Army Jumps the Shark

Yes, you've read this already on a hundred other blogs, but the Army's chief is concerned about Muslims.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

He's asked his officers to be on the lookout for a "backlash"; meanwhile, it looks like he never asked anyone to be on the lookout for jihad. Casey says that he's afraid that "diversity became a casualty"; no matter how many people get murdered, diversity must remain. That an Army general is capable of muttering such Orwellian blather speaks volumes to how far we are gone.

“A diverse Army gives us strength,” General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on “This Week.”

Priceless, beyond parody.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, chimed in:

“I mean does every soldier who shows discontent with the war and every soldier that has had a bad performance report — what are we going to do with those folks?” Sen. Graham said. “At the end of the day, maybe this is just about him. It’s certainly not about his religion, Islam.”

He added: “To those members of the United States military who are Muslims, thank you for protecting our nation, thank you for standing up against the people who are trying to hijack your religion.”

We're lost.

Excuses, Excuses

From the NY Times, the article called Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions doesn't live up to its name. What most of the Muslims offer in this article are excuses.

KILLEEN, Tex. — Leaders of the vibrant [sic! - ed.] Muslim community here expressed outrage on Friday at the shooting rampage being laid to one of their members, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who had become a regular attendee of prayers at the local mosque.

But some of the men who had befriended Major Hasan at the mosque said the military should examine the policies that might have caused him to snap.

Right, so there's, what, 1.5 million men in the American military, and it's a Muslim who "snaps" and commits a massacre. Like I said, excuses.

“Ultimately it was Brother Nidal’s doing, but the command should be held accountable,” Mr. Benjamin said. “G.I.’s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it.”

Still calling him "brother" after he's murdered thirteen people, then blaming the command. I agree with him in blaming the command, but for an entirely different reason.

“After 9/11, nothing happened here,” said Ajsaf Khan, who owns three convenience stores with his brother, Abdul Khan. “We are very cooperative.”

Spoken in the voice and accent of Apu.

“He said he should quit the Army,” Mr. Reasoner said. “In the Koran, you’re not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell.”

Mr. Benjamin, who worked as a private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan after leaving the Army in 2000, said the military should have let Major Hassan resign. “They should take more consideration of the human beings in the uniform,” he said, “rather than simply say, ‘We invested our money in you and need to get our money’s worth.’ ”

Still, Mr. Benjamin added, Major Hassan had overlooked an important, and peaceable, tenet of Islam. “We do have the right to retaliate,” he said, “but he who does not is twice blessed.”

So, Muslims believe that they have the "right to retaliate", and according to the speaker's words, he believes that Hasan, as a Mohammedan, had the right to commit mass murder for the alleged and likely wholly imaginary sins of his commanders. Leaving to one side the notion that murder is a suitable and proper response to some sort of harassment, every one of these followers of the Religion of Peace offers no evidence for any ill treatment. Because there is none.

So there's a mosque in Killeen, Texas, filled with people alienated from American society and who make excuses for a murderer. That's what this so-called nation has come to.

Defeatism

One STDV wonders about a "defeatist attitude" among conservative bloggers, citing me among others.

Such a pessimistic, defeatist view ostensibly undermines the larger goals of conservatism and the specific goals of the Steveosphere. How can a group of iconoclasts succeed if they've accepted defeat prematurely? How can we save the West, or at least motivate a marked improvement, if the leaders of this "rebellion" view acquiescence as the only viable solution?

Is it defeatism or realism? Maybe the best reply to this is the comment of Thrasymachus in a previous post:

Note that the conservative faction is on its fourth uprising in the last 50 years to take back the Republican party, achieve electoral victory and turn back the march to socialism. It's never worked before and it's not going to work now.

If defeatism in this context means that one has given up on the U.S., then maybe the word fits. But my post was more about loyalties, about where one should place one's hopes and direct one's actions.

It is indeed my view that the U.S., as a political entity formed by and for white Americans, is just about irretrievable. The country has slipped from our grasp, and the huge demographic changes of the past 45 years - since the passage of the National Suicide Pact and the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico - look permanent. Demography is destiny. Most of these immigrants and their children have a vested interest in government preferences; conservatives have been trying to abolish affirmative action for decades now, unsuccessfully. Unless the populace suddenly embraces the political outlook of Milton Friedman, most of then will continue to clamor for government goodies, for race-based jobs and lawsuits, for family reunification, for amnesty.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do claim that we need to look at the situation realistically. Electing new politicians or even passing constitutional amendments are Band-Aids because, after all, we already have a Constitution, but it has been ripped to shreds by judges who were appointed by the politicians we elected.

