Links and Aggravation

I really don’t know what the hell is going on with our country any more. I read all of these stories in ONE DAY …

Does Obama Believe in Human Rights? – When it suits him. And just in his speeches. Bret Stephens lists the failures: the Berlin Wall, China, Sudan, Iran, Burma. Quoted:

It takes a remarkable presumption of good faith, or perhaps stupidity, to imagine that the Burmas or Sudans of the world would reciprocate Mr. Obama’s engagement except to seek their own advantage. … It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that “interferes” with America’s purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them.

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast – Humans Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein: “As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics.” Finally, a sane voice in a human rights group.

What Singapore Can Teach the White House – Universal health care with individual responsibility seems to be working in Singapore. We aren’t following that model.

A Survival Strategy for Free Enterprise Over the Long Term – The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has rolled over on fighting a carbon tax: “what we need is a carbon tax.” No, we don’t. In fact, that is exactly what we don’t need. Are you freaking kidding me? A business group endorsing a tax on economic activity? This is the stupidest public comment I’ve heard in … hours.

Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals – And now we see why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has rolled over on fighting a carbon tax: “The MSNBC blast against the chamber appears to dovetail with what the Politico newspaper reports is a White House and Democratic effort “to marginalize” the business organization.”.

What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us – Frankly, the demonization of conservatives really needs to stop. It’s become tedious. And frankly, it makes the Left look vapid, paranoid, and venal. Is that what they want?

This must be what it feels like to wake up in hell

“Health care reform” or, as I like to call it, “another stupid idea from Washington” :

In short, the plan sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would almost certainly lead to a death spiral in many private health insurance markets.

Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say “no thanks” to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan.

This is not a hypothetical, textbook scenario of what might happen to a poorly run insurance market. It has happened before — many times and in many places. See, for instance, the experience in Kentucky, and in Washington state, and in Maine too. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen nationwide.

The Obama White House and congressional Democrats convinced themselves months ago that they could avoid the fate of these failed state reform efforts by forcing the young and healthy to buy insurance, whether they wanted it or not. And so, all of the bills under consideration in the House and Senate would make government-approved health insurance enrollment compulsory for all Americans. Those not complying would have to pay a new tax, collected by the IRS.

Torture? That’s not torture. THIS is torture.

Remember.

Competition: Good. Regulation: Bad.

Ever wonder why health insurance costs so much?

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute has some information for you about insurance regulation and the power of free markets: O’s Rx: Break It. Even with the silly title, it’s a must-read.

Here’s a bit of it:

The individual market is where people face the most choices and have the most choice — except in those states with Obama-style regulations. People are spending their own money and so must confront directly the value of more insurance protection versus other uses of their cash. Not surprisingly, they often opt for less generous coverage with less onerous premiums.

To discover this world of choice, just go to ehealthinsurance.org. Pop in your state, age and gender, and then ponder a myriad of choices to secure protection from catastrophic health expenses, the proper function of insurance.

A 55-year-old man in Allentown, Pa., can choose from 99 plans starting as low as $141 a month for hospital coverage. A zero-deductible HMO plan costs $418 a month. Or he can pick a more flexible PPO, with a higher deductible and pay less monthly out-of-pocket for the premium.

Young people, “the invincibles,” often skip insurance, because they have few assets to protect and little fear of getting sick. The congressional Democrats’ solution is a tax increase by another name: Force employers to keep paying for them on their parents’ expensive plans until age 26.

Yet the market has responded with products targeted at the needs of the young, such as Wellpoint’s Tonik, which offers excellent protection, prescription drugs and preventive care for less than $100 a month for the under-30 set.

So if 50-somethings can get a plan at less than $200 a month and youngsters can sign up for less than $100 a month, where’s the problem? Why, it’s in New York and New Jersey — precisely the states that have adopted Obama-style reform — restricting insurers from charging rates based on age and preventing them from saying no due to poor health.

Change the zip code from Pennsylvania to neighboring New Jersey, and choice plummets even as the cost per plan skyrockets. In New York, our 55-year-old has only 12 plans to choose from.

The reason is simple: When people can buy fire insurance after their houses are burning, only those with a fire in the attic apply for insurance. Soon, only those who expect a blaze can afford the high premiums.

