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Duesberg, Joshua Nicholson, David Rasnick, Christian Fiala, and Henry H. Bauer, published in Medical Hypotheses but withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from an AIDS advocacy group.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.

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.)

Dollar-adjusted S&P 500: We're back to 1996

From the Financial Times, this is a chart of the S&P 500, adjusted for the trade-weighted dollar index. Even after the current stock market recovery, the adjusted index is back to about 1996 levels. In terms of economic health, the stock market tells us that the current recession/depression has set us back 13 years, and that the content of 401Ks and brokerage accounts is something of an illusion.

The dollar is in process of being trashed, courtesy of the government. How long can this go on before final collapse? Or am I an unwitting victim of pessimistic bias?

Retirement Abroad

Roosh writes that it's time to reconsider retirement. [My answers in brackets.]

Will the dollar be seriously devalued in our lifetimes? [It's already happening.]

Will Social Security and Medicare survive? [No.]

Will the cost of health care continue to go up? [Yes.]

Will wages keep up with inflation? [Hell, no.]

Will corporations continue to outsource middle-class service jobs to other nations? [Hell, yes.]

Will the stock market provide suitable returns to your 401k? [Possibly, if invested in a country other than the U.S.]

Will the government increase taxes to make up for their haphazard spending? [Duh.]

And most importantly…

Will you survive to the age of retirement? [Good question.]

The U.S. is seriously screwed. Recall all the discussion over the past decade or so about the survivability of Social Security and Medicare; well, it's finally reached the tipping point, and if these programs do survive, the dollars they pay out won't be worth much.

We're headed toward a second world standard of living. We produce hardly anything of value other than military hardware, so unless we become the arms bazaar to the world - wait, I guess we already are. Our debt to GDP ratio has become huge and can only be financed by becoming even more indebted.

I feel for you younger guys out there. I don't know what kind of plans or dreams I'd have if I were starting out on a career, family, and life in general all over again. (Though of course I can think of lots of things I would have done differently.) But the thing that you youngsters must realize is that your government is out to screw you over royally, and it's made a good start at it already. Roosh advises retirement abroad, which is what I'm considering, and soon.

By the way, Roosh's book Bang is well worth reading.

As long as the topics of sex and abroad came up in the same post, I'll also mention as worthwhile Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. Richard Hoste reviewed it in Go East, Old Man!

Black Nobel Laureates

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Obama has had many referring to it as "the affirmative action Nobel". But if you take a look at a list of black Nobel laureates, it becomes pretty clear that affirmative action has played a role in many or all of the Prizes awarded to blacks.

A total of 12 blacks have received Nobel Prizes, and none of them have been in physics, chemistry, or physiology and medicine. Three have won in literature, eight in peace, and one in economics. Oddly enough, two of the winners, Derek Walcott (literature) and Sir William Arthur Lewis (economics), both hail from St. Lucia. ("Saint Lucia which is only 238 sq. miles has two Nobel Laureates while Australia a continent of 2,941,285 sq. miles also has two Nobel Laureates." St. Lucia wins the prize for most Nobel laureates per square mile.)

The peace prize is little more than a joke, which I think most people realize. Of the black winners, only three, Bunche, Annan and Maathai, became laureates for something other than racial activism. (Maathai got it for tree planting, Annan for being head of the U.N., and Bunche looked like he was three quarters white. Annan is married to a white woman, a Swedish lawyer.)

The literature prize has gone to Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and Toni Morrison. What the literature prize has in common with the peace prize is a heavy dose of subjectivity. I rather doubt that many people would claim that these three are among the giants of literature, but in any case most of the literature laureates are forgettable and indeed forgotten.

The only black economics laureate was the above-mentioned Lewis. Economics is another highly politicized field.

Compare some of the winners in chemistry, physics, and medicine: many names belong in the pantheon of humanity, people like Rontgen, Planck, Arrhenius, Heisenberg, Landsteiner, and on and on.

To be completely fair to the black peace and literature laureates, most of the white winners in these areas were hardly giants either. But other than economics - a sort of in-between case - fields that have very objective standards of accomplishment have no black laureates at all. Due to racism, of course.

Health Links: Omega-3 Index, Antioxidants Increase Diabetes Risk, and a Viral Cause of Prostate Cancer and Chronic Fatigue

The Omega-3 Index and sudden cardiac death: A greater amount of omega-3 fatty acids found in red blood cell membranes correlates with a lower level of sudden cardiac deaths, which would include heart attacks. Dr. Davis comments, "Subsequent studies have shown that the omega-3 index has greater power to discriminate who will have a heart attack or die from sudden cardiac death better than any other common laboratory measure of coronary risk, including LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, total cholesterol to HDL ratio, homocysteine, and c-reactive protein." (My emphasis.)