While it is true that politics is a never-ending business, one that we cannot refuse to join, a politics that denies reality cannot succeed.

Loyalty and Indifference

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

I lost any loyalty I had to this society when it started conspiring to screw me over.

At his link, we read:

We all know that society is sick and civilization is waning, but how is an individual supposed to react to this? Once you’ve learned that following the rules is a sure way to get screwed over, you can’t go back to being Boobus Americanus (to borrow from Mencken). Western civilization, in its politically correct, feminized state, demands that you bend over and grab your ankles in order to be a good citizen, and breaking the rules will earn you the contempt of society at large – and yet, breaking the rules is the only way to survive. There’s no proper ethical code in existence that requires people to submit to tyrants who seek to bind them in chains.

The thought popped into my head the other day that I doubt that I would be willing to fight for my country. I've never served in the military, but I've always thought it an honorable institution, and still do. The problem is that I no longer think my country an honorable institution, but more importantly, it no longer feels like my country. As Ferdinand says, our country seems intent on screwing us over, at least those of us who are white, male, and native-born. The entire political and social apparatus is designed to elevate the untalented and undeserving, to steal money from taxpayers to give to Wall Street and its enablers in the federal government, to plunder and ruin men in divorce courts, to dilute our valued citizenship with the constant issuance of stock, and to fight foreign wars that provide no benefit for the people as a whole, and of which the allowance and even encouragement by the government of potential enemy aliens to settle here makes a mockery.

Passing politics, or deep structure? Until recently it looked like the former, but lately it appears that the U.S. has taken on at least some of these features permanently. What is one to do? While I haven't quite yet given up on the struggle to change the nation into something better, something a lot closer to what it used to be, it begins to appear a lost cause.

Is rebellion the only option? Another option is indifference and looking out for oneself, which, for now, seems to me the best option.

Addendum: I forgot, another thing the political apparatus does is constantly debase the currency, rewarding debtors and penalizing the prudent. "Our leaders dilute dollars for the sins of everyone."

Proximity to Canada Engenders Trust

A recent Gallup Poll, Utah, South Dakota Best Places in U.S. to Lose Your Wallet, asked residents of different states whether they would expect a neighbor who found a wallet or purse that contained $200 to return it. California ranked third from the bottom on this poll, ahead only of Nevada and Mississippi. (Via The Inductivist.)

That ethnic homogeneity engenders trust, and that the secret of the success of the Anglo world lies in their superior quantity of social trust, have become fairly commonplace ideas.

The northern Midwest and the Northwest are filled with ethnic Germans and Scandinavians; the South, with blacks and Scotch-Irish; California, with Hispanics and Scotch-Irish. (The latter is an exaggerated attempt at humor, but quite a few Scotch-Irish did make it to California.)

Bottom Line

Seventy percent of Americans nationwide express trust in their neighbors, as measured by a question about whether a lost wallet (or purse) would be returned, but trust in one's neighbors varies greatly across regions. A number of Western and Midwestern states, along with other states with smaller populations, top the list of high-trust places, whereas Southern and highly populated states are more prevalent on the low-trust list. People living in high-trust states have higher overall well-being, possibly due to greater access to the resources and services needed to lead an optimal life.

See also Trust, social capital, and economic growth.

More HIV Skepticism

In the comments, in response to the statement that "[i]t seems well established that HIV progresses to AIDS", Ben Tillman wrote, "Indeed, in much the same way that it's established that human races are identical and humans should get 70% of their calories from carbos. Indoctrination."

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, one of them being that so much of what our betters want us to believe simply isn't true. That races are essentially the same in all qualities that matter does not hold up to a moment's scrutiny, yet the NY Times, along with all the great and good, repeat this idiocy on a nearly daily basis. One can almost always find an article in the NY Times, decrying the state of education or crime while laying the blame on (white) society.

The reference to a dietary composition of 70% carbohydrates is perhaps even more apropos, because on this issue even the establishment is slowly but surely coming around. But this same establishment impeded the emergence of the truth at every step. Just like the AIDS establishment, they accused the dissenters of killing people.

In a "Bad Science" column, Medical Hypotheses fails the Aids test, Ben Goldacre accuses Peter Duesberg of misrepresentation.