Massachusetts enacted such a system in April 2006. A CEO of a major health network reports exactly this problem: Despite the state mandate that everyone buy and keep insurance, his company is experiencing a drastic increase in people who purchase new coverage, run up big bills that are fully covered and then drop the plan.

People are simply gaming the system. Since they can acquire insurance any time, regardless of health, why pay the premium in times of good health?

Read it all.

We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that Big Business got us into this mess, and that Big Government Meddling and Regulation will fix it. Sadly, Big Government Meddling and Regulation doesn’t fix anything. In fact, it makes it worse, just about every time.

Free economic markets usually do a pretty good job of sorting these things out. And that is because competition on price is always good for consumers. I.e., us.

Conversely, government regulation tends to limit supply of some essential good or service, and drive individuals and businesses away from that line of work, along with the innovation they may bring.

Limiting supply with constant (or increasing demand) always pushes prices up. Always.

So does artificially increasing demand. That’s how the whole mortgage mess started.

It’s just not smart to ignore the laws of economic markets. And this is true even if—especially if—you don’t understand them, or wish they worked differently.

Via No Left Turns.

Duncan Keith Works Out Like a Maniac

Here he is doing something called “Climbing Bear Mountain”. That’s a link to the video, which I can’t embed here.

Like Sarah Spain said in her tweet for it, “I got tired just watching this…”.

Someone who wanted to do just one exercise as a complete work-out would be hard pressed to find a better one. I’d probably kill myself trying to do this, though.

Driving While Texting = Cleaning Out the Gene Pool

For all the yahoos and moe-rons that just can’t put aside the damn iPhones and Crackberrys whilst motoring a vehicle on public roads: 10 Car Pile-Up! ROTFL!

It’s a must-read.

Apparently, 26% of drivers admit to texting while driving. Um, talk about impaired.

What if 26% of drivers admitted they were legally drunk while driving? Impaired is impaired. Just what the hell is the difference to the unlucky ones that get hit?

When it comes to the types of impaired driving we get all up in arms about, we are curiously capricious.

I wonder … is MADD going to start another chapter devoted to this form of potentially lethal use of a vehicle? And get that PR and lobbying machine all cranked up to demonize “texting and driving”? Care to place a bet?

All that aside, we would do well to remember that driving a car is a public safety issue.

While we are very sorry if it interrupts your busy Twittering schedule, that’s just too f*cking bad.

Deal. With. It.

Nuts Are Health Food

So add nuts to the list of “yummy food that is also medicine when taken in moderation”:

• olive oil
• red wine
• coffee and tea
• nuts

Coincidentally, I’ve been eating more nuts lately — a lot more — and I’ve noticed a few short-term benefits, too. They help with “regularity” — what a dumb word that is, to mean, well … you know. My skin and hair — which are usually pretty dry, to the point I get itchy — are softer and more “normalized”. And my blood sugar seems to do very well when I eat nuts a few times throughout the day, which makes sense, because they have both protein and fiber, which I’ve read are very important in managing blood sugar.

The article lists other benefits:  antioxidants like vitamin E, and unsaturated fat, a “healthier fat known to lower blood triglycerides and increase good cholesterol”.  Which, if you’re like me, means you lose some of your taste for less healthy forms of fat, like cheese and other animal fats.  Win/win.

Plus, they are one of my favorite snacks.  Especially the butter toffee coated kind.  OK, fine, maybe I’m pushing a boundary or two there.

Being Safe is Boring

This is what happens when a nation raises its kids in a bubble where no risk is deemed acceptable.

Why Safe Kids Are Becoming Fat Kids – Philip K. Howard, online.wsj.com, 08-13-2008

[...]

The harmful effects of our national safety obsession ripple outward into society. One in six children in America is obese, and many of them will face a lifetime of chronic illness. According to the Center for Disease Control, this problem would basically cure itself if children engaged in the informal outdoor activities that used to be normal. But how do we lure children off the sofa? One key attraction is risk.

