I Couldn't Say It Any Better -- Listen Up, Obama

I couldn't say it any better, so I won't try. From National Review Online, Bill Whittle says:

… what is a right? How do we know? What’s the difference between the right to free speech — which is enshrined in the Constitution — versus the “right” to health care, which is not? Well, back in the day, we would simply say that a right has legal authority — it’s in the Constitution and therefore it’s a not just a right, it’s a birthright. So why shouldn’t we amend the Constitution to include the rights to health care, food, housing, education — all the rest? What’s the difference between the rights we have and the “rights” Obama wants to give us? Simply this: Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

He goes on to say:

But these new so-called “rights” are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin. Does that ring a little familiar these days? Because isn’t the danger here that if you’re offered something for nothing… you’ll take it?

And then he reaches the only logical conclusion:

Only it’s not something for nothing. “Free” health-care costs us something precious, and no less precious for being invisible. Because there’s a word for someone who has their food, housing and care provided for them… for people who owe their existence to someone else. And that word is “slaves.”

To that final statement I will add the following addendum:

When the people become enslaved by owing their existence to someone else, then that doubly enslaves those that must provide their serivces to the enslaved.

I refuse to be a slave, much less a slave to a slave.

Senator Obama, Hear This!

Just got through watching the second Presidential debate, and I couldn't believe that Tom Brokaw would point-blank ask whether the candidates thought that healthcare was a right or a responsibility.

Senator Obama said it was a right. Senator McCain said it was a responsibility.

Senator Obama, hear this: Healthcare Is Not a Right!!!!

Not that I needed the assistance, but my choice of who to vote for is now as clear as a CSF beertap.

Third Prophecy Fulfilled

Previously I hinted at the existence of another prophecy yet to come. Well, the time has come to reveal that, indeed, the third prophecy has been fulfilled. I really wanted to mention this earlier, but I had to wait till the time was ripe.

In November 2004, while watching the election results and waiting to see if George Bush or John Kerry would be the next President, I had a stunning revelation. I had seen Barack Obama give one of the keynote addresses at the Democratic National Convention earlier that year, and was impressed with his oratorical skills, if not what he actually had to say. On Election Night, imagine my surprise when there he was again, being interviewed on camera on every network, after winning his Senate race by a substantial margin (somewhere around 72% of the vote, as I recall) and against token opposition. Initially, and only briefly, I couldn't understand how and why this local nobody was getting such a national stage. Then suddenly, the blinding flashbulb of truth went off in my head and I could see with crystal clarity:

Barack Obama was already running for higher office. And there's really only one office higher than US Senator.

I turned to those watching with me, pointed at the TV screen, and pronounced, "If John Kerry loses tonight, that man right there, Barack Obama, is going to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2008."

I was met with blank stares and dismissive ridicule.

The next four years were somewhat lonely ones (not really) as I held to my position, telling any who would listen (and there weren't many) about my prediction. Every time, the immediate reply would be "Barack Who?"

If there were other people in this country who, like me, were not surprised when Obama announced his candidacy for President, I haven't heard of or from them. And now, with the 2008 Democratic Convention behind us, my prophecy from so long ago is fulfilled. I consider this one to be an even longer shot than the prediction of the GM strike.

Note that I did not predict he would be President, however. That flashbulb hasn't gone off yet.

I Can Die When Someone Hires A Real Science Reporter (So I Expect I'll Live Forever)

I really hate it when the news media gets a hold of trial results well in advance of when I get my copy of the journal in the mail. For one thing, I'm actually paying for the most important journals, so I feel I should get first shot at the data. For another thing, when the news media starts reporting on these studies, and I don't know anything more than what I (and my patients) have just heard on the TV, it makes me look bad, stupid, or at least ill-informed; after all, I'm supposed to be the medical expert. And for the worst thing, I need to be pre-warned and fully prepared when my patients come in with questions, because the news media ALMOST UNIVERSALLY GETS THINGS COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, HORRIBLY WRONG!!

Excuse me for shouting. Do recall I am postally mad (as in the original sense of the word 'mad' which is 'insane'). You see, I have been dealing with questions from my patients regarding the Zetia/Vytorin issue for about the last two weeks now, ever since the information regarding the so-called ENHANCE trial was "leaked" to the media. And only today have I received my copy of the New England Journal of Medicine and have read the actual study with the actual data and the actual conclusions of the actual authors.

Why is this important? Because media reports of medical studies are virtually without exception reported incorrectly. Usually, as with the ENHANCE trial, reporters reach conclusions from these studies that were not reached by the actual researchers. And they weren't reached by the researchers because the media's conclusions cannot be made on the basis of the data presented by the study. Another classic example of this was the media's handling of the Womens' Health Initiative report from a few years back. You know, the study that killed PremPro/Premarin and likely Wyeth Pharmaceuticals along with them? I could melt your monitor with complaints about how abysmally I think that was handled. Of course, I have more complaints with the actual study itself; I don't think it should have ever been published it was such a bad study. But that's another issue for another time. When your monitor melts, don't blame me; you've been warned.