This is a simple, flat, unambiguous misrepresentation of the Lancet paper to which they refer. Antiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials. The Lancet paper they reference simply surveys the first decade of patients who received HAART – modern combinations of multiple antiretroviral medications – to see if things have improved, and they have not. Patients receiving HAART in 2003 did no better than patients receiving HAART in 1995. This doesn’t mean that HAART is no better than placebo. It means outcomes for people on HAART didn’t improve over an 8 year period of their use.

Yes, that Lancet paper they reference shows that HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) is still killing people at the same rate as a decade ago. Furthermore, Goldacre says that "[a]ntiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials." References, please. This is what I keep seeing, but have there in fact been randomized, controlled studies of HIV positive patients with no other lifestyle risk factors, such as IV drug abuse or multiple male sexual partners versus the same on HAART?

In short, there is a powerful AIDS establishment that receives billions of dollars from governments and employs thousands - probably tens of thousands - of highly-educated people, including scientists. They have every motive in the world to throw out clouds of obfuscation and silence their opponents, which is exactly what they are successfully doing right now. Is there any reason at all to trust them?

Darwinism Is Reactionary Dynamite

Steve Burton writes on evolution and ideology, and asks whether conservatism and Darwinism are compatible. He says that radicals have long been at war with religion, and have seized any weapon at hand for their fight, notably the theory of evolution. Conservatives, many or most of whom are religious, therefore see Darwinism as antagonistic to traditional society and as an arm of radicalism. But in this case, they're mistaken.

'Cause evolutionary theory has it's own story to tell about things like the differences between men and women, and the differences between racial and ethnic groups - the general upshot of which is that, by guess and by golly, our ancestors pretty much got all that stuff right. And it had nothing to do with evil patriarchal oppression, or wicked white supremacism. It simply had to do with homo sapiens experiencing and adapting to reality...to the facts on the ground, as they say, these days.

E.g.: men and women, on average, really are different - in ways that are not only easily predictable, from a Darwinian point of view, but which your grandmother probably understood better than your grand-daughter will - brainwashed as she will have been by the revolutionary ideologists who control American education from start to finish. And human racial and ethnic groups differ in ways that are at least as deep, and even more interesting, than the ways in which the various breeds of cats and dogs and chickens and goats and every other animal under the sun differ from one another. And those differences reveal more about the way the world wags than all the multi-culti mythology that ever has been or ever will be written.

In short, much (most?) of evolutionary theory is reactionary dynamite.

Duesberg's Paper

Here's the abstract to the paper by Peter Duesberg, Joshua Nicholson, David Rasnick, Christian Fiala, and Henry H. Bauer, published in Medical Hypotheses but withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from an AIDS advocacy group. Have a read and see if this is "pseudoscience" or such a huge threat that publishing it is a danger to humanity. Since those engaged in the campaign to deselect MH from Medline have said that Duesberg has the right to be heard, but not in a scientific publication, they won't mind if it's published on a blog.

A recent study by Chigwedere et al., “Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa”, claims that during the period from 2000 to 2005 about 300,000 South African deaths from AIDS per year could have been prevented by available anti-HIV drugs. The study blamed those who question the hypothesis that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS, particularly former South African President Thabo Mbeki and one of us, for not preventing these deaths by anti-HIV treatments such as the DNA chain-terminator AZT and the HIV DNA inhibitor Nevirapine. Here we ask, (1) What evidence exists for the huge losses of South African lives from HIV claimed by the Chigwedere study? (2) What evidence exists that South Africans would have benefited from anti-HIV drugs? We found that vital statistics from South Africa reported only 1 “HIV-death” per 10,000 HIV-positives per year (or 12,000 per 12 million) between 2000-2005, whereas Chigwedere et al. estimated losses of around 300,000 lives per year. Moreover, the US Census Bureau and South Africa reported that the South African population had increased by 3 million during the period from 2000 to 2005 instead of suffering losses, growing from 44.5 to 47.5 million, even though 25-30% were positive for antibodies against HIV. A similar discrepancy was found between claims for a devastating AIDS epidemic in Uganda and a simultaneous massive growth of the Ugandan population. We conclude that the claims that HIV has caused huge losses of lives are unconfirmed and that HIV is not sufficient or even necessary to cause the previously known diseases, now called AIDS in the presence of antibody against HIV. Further we call into question the claim that HIV antibody- positives would benefit from anti-HIV drugs, because these drugs are inevitably toxic and because there is as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS.

