Don't be a social outcast

Read all aboutthe oeuvre of Junior Samples so you'll be ready to discuss him intelligently at your next cocktail party.

Not that!

Never mind evolution - we can definitely prove de-evolution exists because we can observe it in our lifetimes. The latest example is a band once known as "Chicago Transit Authority".

They didn't take long to start going downhill. Guitarist Terry Kath killed himself with a pistol that wasn't loaded 26 years ago tomorrow. The ballads and top 40 crept in. Yeah, they must have made tons of money for somebody. But IMO inside they were probably saying don't listen to us - we don't want you to hear us this way.

Now their back catalog is distributed by Rhino Records, and their "greatest love songs" are for sale on TV. Can they go any lower?

Choice the Planned Parenthood way

Life is cheap in some places. Back about 20-odd years ago I had some lowlife acquaintances who said they knew people who'd kill for hire for only a few hundred bucks. Maybe even less if they didn't like the mark to begin with. I never took advantage of such opportunities but was impressed nonetheless.

Likewise I never was party to an abortion, but it seems to me that the price ran around $300 back then.

That was for "medical services" of course - it's not as if they were killing a human being, right? Those needles and vacuums and medwaste receptacles and waiting rooms with people who won't make eye contact aren't free, you know.

What's more, they were enabling "a woman's right to choose", which I was told was among the holiest of holies. Imagine not being able to choose at all, ya know? Except they meant just choosing abortion.

(Everyone is pro-choice BTW. It's just that some of us think the relevant choice is made *before* you do what it takes to get pregnant, not after. And since rape by definition was not chosen, it makes perfect sense to see abortion differently in such circumstances)

And it wasn't enough to have the "right to choose". It had to be convenient. Constantly we heard about how only so many counties in the US had abortionists as if this were some Hitlerian crime against social justice.

So now what do we hear? Planned Parenthood is closing some more abortion clinics. Terrific. But let's read what they're saying about their "business decisions":

Claudia Stravato, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle, said the Tulia facility was closed due to low patient load and insufficient government funding to reimburse the organization for its expenses.

"We're basically in survival mode here," Stravato told the Amarillo Globe-News when the clinic in Pampa was closed down for similar reasons. "Nobody wants to close clinics and cut services, but we can only do so much with so little."

Look guys, I have no problem with organizations making business decisions. But if Planned Parenthood must behave that way, then let's drop the BS about availability of abortions - if an abortion mill like Planned Parenthood can't make money at it, who can?

(Are they really an abortion mill? Maybe that's a bit harsh. After all, they made referrals for adoptions too. 1 for every 138 abortions (ibid)).

And let's drop the sainthood act too. If abortion is so important, then how dare they treat it like a business when the parent organizatio has the money to keep the clinics open? Why don't PP's backers hit up people with nothing better to do with their money than George Soros? (Or does he only buy elections?) Why don't all these limousine liberals put their money where their mouths are, to help kill off undesirables per the desires of PP founder Margaret Sanger?
Note: this post has been heavily revised - the first version to show up online was posted by mistake before I was finished. If you think it stinks now, well, imagine how bad it must have been...

Are you warped?

No, this isn't Cosmopolitan (what was your first clue?). But hey, why can't I offer one of those tests that have been used to persecute innocent men for decades?

Mine is quick and easy. There's just one question to read and answer. You may score yourself. Now get your #2 pencils ready and begin:

1. Do you think this story is funny?

Single mother of quadruplets

Being a first-time mother is a load. Doing so without a mate is tougher. Doing it at 39 is that much worse. Now multiply that by 4 and you know what it's like to be Beth Goodman. Her friends have set up a web site here with information about the babies and how to help.

How did I run across this? I couldn't find the remote when Oprah came on. But it was all worth while - Oprah visited Beth and the babies and was bathing Cason when he squirted her right between the eyes.

Nerd's eye view of Google infrastructure

Right here.

You know who you are

Don't let your kids record your answering machine messages. After a few times it just isn't cute anymore.

Yet another outrage from our friends the Muslims

I don't want to hear another peep about oppression of Muslims until the mofos who did this are caught.

How long before it gets blamed on "the Jews"?

Meet the NRO gang in DC

If you’re in DC next Friday, come by Fado’s Irish Pub in Chinatown and hang and drink with the NRO gang for our inaugural celebration. That’s where we’ll be hanging out from 5-8.

RSVP to thecorner@nationalreview.com to help us get a headcount for the good folks at the bar. Thanks much and see you there

The real Galileo

Right here.

Hint - he's not famous because his work was good science. He's famous for anti-Catholic teaching.

Instant character detector

It used to be that you had to observe someone for a while before you could tell if there was something wrong with them.

No, it's not skin color. It's not the shape of their skull, or a birthmark (666 or not). Just

look at their wrists.

Stolen from The Corner.

Mass malpractice?