Why does the media almost always do this? Because "science" reporters have, without notable exception, no apparent knowledge of the scientific process or the area of science they are assigned to cover. It seems as if the journalistic world has fallen into the same trap as the education industry. Where teachers are supposed to be able to teach any subject as long as they know enough about education theory and how to teach, reporters apparently are supposed to be able to report on any topic as long as they know enough journalism theory. Neither of these suppositions is true. If you don't know algebra backwards and forwards, how do you expect to teach it? If you don't know enough science to understand or properly read a scientific paper, how can you write a newspaper article about it and make any sense?

I will to a certain extent even fault the actual doctors that the media hires to cover medical issues. I'm talking about the real doctors they've hired, not the weirdos like Dr. Weil or Dr. Oz, who are just trying to sell their next book. Check out the network medical reporters on ABC,CBS, CNN, NBC and what they are -- gynecologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, you name it -- but never internists. And 99% of the issues they cover are internal medicine based. Among the doctors I know and have met, it has been my experience that, for the most part, gynecologists know gynecology, surgeons know surgery, psychiatrists know psychiatry, cardiologists know cardiology, and they know their fields well. But ask them a good internal medicine question, and they haven't got a clue. So why should the ones on TV be any different?

I don't expect this situation to change anytime soon or ever. But I can die if and when a major media outlet actually hires a scientist to cover a scientific issue. Therefore I expect that I'll be able to live forever, since that event has less chance of occurring than I have of winning the Texas Lottery. And that's assuming I would actually buy tickets regularly, which I don't.

Next time I'll get into the details of the ENHANCE trial and show where the reporters went wrong. I'll point out some interesting data that the reporters missed, probably because they didn't recognize its significance. And I'll tell you what we actually did learn from this study. (PS: It isn't very much.)

And by the way -- if you are currently taking either Zetia or Vytorin on the advice of your physician, please talk to your doctor about it and follow his or her advice. Don't just stop taking it. I'm sure your doctor knows a bit more about what he or she is doing than the reporter from the Associated Press does about that medical paper he just listened to a press conference about and couldn't spell half the words from.

Could It Be? The Final Nail in the AGW Coffin?

Why can't the people who get paid to report the news find this stuff? I'm not even looking very hard.

Blogger Ace of Spades put me on to the link to what may be the final nail in the coffin of the AGW hypothesis: the computer models are wrong, and someone has figured out what the error is!

Hungarian atmospheric scientist Ferenc Miskolczi discovered that the climate models being used were based on a series of differential equations for modeling greenhouse gases originally derived in 1922 that made the assumption (to simplify the math) that the atmosphere was infinitely thick, which of course it isn't. So he did the logical thing -- he re-derived the equations including terms that described the actual thickness of the atmosphere. And guess what?

The new equations show that as CO2 concentrations go up, negative feedback forces kick in, limiting temperature rises and preventing any runaway global warming.

The new theory also predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid, temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling -- exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates, and what the actual data show appears to be happening right now.

The new model also accurately describes the witnessed global warming on Mars.

Dr. Miskolczi worked for NASA when he figured all this out. As one would expect in this politically correct nation, NASA refused to release the results, and he eventually published his findings in a Hungarian peer-reviewed scientific journal. When he resigned from NASA, his resignation letter stated, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."

Global warming advocates dismiss his theory in spite of his model's more accurate fit with the data, the paleoclimate record, and the warming on Mars. After all, the AGW model just can't be wrong. There's too much money already tied up in it.

I thought it would take a while to find the evidence to disprove the AGW hypothesis. It never occurred to me that the hypothesis could be that fundamentally flawed.

So the coffin is now nailed shut. But we've all seen enough vampire movies to know that it won't stay shut, at least for a long while, and that the monsters will continue to plague us for some time.

AGW and the (Foreign) Press

Once again I bring to your attention the increasing quantity of data and evidence that AGW is a crock of manure and that we may have much more dire things to worry about. And once again this information can only be found in news outlets located outside the USA, or by depending on information obtained from foreign sources.

An editorial in Investor's Business Daily (which I'm sure all of you subscribe to and read daily) reiterates the idea that I've introduced you to before -- that the sun is the driver of the climate and that it overpowers what little (if any) effect man-made CO2 has on temperature. But look closely at where the data are coming from: the Danish Meteorological Institute, Canada's National Research Council and Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Carleton University, Germany's Max Planck Institute of Solar Research, and a Russian astronomer. Where are the Americans? Cowed by the PC police, that's where.

The better piece comes from the the Australian News regarding a recent interview on Australian radio, revealing that both terrestrial and satellite data are showing that since 1998 the Earth has been cooling -- and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, that mouth organ of the UN that is the main champion of the AGW cult) is very aware of this data! Of course, the statement is made that the meteorological community is "having trouble digesting the findings" since the data don't fit their beloved computer models, and as we all know, the computer models can't be wrong, can they?

I particularly like the second half of this Australian article, where it talks about the "implications" of the failure of the AGW hypothesis, focusing mainly on the political aspects. But right near the end, the article reveals that even in the foreign press, there is still politically correct censorship -- I mean editing. In republishing an essay from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian paper The Age deleted the following statement:

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now.

Guess that assessment hit too close to home. It certainly hits too close to home in the USA. Only here, we don't see only the editorial musings of an essayist "edited". Here, the news media edits the facts as well. Thank God there are foreign media outlets that still allow for true freedom of the press. The First Amendment? That only limits the government from censoring the press. It doesn't say anything about censorship by liberal ideologues.