stupid stupidity? (That's slightly embellished; obviously, I'm not that handsome.)
I blame Bush.
The need for Democrat cross-burning in order to keep blacks in the underclass is over. Democrats have succeeded in creating black intellectual serfs who are so swayed by the blandishments of Big Government and the empty anti-capitalist rhetoric of the left that they don't even realize they've been hoodwinked by some of the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism!
Unless black liberals realize they've been the victims of a decades-long election-buying rip-off perpetrated by the Democrats -- and advanced using the cat's-paws of the black faces in the leftist elite -- the black community will remain in the quagmire of despair it has been in since the Democrats started handing black people their scraps to live off.
The black community's allegiance to Democrats is among the most shameful political facts in American history -- and it can be ended only by the articulation of a true conservative message from passionate, intrepid, and ethnically diverse messengers.
Tuesday, October 19. 2010
Murchison: How Big Should Government Be? A quote:
No genius can figure out what government could do "for us" if it really tried. Easier to figure is what it might instead do "to us" once it really decided to save us: narrowing choices, curtailing the varied freedoms of action Americans still enjoy. That's why there's this lawsuit in Florida (as in other venues), where the wait-a-cotton-picking-minute spirit has Our Protectors at least momentarily on the defensive.
If the Feds can tax a non-activity (ie not buying the insurance plan they want us to buy), they can tax anything we don't do, "for our own good."
I am annoyed with Obamacare for at least three additional reasons:
1) I am very happy with my catastrophic ("major medical") insurance plan. It covers nothing elective or "preventive," no obstetrics, no vision, no dental, and has a $5000 deductible. I can see any physician I choose. Even including the deductible, it's relatively cheap. Under Obamacare, I cannot own this insurance.
2) The politicization of medical care promises to be an unholy mess.
3) There will be perverse incentives for your doctors to under-treat you.
Scene 1 – Barry Hussein Obama is being briefed by his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.
Barry: Hillary! Nice to see you. What's happening?
Hillary: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
Barry: Great. Lay it on me.
Hillary: Xi is the new leader of China.
Barry: Who is?
Hillary: No. Hu is the current leader.
Barry: So what I'm asking you is who is the new leader of China?
Hillary: Xi is.
Barry: I mean her name.
Hillary: Her name? Who?
Barry: The new leader of China.
Hillary: The new leader of China is a guy.
Barry: She’s a guy?
Hillary: Of course Xi’s a guy. Hu’s retiring.
Barry: Now whaddya' asking me who’s retiring?
Hillary: I'm telling you Hu is retiring.
Barry: Well, I asked you first, but I don’t care who’s retiring. You’re telling me she’s a guy? Leading China?
Hillary: Yes. I told you. Xi is the new leader.
Barry: Great! Does she have a name?
Hillary: I have been telling you over and over. Look, maybe this is a little complex for you. I’ll just leave you the report. [a door slams]
Barry: Bitch! I’ll bet she’s a guy too!
Carl Sagan's bunkometer list, via SDA re global warming climate change climate disruption:
- Whenever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts”
- Encourage substantive debate on the “evidence” by knowledgable proponents of all points of view.
- Arguments from authority carry little weight as “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that there are no authorities; at most; there are “experts”.
- Spin a variety of hypotheses. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each. The ones that survive are the ones to do in depth study on.
- Do not become attached to any hypothesis just because it’s yours. Find reasons for rejecting all, including your own, hypothesis.
- Quantify. If whatever you are explaining has a measure, quantify it so that measurement is more possible. Vague hypothesis, or those difficult to quantify will be the most difficult to prove or disprove.
- If there is a chain argument, then each and every link must work, including the premise.
- Use Occam’s Razor; which is to choose the hypothesis that explains the data in the simplest terms.
- Ask: is the Hypothesis testable and falsifiable. Hypothesis that are not testable are not worth much. Could you duplicate accurately, at least theoretically, the hypothesis?
I am reading - or trying to read - McDonogh's 2007 After The Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. It's about the horrors inflicted on ethnic Germans by the Allies in the years following WW2. Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany.
This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read.
Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:
The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.
Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.
Read the whole brief review to get an idea.
Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions).
Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in the South (I thought ex-Presidents traditionally stayed out of active partisan politics. How come nobody talks about that?):
He warned voters, “You are being played,” and urged people to cast ballots with their economic self interest in mind.
What? Not America's best interests? He's telling us to vote our personal self-interest. Good grief.
New Poll: Van Tran Pulls Even with Loretta Sanchez in CA-47
Democrat Dirty Tricks: The Next Round
Related: Did you hear about Axelrod's bestiality problem?
AVI on Kent State:
We were so sure we were the ones who wanted peace, and some of us were willing to get violent to prove it.
How Diversity Punishes Asians and Poor Whites
A reader pointed out that schools use two categories: "Minorities" and "Underrepresented Minorities." Asians are overrepresented minorities. Poor whites are, well, white - and whites who cannot pay full freight, so nobody wants them.
How Krugman became Krugman
Governor Moonbeam Offers Free College for Illegal Aliens
Dick Morris: Dems have no message.
Yes, they do. They just won't say what it is.
Obamacare will kill the private practice of medicine (on purpose)
More on that $250 bribe the over-65 set got in the mail.
As we said, timed perfectly to send it off to your favorite Tea Party candidate
Coyote: Government: The Solution to Failed Programs is to Double Their Size (h/t Shrinkwrapped's Connecting the Dots)
That means there can be no such thing as a failed policy experiment.
ObamaCare’s Unseen Costs - Taxes will go up under the new health care law—and the costs will be more than you think.