Risk is fun, at least the moderate risks that were common in prior generations. An informal survey of children by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Child Studies found that “merry-go-rounds . . . anecdotally the most hated piece of playground equipment in hospital emergency rooms — topped the list of most desired bits of playground equipment.” Those of us of a certain age can remember sprinting to get the contraption really moving. That was fun. And a lot of exercise.

America unfortunately is going in the opposite direction. There is nothing left in playgrounds that would attract the interest of a child over the age of four. Exercise in schools is carefully programmed, when it exists at all. Some schools have banned tag. Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess. (How else can we guard against a child falling down?) Little Leagues forbid sliding into base. Some towns ban sledding. High diving boards are history, and it’s only a matter of time before all diving boards disappear.

Safety is meaningful only in the context of other benefits and risks. Safety always involves trade-offs — of opportunities, of scarce resources and, especially in the case of children’s play, of learning to manage risk. The question is whether the trade-off makes sense.

Parents:  make the kids get outside and play with other kids.  Risk, adventure, and exploration are good for them, even if somebody occasionally gets hurt.  They’ll live.

And sitting around fiddling with video game controllers isn’t good for them.  And if your school district is one that gets rid of recess, or gym, push them to reinstate it.

So, City of Chicago, How’s That Handgun Ban Working Out For You?

Hmmmm … I think it’s a map of Chicago. Hard to tell, what with all the blue and red pins covering nearly the entire city.

Oh, well. I’m sure it’s working pretty well, anyway. How could it not? Make something illegal, and it becomes impossible to get, right?

Making Beautiful Olympic Memories (cough, cough)

China has now implemented extra driving restrictions in an attempt to literally clear the air before the start of the Olympic games Aug. 8. This is in addition to both closing and relocating factories, and ordering power plants, chemical plants, and the like to clean up their emissions.

Even so, the U.S.O.C. has issued pollution masks to all 600 U.S. Olympic athletes.

We’ll see how quickly the horrible air quality can be cleaned up based on the Opening Night ceremonies, and outdoor events like the marathon and cycling. Or maybe we won’t, if the Chinese threaten to go all Tiananmen Square on the networks.

Or, maybe, the air really will be clean, after these emergency measures, and the Chinese government won’t have to bother to threaten cameramen and reporters with the Tibet treatment (warning – extremely graphic).

Whichever way this plays out, the generally horrible air quality in places like Beijing ought to open some eyes. And, um, make them really red and itchy. So I’d close them again, if I were you.

Nearly all of the most-polluted places in the world are either in the Third World, or the emerging industrialized world like China and India. This is just a fact, despite what we might read in American newspapers.

So it would really be super keen if those people who constantly complain about American air quality, or American CO2 emissions, or American whatever, could maybe take a look once in a while at pictures like the above. We can see, you know. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that air that looks like volcanic ash might be kinda bad for your lungs.

Our air and water quality is better than ever. And we actually reduced our CO2 emissions in 2006, which will probably make the U.S. the only industrialized nation to do that. Apparently, the act of signing the Kyoto Protocol means, well, nothing. Who knew?

Somehow, this gets turned into “run for the hills, the water is rising, we’re all going to die!”

Mmmm-kay. Listen, you run for the hills, I’m going to cut my grass and then have a nice cold beer when I’m done. Maybe even during. And then I’m going to watch a ballgame.

(via Deadspin)

Josh Hamilton is the Feel-Good Story of the Year

Faith, Recovery, and Good Baseball — What’s Not to Like?

Josh Hamilton might not have won the overall Home Run Derby last night, but he put on an amazing display of hitting in the first round, with 28 homers, many of them in the upper deck. He hit 500+ foot blasts not once, not twice, but three times.

But Home Run Derbies come, and they go. The main thing to understand about Josh Hamilton is that, in the most important ways, he’s already won. After being drafted number one overall by Tampa Bay in 1999 — and being called “the best I’ve ever seen” by multiple scouts — he ended up taking a detour as a drug addict and an alcoholic for three or four years, and was out of the game from ‘03-’05. He could easily be dead already.

But because of his new-found faith, and his wife, and his family, he’s turned his life completely around, and can now show the world his talent for hitting baseballs. Win … win … win.

So good for him. God Bless Josh Hamilton.

