In Dearborn the local government tried to keep the arrest of a Jihadi secret to “avoid stirring anti-Muslim sentiments”.
In related news, a Health Inspector in Florida has witheld information about a cockroach infestation at a local restaurant to “avoid stirring anti-cockroach sentiments”. And California school curricula will no longer teach the germ theory of disease, so as to avoid stirring “anti-bacterial sentiments”.
A long, but very worthwhile article in the New York Times by Gary Taubes , author of the forthcoming book “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease.” (Yes, the NYT comes in for a lot of well-deserved grief for its vile politics. The science pages are, nonetheless, often excellent.)
It covers very well the perils of epidemiology and points out why I’m miffed every time a new health-related study gets reported in the MSM: The first study is the most likely to be wrong. That’s not a failure of science, it’s just how science works. A hypothesis is something to be tested.
His summation on what to do when we read studies, found on the last page, is vital reading. So, for those who won’t read the whole thing, here it is:
So how should we respond the next time we’re asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it’s the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it’s this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical.
If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they’re also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity.
If the association involves some aspect of human behavior, which is, of course, the case with the great majority of the epidemiology that attracts our attention, then question its validity. If taking a pill, eating a diet or living in proximity to some potentially noxious aspect of the environment is associated with a particular risk of disease, then other factors of socioeconomic status, education, medical care and the whole gamut of healthy-user effects are as well. These will make the association, for all practical purposes, impossible to interpret reliably.
The exception to this rule is unexpected harm, what Avorn calls “bolt from the blue events,” that no one, not the epidemiologists, the subjects or their physicians, could possibly have seen coming — higher rates of vaginal cancer, for example, among the children of women taking the drug DES to prevent miscarriage, or mesothelioma among workers exposed to asbestos. If the subjects are exposing themselves to a particular pill or a vitamin or eating a diet with the goal of promoting health, and, lo and behold, it has no effect or a negative effect — it’s associated with an increased risk of some disorder, rather than a decreased risk — then that’s a bad sign and worthy of our consideration, if not some anxiety. Since healthy-user effects in these cases work toward reducing the association with disease, their failure to do so implies something unexpected is at work.
All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologist’s study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, it’s never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.
Maybe Romney should downplay the whole “I got elected governor in Massachusetts” thing. The current governor has illustrated what a mental weakling and a boob one can be and still get the office. Mark Steyn has the goods.
The money graph:
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
TigerHawk explains what it really means.
In any case, you can’t simultaneously watch the price of oil over the last six years and claim that we invaded Iraq to “get” its oil.
I don’t disagree often with Michelle Malkin, but she’s wrong to call for Fred Thompson’s campaign to take a stand on Terry Schiavo.
It’s not that it isn’t an important issue. It’s that it has nothing at all to do with being president. A couple of elections ago when Pony Tail Boy asked the candidates to speak as his “parents” I wanted at least one candidate to say, “I’m not running for dad, son.”
This is yet another reason why I say the Democrats ruined presidential elections by making it a direct vote. The original plan where the Electoral College represented the states and acted as an executive search committee was much better, and would avoid all this pandering and yacking about things that are simply not the federal government’s job, let alone the president’s.
Some brave Muslims – or, I should say, ex-Muslims – have opened another front in the war on Islamic Facism.
They are going up against barbarians who commit murder just for movies they don’t like. I wish them success in what promises to be a tense, but vital battle.
The Confederate Yankee has the story of how they unload on him.
Mark Steyn reports on an interesting development in Brussells.
The country could have a glorious future ahead of it, free of domination by either of its ancient tribes. Already, the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, presides over a ruling Socialist Party caucus, ten of whose seventeen members are Muslim.
That’s to say, the capital city of the European Union has a Muslim-majority governing party.
Be sure to read Hunting of al Qaeda, Part I of III.
Especially note the part about the 1920’s. Talk about strange bedfellows. Still, it’s a sign of impending victory.
