Vitamin D supplementation could save big bucks, and it might cure the flu

Bill Sardi reports on a recent study by William Grant on the impact of vitamin D supplementation on European and American health:

Health demographers guesstimate that if human populations in Northern Europe were to achieve adequate vitamin D3 levels (40 nanograms per milliliter of blood sample) this would save 17.7% in direct and indirect healthcare costs, saving hundreds of billions of dollars/Euros per year.

If these Northern European statistics can be extrapolated to the United States, the U.S. would save about $4.4 trillion in healthcare costs over the next decade.

Complete paper here (pdf).

What to do about the flu? Dr. Cannell, than whom hardly anyone knows more about vitamin D, says:

Take enough Vitamin D3 to get your 25(OH)D level above substrate starvation levels (50 ng/mL or 125 nmol/L). Levels of 50 ng/mL usually require at least 5,000 IU per day for adults, some adults will require more. Children should take 1,000 IU per every 25 pounds of body weight.

I want to emphasize this next bit, as it could save lives:

Stock your home's pharmacy with several fresh bottles of 50,000 IU capsules of Vitamin D3 (a medicine at this dosage, not a supplement) and if you get this flu, take 2,000 IU per kg of body weight per day for a week. As I weigh 220 pounds, I would take 200,000 IU per day for seven days if I thought I had an infection with a 1918-like influenza virus.

That NYT economics reporter: it's his wife

Megan McArdle has done a bang-up job in digging up an inconvenient truth about that NYT economics reporter who mismanaged his money and his life and then wrote a book about it. That truth is that Patty Barreiro, our hapless reporter's wife - note that she didn't take his name, always a bad sign - has declared bankruptcy not once, but twice - first with her first husband, and second with her second. Her husband, Edmund Andrews, then writes his sob story of a book, blaming the bankers and asserting that everyone was doing it.

I call BS. As McArdle reports, Barreiro and her first husband had six-figure incomes during the 90s when they decided that they wouldn't pay their legally incurred debts through bankruptcy. Then, "[i]n 2007, nearly as soon as she was eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again in Montgomery Country." McArdle makes it look very suspicious that the bankruptcies were cleverly managed because they wanted to avoid paying their bills, not because they couldn't.

This makes Edmund "Beta Boy" Andrews look not like a mere fool, but a knave. According to anonymous sources, it was Andrews who broke up his own first marriage by leaving his then wife for Barreiro which, if true, means that this NYT economics journalist barely possesses adult thinking skills. Who would set his life on the path to ruin on account of a 50-something woman who bitches at him for bringing up money problems?

Bring back debtor's prison. Don't get married. Or if you do, make sure you have a prenup, and make sure your wife isn't a past-her-prime spendthrift who serially stiffs creditors.

"Nothing says "P-whipped half-a-shell-of-a-man whose life is already over" quite like those Dockers duds." - Martin B.

Update: Edmund Andrews responds. On PBS, which means that he's still on my dime. I still call BS. So does Blodget.

Straight outta Oz-ton

A young woman in Australia has become something of a celebrity for giving a very straight, non-PC description of a shooting that she witnessed:

"There were these two wogs fighting," she told Nine News. "The fatter wog said to the skinnier wog, 'Oi bro, you slept with my cousin'.

"And the other one said 'Nah man, I didn't for s***, eh' and the other one goes, 'I will call on my fully sick boys, eh'. "And then [he] pulled out a gun and went [gun-cocking sound] BOOM. "

Thanks to Pat Hannagan, who said that the perps were probably Lebbos.

Niacin for Restless Legs

An older woman whom I know quite well - that would be my mother - has suffered from restless legs syndrome for decades now. It's a miserable affliction which keeps its sufferers from having a sound nights sleep, ever, waking up every 40 minutes thrashing around. Strangely enough, restless legs denialists exist; for example, this fact sheet says:

Some people with RLS will not seek medical attention, believing that they will not be taken seriously, that their symptoms are too mild, or that their condition is not treatable. Some physicians wrongly attribute the symptoms to nervousness, insomnia, stress, arthritis, muscle cramps, or aging.

Well, knock me over with a feather, some physicians don't take their patients seriously.

There are meds for RLS, stuff that keeps you doped up enough to sleep and causes major morning hangovers. Recently I read about niacin for restless legs (at Doctor Yourself) and suggested to my mother that she try it. After taking about 400 mg a day in divided doses, after a few days her restless legs syndrome was gone, and it has stayed gone. My mother has never felt so relieved since I moved out.

There are several types of niacin: niacin, niacinamide, and inositol hexanicotinate. The latter is not recommended, while the first can cause a flushing reaction at higher doses. However, the first two have different effects, for reasons which aren't clear to me, and it's also not clear which one is the best, so some experimentation might be in order. Otherwise known as vitamin B3, it's over-the-counter, non-toxic, causes no hangover, and dirt cheap.

Pass the word.

How stupid do you have to be to become a college president?

In the case of the president of Reed College, who wrote an "admissions essay" for the WSJ, the answer is "quite".

As the essay opens, he's living in a "diverse" neighborhood, a mugging takes place outside, and he grabs his baseball bat and goes after the perp. Gets him too. But then:

Later, sitting in my dining room, all I could think was: I'm no hero. I hit a man with a baseball bat. A brown-skinned man. A poor man. Was this the "diversity" I had bargained for? This was the bat I had used growing up in relentlessly suburban, middle-class Lexington, Massachusetts, where diversity meant playing with a few Catholics and an occasional Jew. Six years ago, I had moved my family to Boston's South End, reveling in its economic and racial variety. Did I feel virtuous living there? Our son's school was a model of statistical integration: one-third black, one-third white, one-third "other." We met with neighbors on the multiracial council. Our boys played with black kids who lived down the block. The Latino guy across the street repaired our car. We sat on the front stoop on summer evenings and sipped Chardonnay while the world cruised by.