The argument seems reasonable, though I have not checked the paper's references nor do I have any expertise in virology or AIDS.

The abstract to the paper which Duesberg et al. are responding to can be found here: "Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa", by Chigwedere et al. I do not have access to the full paper, but the abstract states:

South Africa is one of the countries most severely affected by HIV/AIDS. At the peak of the epidemic, the government, going against consensus scientific opinion, argued that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral (ARV) drugs were not useful for patients and declined to accept freely donated nevirapine and grants from the Global Fund. Using modeling, we compared the number of persons who received ARVs for treatment and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission between 2000 and 2005 with an alternative of what was reasonably feasible in the country during that period. More than 330,000 lives or approximately 2.2 million person-years were lost because a feasible and timely ARV treatment program was not implemented in South Africa. Thirty-five thousand babies were born with HIV resulting in 1.6 million person-years lost by not implementing a mother-to-child transmission prophylaxis program using nevirapine. The total lost benefits of ARVs are at least 3.8 million person-years for the period 2000-2005.

Fair and balanced. I report, etc.

Behind the Attack on Medical Hypotheses

As near as I can make out, the main impetus or at least one of the most enthusiastic participants behind the recent attack on the journal Medical Hypotheses is one Seth Kalichman, the author of Denying AIDS, and a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut. His blog profile reads:

I am a Clinical-Community Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut. I have dedicated my career to preventing the spread of HIV and improving the health of people living with HIV/AIDS. My research program is focused in the southeastern United States and South Africa. I am also the Editor of AIDS and Behavior, a leading social and behavioral science peer-reviewed journal. Although this is my sixth book, Denying AIDS is my first book written for a general audience. All of the royalties from Denying AIDS are donated to purchase HIV treatments in Africa.

Several things to note about this profile. One is that Kalichman is a clinical psychologist, not a virologist or physician, and thus can claim no specific expertise in the HIV/AIDS question. To be sure, that is not necessarily grounds for complete disqualification for opinionating on a given topic, but on this one, Kalichman asserts that Duesberg is just plain wrong and that Medical Hypotheses should be shut down for daring to publish Duesberg's paper.

Another noteworthy item is that Kalichman is part of the AIDS establishment, having dedicated his career "to preventing the spread of HIV and improving the health of people living with HIV/AIDS." Hey, fine and dandy, but that certainly makes him suspect as being not the most objective of writers.

And the other thing to notice is that he is a member of the humanities professoriate, whose members are probably about the most leftist you could find in the U.S. today.

Kalichman and AIDSTruth actually attacked MH for two articles, the one by Duesberg, and another one whose lead author is Marco Ruggiero, deleted from PubMed, titled "AIDS denialism at the Ministry of Health". The article reports that it appears that AIDS denialists have the upper hand at the Italian Ministry of Health. The paper does NOT support the denialists; yet apparently because of the paper's title, it was attacked by Kalichman et al. and withdrawn by the publisher. This particular episode calls into question the objectivity and expertise and even reading comprehension of the attackers.

My own interest in all this is neither support nor detraction of either denialist theory or orthodox theory. I looked in depth into this topic some 15 years ago, reading among other things Robert Root-Bernstein's Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, which I found convincing at the time. I mention this because at this point I have little desire to jump in again; if you look around the interwebs a bit, you'll find claim and counterclaim, an evident bottomless pit of debate. My interest lies in defending Medical Hypotheses and its editor from discontinuation and the sack, respectively.

Critics have attacked MH for, among other things, not being peer-reviewed. The fact of the matter is that most scientific publications up until about 50 years ago were not peer-reviewed, and it is not my impression that the scientists of today are so much greater than then. To my knowledge, MH is the last of the editorially reviewed journals. Naturally, bureaucrats love peer review because it allows them to prevent interlopers from trespassing on their turf.

Demonstrating That the Flu Vaccine Doesn't Work Will Get Your Paper Rejected

In The Atlantic, Does the Vaccine Matter?, discusses whether the flu vaccine is as efficacious as the medical establishment says it is. What happened when a physician, skeptical of the efficacy of the flu vaccine, decided to investigate?

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Imagine that, the investigation of vaccines could have deleterious professional consequences, and that some topics are just "settled". Anyone further investigating them shows their perversity and ill will and deserves to suffer the consequences.