What's the Matter With America? President Obama's false consciousness theory of economic worries
Related, the post below, Fault Lines, is a good overview of what is going on politically these days. A quote from that essay:
“He’s trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way. The entire American spirit is being broken,” said an Obama voter and donor in South Bend, Indiana. In Elkhart, Indiana, Time found a Republican candidate who said she was “often approached by Obama voters who want[ed] to vent.” “Betrayed by the health care vote,” “What are they thinking when it comes to spending?” and “He’s not what I voted for,” were among the many complaints. These are not Republicans, and Republicans did not make them say this.
Monday, October 18. 2010
I agree with Am Thinker that Emery's Weekly Standard piece about the new American rebellion is clear and to the point. The NYT editorial board ought to read it. It begins thus:
A few years ago, you met a dark, handsome stranger, with a cool, remote manner and a smooth line of talk. You didn’t know him well, but he had a certain je ne sais quoi that you found irresistible. He was yourself, only better; yourself, only cooler; yourself, as you were in your dreams. You were a long-suffering liberal Democrat, and he was your airbrushed fantasy president come to life: FDR without polio, JFK without women, John Kerry with brains, Al Gore with charisma, Bill Clinton without those cringe-making vibes from Hot Springs. You swooned and you sighed, you got him elected, and you settled in to see how great life could be with someone like you in the Oval Office. And then things began to go wrong.
Photos of East Germany, before and after reunification. h/t No Pasaran
Photos of the construction of the new Swiss tunnel
A good example of the havoc ambulance-chasers are creating in American medicine: Don't Give Trial Lawyers This Booster Shot.
Philip Brand and his brother visited schools in every state in America. What Johnny Learned. A quote:
The contrast between New Heights (a charter school funded publicly but operated independently from the local school district) and New York City public school C.S. 211, two schools which Brand visited back-to-back, is stunning. At New Heights kids rhapsodize about the safety of their hallways; at C.S. 211 Brand witnesses a student screaming to her teacher that she had just been groped. At New Heights an enthusiastic young teacher is instructing her students in the basics of respectful adult interaction, how to shake hands while looking someone in the eye, how to listen with “eyes and ears”; at C.S. 211 a disengaged teacher assigns busy work to a bored class for an entire period.
Via Coyote, spoken by a WVa congressman:
“Climate change — to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, ‘oh no, it doesn’t exist, what are you talking about,’ is about like standing on the floor of Macy’s during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn’t exist."
Exactly.
Who is Clint Webb? I guarantee that you know him because he is running for something in your state:
A good line: Fiorina Says Boxer 'Too Extreme' for California
Too bad it isn't true.
Why sex in space is a bad idea
Why don't Asians count as racial or ethnic minorities?
I always wonder whether people from Spain count as Hispanics. Also, do Moslems count as minorities? Also, as 1/16th American Indian, am I a minority? (If so, gimme the $ and the freebies.)
The people are scared, explains Obama: Our psycho-babbler-in-chief
The only thing we have to fear is loss of our job itself. And more Dem job-destroying and economy-stifling insanity.
Top 400 Charities See Billions Less in Donations
Debicella now a dead heat in CT-4.
It's time for New England to elect at least one Repub congresscritter.
Rasmussen: McMahon Closes Gap on Blumenthal
Linda Chavez: Obama has no clue about entrepreneurship
Well, he has done a heck of a job getting government to grow
Surber: No, we are not afraid
The Trouble with Manchin
Screaming "Allah Akbar" before you open fire is the confusing part
Washington Reb: Growing Up Conservative
How Long Will MSM Ignore Assault By NY Congressman Maurice Hinchey On Reporter? / Update: Poughkeepsie Journal Scoops NY Times
Leftoid violence does not exist.
NRO: Some Context on the Wilders Case
Related: Wilders Is Right: Europe Needs a First Amendment
Perino asks Why is Maureen Dowd so angry?
Everybody knows the real reason in her case. However, Leftoids to tend to be angry people in general.
The bay entry to the Wellfleet Audubon's large salt marsh on an incoming tide, in September.
Sunday, October 17. 2010
 As I live and learn, I no longer view Roman civilization as "ancient." Old, but not ancient. Those folks were a lot like us, and lived a lot like us.
Roman floor mosaics and wall paintings were the usual fashionable decor of the time, and typical for the homes of the prosperous. Naturally, the floor mosaics are better preserved than wall mosaics or wall paintings.
In 2009 we were fortunate to make our way to the Bardo Museum in Tunis to see the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. They have so many, you even walk on them to get from one display room to another. This was decor, mind you - not fine art.
The Lod mosaics are a recent find, very-well preserved. They are now displayed in NYC.
Here's the story of the Lod mosaics.
We are a fickle nation, are we not?
Buyer's remorse. We bought a pig in a poke, and now people are wising up. Well, every generation needs to get conned by a few pols before they understand the game. That's why nobody under 40 should be allowed to vote unless they are in the Armed Services.
Poll: Many Obama 2008 supporters defecting to GOP
Vodkaman: Handicapping the House — Weekend Brief
Obama didn't sell me - or reassure me.
Destroying Schools to Achieve Racial Justice. Weissberg begins:
I've long suspected that the federal government is consciously subverting American education. Deep inside the Department of Education, there must exist a top-secret Bureau of Educational Disasters (BED) whose mission is to concoct alluring but guaranteed-to-fail, academic achievement-killing policies whose sole benefits are more jobs and mindless paperwork. These would be the folks who recently bribed states to retain academically troublesome students whose behavior hindered decent students so as to make America "better educated," i.e., a nation of high school "graduates" barely able to read their diplomas.
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