This study is one more nail in the coffin of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease, besides showing that omega-3/6 fatty acid ratio may be the single most important factor in heart disease. Dr. Davis comments that most Americans fall into the lowest level (highest risk) category, and that he himself entered the lowest risk level through supplementation of about 2500 mg omega-3 fatty acids daily. That's the amount in around three teaspoons of fish oil.

Antioxidants increase the risk of diabetes. (Link thanks to Malcolm Pollack.) This is further corroborating evidence for antioxidants abolishing health-promoting effects of exercise. It looks like antioxidants, despite their heavy promotion over the past couple of decades, may not be so good for you.

First evidence of a viral cause of prostate cancer. The same virus has now been linked to chronic fatigue, and researchers are going so far as to call it the cause. XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus, the putative cause, is a lipid-enveloped virus, and thus may very well be susceptible to over-the-counter antivirals, including monoglycerides and BHT.

Radical Conservatism

Could there be such a thing as radical conservatism? It sounds like an oxymoron, but maybe there's something to it.

Those of us attuned to human biodiversity understand how social institutions and the people who run them try to cover up the truth of HBD, and in fact broadcast a narrative that's the opposite. So HBD, together with the policies which come from ignorance of it, can breed distrust and skepticism toward our betters.

In the past two years, we've seen that the government and Big Finance, if not in total cahoots, are at least watching each others backs. The government is more than willing to debase the currency and erode the savings of the citizenry in order to bail out their friends on Wall Street. Distrust and skepticism of both government and Wall Street seems to have reached a high for this cycle, and maybe its headed higher.

It's starting to dawn on most men that women, courtship, and marriage no longer resemble their former selves, and have in fact been given a thorough makeover. Marriage as an institution begins to look like something deliberately designed to extract resources from men, very much at their expense.

These three examples, HBD, government/finance, and marriage, concern society's fundamental bases, and all have been radically transformed by those who would benefit from the transformation.

Should any conservative want to preserve them?

More importantly, what can be seen from these examples is that the question cui bono?, or the question "Who? Whom?" can and should be asked of any institution.

I wonder whether skepticism of the kind I've sketched is compatible with conservatism, or whether the embrace of it makes one automatically a radical. However, the radical will propose new or reformed institutions that will be just as susceptible to corruption as the old.

The radical conservative will look at all institutions, whether the American government or the Catholic Church or anything else, as places where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal. This can leave one reeling at the shifting landscape, where nothing is as it seems, but it's the only way for those who want both the truth and a decent society.

[I'm probably not saying anything very original here.]

Gold hits all-time high, the dollar's demise, and the F-16 standard

Bloomberg:

Gold rose to a record on speculation that currencies will depreciate, spurring inflation and boosting the appeal of the precious metal for investors seeking to preserve their wealth.

Gold futures climbed as high as $1,045 an ounce in New York, topping the previous record of $1,033.90 in March 2008. The spot price is headed for a ninth straight annual gain, the longest rally since at least 1948. The dollar fell as much as 0.7 percent against a basket of six major currencies.

“Gold is acting like the ultimate currency,” said Chip Hanlon, the president of Delta Global Advisors Inc. in Huntington Beach, California. “Central banks are following the same monetary course and trying to stimulate and inflate their way back to growth. Everyone’s concerned about the dollar, but it’s not like you can hate the dollar and fall in love with the euro or the yen.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has increased the nation’s marketable debt to an unprecedented $6.78 trillion as he borrows to spur the world’s largest economy. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts the country will sell about $2.9 trillion of debt in the two years ending next September. [...]

“Gold has just begun its ascent,” said John Brynjolfsson, the chief investment officer of Armored Wolf LLC, a hedge fund in Aliso Viejo, California. “As central banks print more and more money, the private demand for gold as an investment and inflation hedge is destined to grow. It’s pretty clear that gold will be at $2,000 by 2012, and it could happen a lot faster.”

The Bloomberg story doesn't mention it, maybe because it's too speculative, but investors all over the place are abuzz with talk about an article in The Independent, The demise of the dollar, which reports:

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

"Within nine years": the problem here is that the mere news of plans like this will hasten the demise of the dollar. Investors won't wait to dump their dollars and buy gold or foreign currencies.

Here is a bit of countervailing skepticism. The world can't leave the dollar, because they've traded the gold standard for the F-16 standard, and the U.S. just happens to control the world's F-16s.