Also of note here is why the flu vaccine may not be nearly as efficacious (if at all) as its proponents claim: the healthy user effect. People who get vaccinated are healthier than those who don't.

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”

So it looks like Dr. Jackson shattered another medical myth, one that's important to public policy, involves the expenditure of vast sums of money, and even one that moves the government into authoritarian mode (mandatory vaccination). Yet no one wanted her to even take a look, and she was warned that her career would suffer if she did. It looks like the obscurantist attitude is widespread in science and medicine.

"Scientific" as a Term of Abuse

Seth Roberts writes regarding the campaign against Medical Hypotheses:

The campaign is associated with AIDSTruth.org, which says it is about “the scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS.” A dead giveaway. When I was a senior in college, I wrote a paper called “The Scientific _______” in which I said that use of the term scientific is a sign that the writer or writers don’t know what they’re talking about. Calling this or that “scientific” is essentially calling something else “unscientific” — which isn’t an argument, it’s abuse.

More.

The History of Science as a History of Rejected Papers

Paul Lauterbur, the Nobel-winning discoverer of the principle behind magnetic resonance imaging, once said, "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."

The quote comes from a short article by Henry Bauer, an HIV skeptic, called Nobel Prizes Illustrate How Research is Done and Evaluated. Bauer lists a number of scientists who, prior to winning their Nobel Prizes, were widely disparaged for their later prize-winning theories. The list includes the aforementioned Lauterbur, as well as the discoverers of the bacterial causation of stomach ulcers, the discoverer of prions, and even Einstein and Planck.

So how are we, the lay public, to make sense of claims such as those involved in HIV skepticism? The short answer is, I believe, it's damned difficult. In this particular case, the number of people in the world able to pronounce decisively on this matter must be very few, and even so there is the matter of trust. For instance, critics of the HIV "denialists" want editors and journals that publish the skeptics blacklisted. Now, how trustworthy is the word of someone who wants critics silenced? (Rhetorical question.) We laymen can only attempt to make sense of the differing opinions in this or any other area. Shutting down critics hinders the flow of ideas, the emergence of truth, and is unworthy of any society which calls itself free.

Off the top of my head, here are some other topics I've come up with in which proponents of the majority view believe that they have/had everything right, and critics should sit down and shut up.

• The lipid hypothesis of heart disease. Proponents of the lipid hypothesis have been in the saddle for well over 30 years, and some of them like its inventor Ancel Keys, wanted critics fired or marginalized, using the same reasoning that the HIV anti-denialists use: the critics are killing people. The lipid hypothesis has lately been shown to be almost certainly wrong.
• Global warming. Critics of AGW are accused of obstruction of the progress necessary to almost literally prevent the world's destruction. 
• Antioxidants. Somewhat less controversial, but for perhaps the past 20 years it has been widely held by biological scientists that dietary antioxidants are critical to good health. New evidence is emerging that maybe they aren't good for you after all.
• Statins. The medical establishment believes that they should be handed out like candy, some even advocating putting them in the water supply. A vocal group of critics says that statins are not only next to useless, but are killing people. (See here.)
• Michael Bailey's theories of homosexuality and transvestism have resulted in harassment, lawsuits, and nearly losing his job.
• Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee: For years this group has asserted that governments, especially the U.S. government, manipulate the gold price to a lower level than it would be in the absence of such manipulation. It seems to me that there is almost no way that a layman can discover the truth behind this, both because of lack of expertise and because definitive evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming.
• Peak oil.
  

  
On any given matter, the establishment will have powerful motives for the maintenance of the status quo, and that includes the scientific establishment. Whenever the partisans of a particular theory say that their critics should be silenced, we ought to be extremely suspicious.

House of Numbers: The HIV/AIDS Hypothesis

A documentary on the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. (Film website. HT: reader Stirner.)

I make no judgment on whether the movie's thesis is true or not, but it certainly doesn't seem that it should be censored, which is what some people think should happen.

Peter Duesberg makes an appearance, as well as the co-discoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier, who comes close to saying that HIV does not cause AIDS.

What seems to be driving those who are so upset over the notion that anyone should even discuss the HIV/AIDS link is responsibility. AIDS is widespread in Africa, and while HIV infection can be found in virtually any country, AIDS just doesn't seem to be a huge problem outside of Africa. In this country, for instance, the disease still mainly affects homosexuals and IV drug users, the much ballyhooed heterosexual epidemic never having come to pass. It would appear from these examples that simple HIV infection may not be necessary or sufficient to cause AIDS.