Sports is often filled with stories of failure and disappointment, especially because so many young men with too much time and money on their hands are central to just about every sport. It’s sad to watch, even if it is inevitable much of the time; young men will do what young men will do. But because Josh’s recovery is faith-based, it would seem that he has a higher chance at success; here’s a quote from UT-Southwestern addiction specialist Dr. Bryon Adinoff (from the above link):

“If you replace addiction with religion, it’s not an addiction, it’s something meaningful, socially appropriate and rewarding,” Adinoff says. “It’s typically very healthy behavior.”

It was interesting to me how neither the broadcast crew on ESPN, or the article I read this morning (AP), noted that faith played the central role in Josh’s recovery. It’s like they’re scared to even mention it.  Out here in the real world, we know that oftentimes, religion helps people, and we also understand that acknowledging one specific instance where it quite likely saved a man’s life is just mentioning a true fact.

If they all care so much about the Josh Hamilton story, don’t they owe that to him, if nothing else?

Kids, On Their Own, and Loving It

A mom in New York left her 9 year old son at Bloomingdales. On purpose.

He had begged her for weeks to let him try to figure out how to get home from somewhere. So she finally gave in, and gave him “a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call”.

So what happened?

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Coolest. Mom. Ever.

I did things like this when I was even younger than nine. Not quite on that scale, but I did live in an urban setting (Evanston, Illinois) and rode the El train by myself on occasion. I wasn’t scared; on the contrary, it was exhilarating. It was an adventure, and boys live for adventure. Some girls too, I imagine. But for boys it is an essential part of who they are.

This is hardly news, but parents today have been brainwashed into believing that we live in a dangerous society where the risk of abductions is much, much higher than it really is. And what that risk really is? Approaching zero.

And the cause of this unfounded fear is too much exposure to a media that is in the business of creating drama and celebrating crisis. This world view can safely be ignored.

Of course there are risks to be prepared for — like learning to swim to prevent drowning, and learning to cross streets and ride bikes safely. But risk is part of living life; it isn’t possible, or advisable, to eliminate all risk from our lives, or our kids lives. And living your life in fear, to avoid risks that don’t really exist, is putting unnatural shackles on yourself and your kids.

Part of growing up is learning to be independent, which requires doing things on your own. Parents aren’t doing them any favors when they use nonexistent risk to prevent their kids from accepting the challenges that their development requires, and that their kids crave.

My $.02, anyway.

HGH: Missing the Point

Growth hormones don’t boost performance, apparently.

The only problem is, I’m not sure anybody was claiming that they did boost performance.  At least, not in the sense of improving skills, like hitting a baseball.

To a professional athlete, anything that helps them stay on the field is, in effect, a performance-enhancing drug; if you aren’t on the field, you aren’t performing.

Everything I’ve heard about HGH is about (1) recovering from injury more quickly, and (2) building up tendons, ligaments, etc. from the extra stress placed on them by radically increased muscle mass.  From, say, steroids.

So this study doesn’t tell us much. But thanks, AP, for using a misleading headline that distorts what the article really says. It’s what they do best.

Nice Theory. Too Bad It Seems To Have Killed People.

Deaths in diabetes study halt therapy, stun experts

Here we go again, with the assumptions that driving down a number via drugs is the same thing as making somebody healthy enough in all the standard, normal ways so that the number goes down on its own.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Aggressively driving blood sugar levels as low as possible in high-risk diabetes patients appears to increase the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke, according to major government study.

The startling discovery, announced Wednesday, prompted federal health officials to immediately halt one part of the massive trial so thousands of the Type 2 diabetes patients in the study could be switched to less risky treatment.

Turns Out, Timmy Was Right

Double-dipping **IS** like putting your whole mouth right in the dip

Which isn’t all that shocking, really.

But does another few hundred bacteria really matter all that much? I dunno. But I rather doubt it. If we pointed microscopes at everything around us, we’d probably bathe in Clorox and vow never to touch or eat anything ever again.

Miles Monroe Was Right

About the “Deep Fat”, That Is

Hardly a week goes by any more, it seems, without another story debunking recent dietary theories about what is healthy, and what is not. This time, it’s low-fat and non-fat milk: Nonfat milk linked to prostate cancer.