Be that as it may, while the world may perhaps have to adhere to the dollar as the reserve currency, at least for awhile, the dollar is well on the long-run path to massive depreciation, and gold on the path to appreciation.

Deflation in Japan: Not so bad after all

In a fascinating blog post, a Japanese man who lives outside Tokyo describes "life in Japan from 1989 to 2009", with an emphasis on the financial aspect. Here's something that we don't consider much: the writer points out that in Japan, employers often pay for train passes, with a bonus.

Savings from free pass, no need for car, $5,000+ per year.

Trains are much safer than cars, and if the Japanese drove as much as Americans, there would be about 10,000 more fatalities per year. Over the last 20 years, there are 200,000 Japanese wandering around unaware that had they been driving like Americans, they would be dead. And many many more injured. If you want to be an actuary about it, assuming as in the US that a death in a law suit is roughly worth one million dollars, that is a benefit of 200 billion dollars, and untold billions less in hospital care, injury, disability, and misery.

The writer makes the case that the cost of living in Japan has been greatly exaggerated - mainly because exaggeration makes for good copy. But if one is willing to live within one's limits, it looks like the Japanese are doing alright.

In summary, you could expect to live reasonably, within 20 minutes of downtown Tokyo by train on the following annual budget.

Rent $10,000 (60 square meters, 600 square feet)
Health insurance $3,000
Food $3,000 (if you cook yourself most of the time)
Electricity (heating and cooling included) $1,000
Water $300
Gas $300
Telephone and broadband $700
Transportation $1,000 (free $1,000 employer provided train pass + $1,000 incidental travel by train, taxi, bus; $8 buys pass for unlimited travel for one day on most subways throughout Tokyo)
(Car unnecessary -$5,000 to -$9,000)
National income tax + local income tax = US federal tax rate.
Consumption tax is 5% on all purchases and most restaurant meals.
Average salary is about $50,000.

The conventional wisdom among economists is that deflation is something terrible, to be avoided at all costs. However, one certainly gets the feeling that that fits into the American policy of encouraging consumers to spend everything and then some.

Nearly half of the population pays no federal income tax

From CNN Money:

In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks.

So, who are those people that pay no federal income taxes, or even "get additional money from the government"? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Is Secularism Maladaptive?

Malcolm Pollack asks, quoting Bill Vallicella and referring to arguments by Lawrence Auster, Outland, Cornelius Troost, Pope Benedict, Daniel Dennett, and myself, whether secularism is maladaptive. It's a long and thought-provoking post, so RTWT, and I'll just highlight one or two things.

The quote from Vallicella contains this:

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers. Man is impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way. We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a middle eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another middle eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed. Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing. We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

However, and Vallicella acknowledges this, "belief in Man" is a component of Leftism, and no conservative could ever rightly speak of such a thing. It is the erection of a new idol in place of the old. Secular conservatives have no need of such a hypothesis; indeed, many commentators have noted the similarities between leftist dogmas and old-time religion, whether the dogma be one of equality, utopia, or Gaianism.

Furthermore, I wonder whether the presence of nuclear weapons negates progress in science, technology, and economy, my view being that it does not. That new problems always arise doesn't mean that we should abandon scientific and technical research, and in fact no one but a few Unabomber types advocates for this. It would be as if someone were to say to Louis Pasteur, "Don't go down that road, there be atom bombs." That human nature doesn't change (much, or at any rate very slowly) cannot be blamed on science and technology.

Malcolm writes, "That our instincts for morality, and the particular configurations they assume, are not rooted in Divine command, does not mean that they are empty shells, or that we can ignore them any more than we can ignore our adaptive enjoyment of sex or food. Yes, religion may provide an enormously effective memetic reinforcement of these social instincts, but it is clear that we unbelievers can still behave just as well as the theists do, even without religion’s bridle and spur."

This seems to be the crux of the matter for those, like Auster and Kristor, who argue that without "Divine command", morality would be meaningless and therefore Darwinism cannot, as a worldview, save the West.

Read the rest.

This just in: Bruce Charlton, who is, it should be noted, both a teacher of evolutionary psychology and a Christian, writes apropos of innate morality:

Natural selection describes a variety of instincts, some moral and others immoral; some of which secular modernity would regard as good, others regarded as bad.

SO - these moral instincts are natural in humans. We now have plausible hypotheses what these instincts are and how thy might have enhanced reproductive success.

This is hypothetical knowledge about how human beings are naturally constituted (on average, in the environment where they evolved).

BUT it is not information on how humans ought to behave.

More.