Therefore, the notion of responsibility arises in the case of those whose lifestyles lead them to come down with AIDS. But what about Africa? In my view, little of the AIDS epidemic there can be ascribed to personal responsibility; but cultural practices would seem important, as well as poverty, ignorance, and the fact that tropical diseases flourish in Africa.

Nevertheless, the suggestion that HIV may not cause AIDS arouses the ire of many, and it would seem that ascribing any deficiency whatsoever to Africa, whether in culture or education or personal behavior, is the target of this ire. The anti-denialists say that the denialists are killing people by undermining support for the use of anti-retroviral drugs. But that only gets us back to the question of the cause of AIDS, because if it isn't HIV, then the anti-denialists are the ones killing people.

PS: Those of you coming from other sites to read this post, please also read this one, which will help to explain my motivations for posting this video.

The International Campaign to Destroy Medical Hypotheses

Recently the journal Medical Hypotheses, whose editor-in-chief is our friend and frequent commentator Bruce Charlton, a psychiatrist and a professor of evolutionary psychiatry at the University of Newcastle, accepted for publication a paper by the well known HIV "denialist" Peter Duesberg. AIDS activists and researchers hate Duesberg (who by the way has at least one Nobel laureate, Kary Mullis, on his side), and for the grave sin of accepting a paper that dares to question the HIV hypothesis of AIDS, have launched a campaign against Medical Hypotheses and Dr. Charlton.

The group AIDSTruth.org ("The scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS" - no other ideas allowed) recently featured the article Elsevier retracts Duesberg’s AIDS Denialist article, which sets out their successful move to get the publisher of MH to withdraw the article.

AIDSTruth has now opened a campaign to get MEDLINE, the bibliographic database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is fully searchable through PubMed, to deselect Medical Hypotheses from inclusion in the database. (The letter requesting this action is here in PDF.) There is now a Facebook page, Cancel your Medical Hypotheses subscription, which urges medical libraries and other institutions to rid themselves of this turbulent publication. Also of note, the group additionally accuses the journal of publishing "offensive" and "racist" articles, the latter of which of course places any publication beyond the pale of an enlightened people. (Funny, really, they missed James Watson's most inconvenient truth (PDF) by Rushton and Jensen. Normally that alone would have caused a massive raising of skirts.)

Dr. Charlton, who has more than doubled the journal's impact factor during his tenure as editor-in-chief, radically decreased author response time, and increased the number of downloaded articles to half a million annually, is in danger of getting the sack.

You can read the specious reasoning that comes out of AIDSTruth yourself, but this is obviously a concerted campaign against a journal and an editor who would dare to publish articles that question politically correct dogma. We've seen similar intellectual thuggery going on among the global warmers, who would shut down "denialists"; that the two groups use the same terminology of "denialism" speaks volumes about their common wish to shout down, silence, and destroy their critics.

AIDSTruth must not be allowed to destroy Medical Hypotheses, a journal unique in medicine, whose venerable tradition allows for the publication of "radical, speculative, and non-mainstream scientific ideas". These, of course, are what groups like AIDSTruth can not abide. Though I'm far from able to pronounce decisively, my impression is that MH commands enough prestige among the scientific community that this campaign will get laughed out of court. Let's hope so.

Top Obama Campaign Contributors

This list comes from Open Secrets, and shows individual (not corporate) contributions, made through that corporation's PAC. The list looks like a compendium of elite institutions in the U.S., so it isn't any wonder that the Obama administration has shown itself so friendly to them. (Not that Bush and Co. were a lot better, I hasten to add.)

University of California	$1,591,395
Goldman Sachs	$994,795
Harvard University	$854,747
Microsoft Corp	$833,617
Google Inc	$803,436
Citigroup Inc	$701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$695,132
Time Warner	$590,084
Sidley Austin LLP	$588,598
Stanford University	$586,557
National Amusements Inc	$551,683
UBS AG	$543,219
Wilmerhale Llp	$542,618
Skadden, Arps et al	$530,839
IBM Corp	$528,822
Columbia University	$528,302
Morgan Stanley	$514,881
General Electric	$499,130
US Government	$494,820
Latham & Watkins	$493,835

The Government Dominates the Mortgage Market

A story from Clusterstock illustrates how the feds are trying to re-inflate the housing bubble - with your tax dollars. 20 Year Old Buys Home With $183,000 FHA Loan And Just 3.5% Down.