First we scare people into thinking normal food is going to kill them. Then we convince them to buy “improved” versions of it that have been manipulated by the food industry in various ways. Then years go by, and our health gets generally worse, especially our sheer poundage (is anybody going to deny that we are a much fatter nation than in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s?). Finally some studies are done to compare the true health effects — not the imagined or theoretical ones.

And lo and behold, some bad sh*t has happened, Maynard.

Holy Unintended Consequences, Batman!

Let’s take a little pause here, and ask some questions. Three things have become evident to me over the years about food:

1. There is way too much fear-mongering about food. We all need to eat, and if we just eat sensibly, we can attain our ideal weight. Don’t believe me? Go to Europe and note how well they eat, and how light they eat, and how much they enjoy it, and how little they obsess over food like we do. They understand that food is to be enjoyed, not feared.
2. Manipulating food to make it low-fat or “lite” isn’t working. In fact, we are not only fatter, but our health is probably being worsened by this manipulation, due to extra additives. Take a look at that lowfat cream cheese ingredient list sometime. Are we really better off with guar gum in our food? Especially when we think “it’s healthier so I’ll eat more of it”? Try eating real cream cheese, enjoy it, and eat less than you would like. It’s called discipline.
3. The type of food is not that important when compared to the sheer volume of it that we consume in the West. Frankly, we are rich, and our main problem is being too fat. In this arena, calories matter more than the type of calories we’re eating (protein, carb, fat). Basically, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, and too many of them will make you fat. Guaranteed. People who want to lose weight would be better served by focusing on their calorie intake vs. expenditure via exercise. Of course, the composition of the calories can indeed affect your weight somewhat due to blood sugar/insulin reactions, but this is more a general health question, because that cycle is bad for your health even if you aren’t overweight, and can bring on diabetes as you age. And nobody wants that.

Here’s a Crazy Idea

Just Might Work Though

If you don’t want doctors and nurses laughing at you and snapping pictures of your male appendage, don’t put a tattoo on it.

But this particular dim bulb, a Mr. Sean Dubowik, had already shown a distinct lack of genius by getting the tattoo because of a bet. He actually made a bet that involved getting a tattoo on his member as one of the outcomes. Nice call!

I assume he lost the bet, but with a clown like this, you never know.

So, lessons learned:

• Don’t make bets involving getting tattoos
• Especially after heavy drinking
• Especially involving your most sensitive areas
• If you ignore all this advice, you pretty much deserve to get ridiculed for the rest of your life

Doctors and nurses probably tell stories like this to each other all the time – wouldn’t you?

Better Reading Elsewhere

Since I’m “under the weather” – whatever the hell that means – I’ll just link to a couple of things here:

• “What If It’s All A Big Fat Lie?”
• “The Myth About Boys”

This paragraph, from the “Big Fat Lie” article, should be enshrined somewhere (bolded text mine):

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you’re trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it’s possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The result is a balkanized community — ‘’splintered, very opinionated and in many instances, intransigent,” says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science — in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own.

This applies to a lot more than just “food science” … as if such a thing were even possible …

Yay, Jake!

Congratulations to my eight year old son Jacob, for running his very first road race, and finishing a 5k — a distance he had never run before, ever – in 32:40.  The results are posted here.

He had never run more than a mile at one time, but insisted that he be allowed to run in this race. And not just the 1 mile fun run, like most of the other kids his age; he wanted to run the 5k. And he ran it all by himself!

I think the fact that his third grade teacher, who is young and attractive and was running in the event, might have been a factor.  Just a teensy little bit.

But hey, what’s wrong with that?  Nothing, nothing at all.

So congratulations Jake!

Doughnuts Now Much Healthier!

Since I just yesterday wrote about Jack LaLanne, and his unbelievable fitness and discipline, today seems a good day to note that Dunkin’ Donuts is dumping most trans fats from their doughnuts.

Like that is going to help anybody.

They’re fricking doughnuts. They’re sinful. They’re supposed to taste really good, and be really bad for you. That’s why we like them.

Don’t go messing with something that works.

Besides, is there really some way to take sugar and flour, and make it any better for you by deep frying it in different grease?