And now, I had raced out into those same streets and knocked a man down with a baseball bat. I had demonized the muggers and the burglars who were preying on our neighborhood, and now I had descended to their level. Or worse. Doubts welled up in my mind. Did I really understand what it means to live in a diverse neighborhood? Or did I just want cosmetic diversity as a backdrop for imposing my white, professional-class ways? Was our experimental elementary school serving the kids from the housing projects as well as it served the kids from the townhouses? When we celebrated the opening of a new trattoria around the corner, did we mourn for the bodega it displaced? Did we really appreciate the smell from the all-day backyard pig roast next door and the salsa music blaring from open car windows?

I looked at the splintered shank end of my Little League bat. This is what it means, I thought, to try to impose your will, your ways. If you really care about diversity, embrace it. And change.

I'll give this guy the smarts to know how to game the system, because this essay would probably get him into the Ivy League.

How a NYT economics reporter was screwed by the state, went subprime, and lost everything

It's an amazing and sad story that speaks volumes about today's America.

The poor guy couldn't have helped getting taken by his ex-wife, backed by the power of the state, but these days we know better. However, our reporter, saddled with $4,000 monthly child support and alimony payments - and that is after tax - he went out and did it again, marrying a woman with a minor child.

What shines through in this article is how privileged he and his wife thought themselves to be. They were spending money they didn't have because they believed that anyone in their class, with their education, had a right to, and because life just doesn't seem worthwhile without boatloads of stuff. Moreover, nothing is too good for the kids either.

Now we're all paying for the indulgences of fools like these. Saved and invested prudently all your life? Tough, you and your children and grandchildren now have to do your patriotic duty and pay confiscatory taxes in perpetuity.

You do have to hand this reporter something: writing about what a complete fool you were in the pages of the country's biggest newspaper takes a strange kind of courage.

New Paleolithic Venus Discovered

The NYT, still useful for a few things, reports Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. ("Full-Figured", cute.) This new Venus is at least 5,000 years older than the well-known Venus of Willendorf.

"Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge, in England, agreed and went on to remark on the obvious. By modern standards, he said, the figurine’s blatant sexuality “could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.”

The tiny statuette was uncovered in September in a cave in southwestern Germany, near Ulm and the Danube headwaters. Dr. Conard’s report on the find is being published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The discovery, Dr. Conard wrote, “radically changes our view of the origins of Paleolithic art.” Before this, he noted, female imagery was unknown, most carvings and cave drawings being of mammoths, horses and other animals."

The first thing that strikes one about this figurine is its realism; the depiction, allowing for relatively primitive artistic skills, seems a realistic portrayal of an obese woman, sculpted from life or at least memory. So why is that important? In a paleolithic society, hierarchical social stratification allegedly would not exist, just as in the modern hunter-gatherer societies we know about. Absent agriculture, food can only be stored in limited amounts, sharing of the hunt is the rule, and an egalitarian social order follows.

However, for a woman like the one depicted to exist in a subsistence society, she would have to have access to more food than the average member of that society, and that implies that she was wealthy, or her family or husband was wealthy. That implies more social stratification than, to my knowledge, current theories on paleolithic societies imply. If I'm right, the existence of an obese woman 35,000 years ago is quite unexpected.

Also, one of the scientists is quoted as saying that the figurine is "bordering on the pornographic", referring to the out-sized breasts and genitalia. While that description seems hyperbolic, if we follow that line of thought, it would imply that paleolithic man, or at any rate some of them, had a radically different view of the erotic than we moderns. It's often remarked that men's standard of female beauty relates to fertility, and this Venus might just be the stone age version. Since a woman who looked like that would be more likely to bear surviving children under paleolithic conditions, she might be deemed far more attractive than the average. And that could mean that men at the time genuinely felt that such a woman was sexier.

Suppressing Impulsivity

A reader sent me a New Yorker article, "Don't!", which discusses the well known Stanford marshmallow experiment.

The article quotes several researchers and educators who claim that self-control and time preference can be taught, which seems plausible, just like children can be taught lots of other things. Conservatives place great emphasis on the middle class values of discipline, thrift, and self-control, so trying to inculcate these values in kids, when so many obviously don't learn them at home, ought to be welcomed.

But you can just see it coming: yet another national program costing billions of dollars which will attempt to teach these values and to eliminate racial/ethnic gaps in various measures of success, such as income, education, lack of a criminal record, and so on. (For a good take on these never-ending programs, always ending in failure, see Steve Sailer's recent post on "The Harlem Miracle".)

But it's intuitively obvious that some kids will grasp future time orientation better than others. Indeed, in the original experiment, the kids who did well with no coaching went on to become much more successful in life.

In his book A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark claims that there was an increase in future time orientation in England from the Middle Ages up to the time of the Industrial Revolution. The spread of "middle class values" was, according to him, largely responsible for setting England on the road to the Industrial Revolution, and furthermore that the changes enabling these were genetic - evolution in action, so to speak.

So, it seems clear that, just as some students in a classroom learn their lessons better than others, the same will hold when their lessons include the suppression of impulsivity.

Teachers love environmentalist propaganda film

NYT reports on a "Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’":

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

Teachers trying to propagandize their charges? Say it ain't so.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that lag behind scientific findings on climate change and pollution.

What that means is that the science doesn't support the teachers' Gaia worship, but they need something to indoctrinate the kids with, and the film fits the bill.

No wonder smart parents home-school their children.