Denise Tejada bought a house last month at the age of 20, thanks in large part to a loan guaranteed by the Federal Housing Authority.

This story offers a dramatic demonstration that, despite the housing bubble causing the worst economic downturn in generations, the ideology of home ownership is alive and well in the United States and still being supported by the government.

Without question, Tejada's loan is toxic--to her and to the taxpayers who are backing the loan. Her house cost $155,000. Tejada's loan was apparently made on a micro-down payment of just 3.5%, the minimum down payment to qualify for an FHA loan. On top of this, however, she got an additional government backed loan to make improvements. Her total loans amount to $183,0000. In short, she was immediately underwater on her new house.

We learn later in the story that this home buyer is "a first generation Guatemalan immigrant". (Does the expression "first generation" go with "immigrant"? "Generation" makes it sound like she was born here.) I'd bet that the whole family is illegal; I mean, how many legal immigrants have come from Guatemala?

The Federal Housing Administration guarantees her loan, which John Carney at Clusterstock shows is likely to go bad in a hurry, saddling taxpayers with the burden.

The other day I spoke with a friend who is an immigrant from a small European country, a young man, one who has often asked my advice on financial matters. He's been looking around for houses, and after discussing potential mortgages and down payments, it turns out that he's looking at an FHA loan, which only requires a 3.5% down payment. I was astonished - though in retrospect I shouldn't have been - that FHA loans were given to non-citizens, but my friend confirmed that he could get one.

But immigrants are not the whole story by any means. The NY Times reports F.H.A. Problems Raising Concern of Policy Makers.

A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino.

Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.

More bailouts. The government now dominates the mortgage market, and one can be sure that the bureaucrats handing out the money aren't going to be very careful with it. Data Confirms Government Dominated the U.S. Mortgage Business Last Year:

Just released mortgage data for 2008 confirm that the federal government effectively took over the housing credit markets last year. [...]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together, increased their share of securitized mortgages to 42 percent in 2008 compared to a 28 percent share in 2006. Conversely, private securitization fell to 0.6 percent from a 10 percent share in 2006.

The FHA experienced the greatest rise in business last year with the number of FHA-insured loans rising to a 21 percent market share last year compared to only a 6 percent market share in 2007. The substantial rise in FHA's business volume has caused concern that the government agency may not be equipped to handle the increased volume. Housing analysts worry about deteriorating credit quality.

Aside from the issue of money being stolen from taxpayers to hand out to barely credit-worthy borrowers and to prop up the housing market and the banks, if the government remains in mortgages to this extent, they will be handing them out to those who have the correct opinions (or ethnicity) and withholding them from those who don't.

Comparative Death Toll: Supplements vs. Conventional Medicine

Andrew Saul, the proprietor of Doctor Yourself, author of five health-related books, and my source for the treatment of restless legs with niacin, sent me along No Deaths From Vitamins or Minerals: Poison Control Statistics Prove Supplements' Safety.

There was not even one death caused by a vitamin or dietary mineral in 2007, according to the most recent statistics available from the U.S. National Poison Data System. The 132-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers published in the journal Clinical Toxicology shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin. (1)

Furthermore, there were zero deaths in 2007 from any dietary mineral supplement. This means there were no fatalities from calcium, chromium, zinc, colloidal silver, selenium, iron, or multimineral supplements. [...]

Of interest here especially is that the zero deaths figure includes vitamin D; the potential toxicity of D has been hotly debated over the past decade or so. It has become close to an accepted fact that raising vitamin D levels globally could confer great benefits on public health, and would impact the most serious diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Yet the medical establishment continues to dawdle over potential toxicity, even now when it seems that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks.

Compare the death toll from conventional medical treatment. An article titled Death by Medicine comes up with a figure of over 780,000 deaths annually, which does not include unnecessary medical procedures.

The figures for supplements and total medical deaths are not strictly comparable, as those undergoing invasive or intensive medical procedures will undoubtedly be sicker than the average for those taking supplements. Defenders of standard medical care would presumably also say that supplements are not even effective enough to kill you. On the other hand, medical experts hate supplements and are constantly warning us about them - but they don't seem to warn us about the dangers of their own ministrations.