The email Yon sent announcing the dispatch is almost as noteworthy:
Successes are occurring, and accruing, in Iraq. Al Qaeda is still a powerful enemy, but they cannot be happy with their Iraqi franchise this summer.
Readers of my dispatches have gotten first hand reports of the kinds of positive indicators that General David Petraeus described in his progress report.
The atmosphere is changing in Iraq and I’ve been posting dispatches and videos that illustrate just how profound this change is in some cases.
I was the first to say Iraq was in civil war, and many readers were angry to hear me say it. Well, I’ll be the first to say that I predict some sort of milestone for the war in Iraq will occur early in the next year. It’s dangerous to predict like this, but something fundamental has changed in Iraq.
There is one important qualifier: this will only happen if General David Petraeus is supported by our elected officials to implement his proposed plan, without meddling from those same elected officials. Oversight and accountability are not the same thing as backseat driving after siphoning out half of the gas tank.
Proving once again that no student is ever as stupid as some “educators“.
The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn’t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.
Not to mention cowards.
Update:
The school has now shown that it’s possible to do sorta the right thing, and still hang on tight to their treasured idiocy. (Just another word for “moral equivalency”.)
Rod Dreher on the tip of the iceberg at the HLF trial. The key paragraph from the Muslim Brotherhood:
The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.
I thought the Big Lesson about WWII in retrospect was that we should have payed attention to what Hitler was saying he was going to do. The lesson seems to have been lost.
This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we’re still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us – and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It’s there in black and white, for those with eyes to see.
Know the enemy.
In case the press wants to know what he thinks of the Petraeus Report.
(NB: The “down” comes from TNR which has, of late, hardly been a bastion of truth telling.)
If the NYT wants to whore its pages to nutcases, Michael Yon won’t suffer it gladly.
Expect the MSM to trumpet this*.
…[T]here is no credible evidence that TNR made any attempt at fact checking prior to publishing the articles. Furthermore, not one of the soldiers interviewed under oath in the investigation corroborated Beauchamp’s story.
*When pigs fly.
You must read Totten’s latest.
“One night,” Lieutenant Markham said, “after several young people were beheaded by Al Qaeda, the mosques in the city went crazy. The imams screamed jihad from the loudspeakers. We went to the roof of the outpost and braced for a major assault. Our interpreter joined us. Hold on, he said. They aren’t screaming jihad against us. They are screaming jihad against the insurgents.“
Michael Yon presents a Marine who does it the right way. By example.
And the last part of Ghosts of Anbar is up.
“They taught me that no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks’ food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.”
T.E. Lawrence, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
I’m not a big believer in polls. But one this lopsided is certainly discouraging. If true, it means that a frightening percentage of putative adults in this country are simply incapable of rational thought.
And a lot of them vote.
Andy McCarthy posts the DOJ’s response.
CAIR fails to demonstrate any injury resulting from its inclusion [as an unindicted co-conspirator], and fails to explain why any alleged decline in membership did not result from evidence already in the public domain well prior to the government’s May 29, 2007 brief, and now in evidence as a part of record in this case. Indeed, CAIR’s request to strike its name from the government’s co-conspirator’s list is moot, since its conspiratorial relationship with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was confirmed by testimony and documentary evidence admitted at trial prior to the date CAIR even filed its brief.
So the Hamas-supporting, unindicted co-conspirator, Islamist front organization called CAIR can just stop calling itself anything but. Now if the DHS would just get the news about these organizations…
It would be if it were New York Times Fact Checker.
Look for the MSM to be all over this.
I wonder just how much scandal has to hit Hillary before they succumb to blood-in-the-water syndrome and turn on her. Probably more than this. And probably not until after the election. But it’d be fun to watch.
It’s finally got a premiere Friday, September 28, 2007 at 7:30 pm in Washington, D.C. If you’re in the area, tickets are here.
