Greed Watch, I

Check out this greedy pig. Though we're far from the westside, this sort of thing goes on here all the time. In California, Prop 13, whatever its positive merits were or continue to be, has allowed two generations of people to shirk their obligations to the commonwealth.

My favorite quotation from the article is by Flaubert:

Two things sustain me. Love of literature and hatred of the bourgeois.

Best Parent Ever

A blog after my own heart is here.

Smoking is Beautiful, Part IV

Too often, the narrow, restricted Westside Mind, while under the vague impression that it champions aesthetics, instead neglects timeless beauty. I was reminded of this when I was rolling down Main Street in Santa Monica and caught sight of all those health & yoga freaks at the Earth Cafe. Horrible organic versions of the spandex and crocs. A sort of "tyranny of the mellow" was in the air. In defense, I present CZ Guest, above.

The war against cigarette smoking is a class war. If one peruses the medical (and popular) literature and its characterization of the subjects who smoke, too often they characerize the smoker as sub-human, uneducated, ignorant.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

A critique of a particularly inane theory of how children learn. It's pervasive amongst the elite (read: expensive) schools on the west side of Los Angeles, and beyond.

Civilized

Check out this piece on maternity benefits under the Norwegian health system, among the best in the world. You'd never get this supported here in the U.S., despite the fact that the Baby Boomers have come into full political power. Too many of these ex-hippie, fake, sell-out, Democrat-voting frauds want to "protect" their property from just redistribution.

Mercury Can Make You Smart!

One of the readers of this blog, a pediatrician from Los Angeles, sent me a review of CDC study on vaccines. The study, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 (357: 1281-1292), is reviewed in The Vaccine Quarterly (2:1, p. 7) by J. M. Lieberman, MD.

Here are a few excerpts from the review:

Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative that has been used in vaccines and some immune globulin products since the 1930s. Some people believe that infants exposed to thimerosal are at risk for neurodevelopmental problems, most notably autism, during childhood.

[Here's where it gets interesting]:

. . . higher prenatal mercury exposure was associated with better performance on one measure of language and poorer performance on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasingly levels of mercury exposure from birth to 7 months were associated with better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination and on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing mercury exposure from birth to 28 days was associated with poor performance on one measure of speech articulation and better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination.

[Thus]:

The results do not support a casual association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropyschological functionaing at 7 to 10 years of age.

[All in all]:

there were a total of 19 significant effects associated with thimerosal expsoure - 12 improved outcomes, 7 poorer outcomes. Altogether, the study employed 378 statistical tests. Therefore, the statistically significant outcomes represented approximately 5% of total outcomes, suggesting that the "significant" outcomes were significant by chance alone, not by true casuality.

Lieberman argues that this idea of an "epidemic" stems "in large part" from "broadened case defintions and better case ascertainment, not a true increase in incident disease." In others words, the criteria for what defines the illness is larger, and the medical community is getting better at discovering illness. These two factors, ascendent, happen to coincide with the so-called "explosion" of cases of autism that are thought to have directly come about from exposure to thimerosal.

Lieberman ends his review with the following thought:

Science usually doesn't sway "true believers," and in this case we seem tobe dealing with a belief in a serach of validation--the hypothesis has been rejected. The most convincing evidence will come when the removal of thimerosal from vaccines does not lead to a fall in the rates of autism; this has already been demonstrated in other countries.

We will soon hear claims that if it is not thimerosal in vaccines that has harmed our children, it must be something else. Are you ready for the aluminum controversy?

Smoking is Beautiful, Part III

As a friend said, you either love her or hate her. Those who are indifferent to beauty are bankrupt. We've got to give her a pass on exiting a Range Rover (black & in town, no less), since she's in England. I'm told that smoking adds wrinkles and lines to your face. Crows-feet, though, are among the sexiest attributes of a beautiful woman.