It would be far better not to need supplements in the first place, and a low-carb, paleo or primal diet seems to be the most effective at delivering necessary nutrition - as well as keeping one from needing a doctor in the first place. But many people do find themselves in need of supplements, and abundant evidence exists for the effectiveness of many of them.

Compare that with statins, which doctors hand out like, well, vitamin pills.

Interview with the Dude

My kid brother Tim scored an interview with Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan who is the new conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and probably the most talked-about figure in classical music today. Dudamel, a mere stripling at age 28, has become the object of tons of hype and promise, but according to Tim, he seems able to live up to it.

Tim mentioned in his interview that the Dude's wife was attractive, so since attractive women are an official obsession of this blog, I had to find a photo of her for this post.

Dudamel website.


For those who missed this a couple years ago, here's Dudamel at work, on Shostakovich.

Auster on Christianity and Open Borders

In a thread called Ultra-conservatives for open borders, a correspondent writes to Lawrence Auster:

You wrote: "If Christians would return to a traditionalist view which acknowledges the reality and importance of cultural, national, and racial differences,..."

However, Paul wrote: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all . . . are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

Because of Jesus' embrace of diverse peoples, in other words, Christians should not practice racial, socioeconomic, or gender discrimination, for all are one in Christ.

The correspondent, Gilbert B., says something that I've asserted before, that Christianity is the religion that seems uniquely susceptible to liberalism. Regardless of the the historical Christian understanding and interpretation of their religion, it remains true that the elements of universalism are present in its sources. From what I can see, it appears that a majority of Christians today, at least the ones who lead churches or make public pronouncements, are on board with the universal element of Christianity, i.e., not only are all human beings of equal moral worth, but that Christians must not practice any kind of discrimination, including the discrimination necessary for protecting borders and national integrity, and furthermore must lobby their leaders to make this kind of non-discrimination a policy.

Note that Gilbert B. merely points out the universalist element in Christianity, and in fact pronounces no opinion on it; neither does he say whether he's a conservative or a Christian.

For pointing this out, Auster proclaims him to be an enemy of Christianity:

In your effort to discredit Christianity you display what can only be seen as willful ignorance of the subject. [...]

It is notable that you, a conservative, in your effort to discredit Christianity by showing that Christianity is identical to radical liberalism, adopt the most extreme possible radical-liberal interpretation of scripture yourself and ignore all contrary evidence. And in doing so, you display your bigotry against Christianity. If you want to show that you're not a bigot against Christianity, you could start by acknowledging the evidence that contradicts your anti-Christian assertions. [...]

In the brief entry linking this exchange, I referred to Gilbert as "an anti-Christian 'conservative' from the Netherlands," and added: "I put the word 'conservative' in scare quotes, because no enemy of the founding and formative religion of our civilization can be a genuine conservative, any more than an enemy of the founding and formative race of our civilization can be a genuine conservative."

Sheesh. Because Gilbert B.'s view differs from Auster's, and because his short statement doesn't encompass the entire worldview of Christianity, including all possible nuances and interpretations, he is therefore "anti-Christian", an "enemy of the founding and formative religion of our civilization", and not "a genuine conservative".

A while back (I can't find the link), Auster objected to my statement that he simply reads out of the ranks of conservatism anyone who disagrees with him on fundamental points. But here's the latest example. His entire response to Gilbert B. is an exercise in bad faith.

Objectively, it looks as though Christianity has become an arm of liberalism, regardless of the political opinions of a minority of Christians such as Auster - though we'd need some statistics to prove this point. Auster's obfuscations should not convince anyone otherwise.

Eat of Destruction

Dr. William Davis writes:

What common food can:

• Cause destructive intestinal damage that, if unrecognized, can lead to disability and death?
• Increase blood sugar higher and faster than table sugar?
• Trigger an autoimmune inflammatory condition in the thyroid (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis)?
• Create intestinal bloating, cramps, and alternating diarrhea and constipation, often labeled irritable bowel syndrome?
• Trigger schizophrenia in susceptible individuals?
• Cause behavioral outbursts in children with autism?
• Cause various inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, dermatitis herpetiformis, systemic lupus, pancreatic destruction, and increase measures of inflammation like c-reactive protein?
• Cause unexplained anemia, mood swings, fatigue, fibromyalgia, eczema, and osteoporosis?

Answer. (Hint: the U.S. government recommends that you eat lots of it.)