System lowers breast augmentation re-operation rate by 17 percent

Some 20% of all breast augmentations require re-operations. I'm not surprised, but somehow I'm guessing that this doesn't get much publicity among the quarter-million-odd women who have it done every year.

Link stolen from, of all places, Living Code.

Premenstrual voice syndrome?

If I had a death wish I'd speculate about the exact mechanism, but:

PMVS describes a condition seen in a small number of women. It stands for premenstrual voice syndrome. During certain times of the month, the vocal chords of some woman undego apparently hormonal driven changes. There was a loss in suppleness of the vocal chords, resulting in "less vocal stability and an inability to sing high notes."

Yeah, I'm ripping off Richard Gayle again. It's almost like blogging.

The bell curve sometimes rings false

Consider the 4 men on Mount Rushmore. Now let's average up their accomplishments (don't ask me how, just do it). At least one of them and possibly as many as 3 could have accomplishments which were less than the average for the group. Ergo, according to some people's logic, those guys must really suck.

Well yeah, that's exaggerated a bit, but it's what's behind expressions like "50% the (doctors, lawyers, engineers,...) are from the bottom half of their class". Strictly speaking it's true, and in some contexts might even be clever. But mathematically it's thoroughly asinine - it conveys no information that's meaningful about the performance of the affected individuals. Similar logic would lead you to conclusions like 50% of the decathlon finalists in the Olympics are inferior athletes, or that 50% of the serial killers are better than average citizens, or maybe that the winners of corresponding events at the Olympics and the Special Olympics had comparable performances. The obvious error in all of the above cases is that the populations being considered were from very narrow classes.

This article from The New Yorker by Atul Gawande has been widely discussed lately. In it the author discusses how not all doctors and clinics perform equally well by various yardsticks, using cystic fibrosis treatment as an example.

I don't have time to write any more about it right now, but it's worth a read. More later.

A taste of medicine

Around the 70's there was a bestselling book about an English country doctor. The title eludes me at the moment, but I seem to remember that at one point the doctor smelled a patient's breath, noticed a hint of rotten apples, and from this correctly concluded that the patient had appendicitis.

A father noticed that his little girl always had really salty skin, to the point of calling her "my little potato chip". Then as she got older and "failed to thrive", he found out why she was so salty. Her body did not handle chlorine properly - she had cystic fibrosis. I'll link the article later when I'll have a lot more to say about it.

Lately a medblogger wrote of a patient that had been eating a lot of ice. Of all things, this often indicates an iron deficiency.

Incidentally, how do you think doctors discovered that the urine of diabetes mellitus patients was sweet?

Instrumentation and diagnostic equipment are terrific. But I have to wonder what is lost by using these artificial senses if they are used to the exclusion of the original 5.

Low standards

Glenn Reynolds is too easily impressed here. All Derbyshire did was express his faith in science, which is of no value in evaluating Intelligent Design.

We might do well to consider how blind science is and always must be. For instance, can anyone prove that gravity will behave the same way tomorrow? Of course you can't - science is based on observation, and you can't observe the future. You just have faith that gravity will be the same, but it probably hasn't even occurred to you that you're making an assumption.

But the hubris really shows when we hear prattle about a "god of the gaps". Right. We have this tiny little light on in the vastness of the universe, and we miss most of what's going on there, and someone speaks of our *scientific ignorance* as a "gap"?

Is there anything to Intelligent Design? Here's the correct, scientific answer - we don't know.

Boys will be boys but....

...no girl of Joe Kennedy's had better act like her male relatives.

Kathleen Kennedy was Joe Kennedy's oldest daughter. Legend has it that she was mentally disabled, so Daddy had her lobotomized when she was 23. She died this past week at 86.

Was she mentally disabled? Perhaps no more so than any of her siblings.
she was able to attend school and travel Europe without a chaperone. But she was sneaking out at night and returning to her convent school disheveled and drunk, the nuns feared she was picking up men and more, and she threw temper tantrums. Heavens, Joe Kennedy couldn't let anyone disgrace the family! If that meant that Rosemary would wind up in an infantlike state, mumbling words and sitting for hours staring at walls, well....I won't accuse even Joe Kennedy of expecting that outcome, but it was an awfully heavy-handed way to respond in any case.

Her troubles are over now finally, and she lives on as the inspiration for the Special Olympics.

Torture test

Yep, I'm ripping off Greyhawk's title too. Because it, like the corresponding post linked here about Abu Ghraib, is excellent. It's not just a blog post, it's an essential part of the history of the Iraq war.

Spinal cords repaired with adult stem cells

You can have your broken spinal cord repaired, but you'll pay through the nose.

Russian surgeons claim a world first after repairing broken spinal cords using stem cells taken from the patient's nose.

The Moscow team claim it is the first time anyone has been able to treat such severe spinal injuries by reconnecting spinal cord neural tissue.

As has always been true of stem cell miracles to date, the heroes were adult stem cells.

Perhaps if the late Christopher Reeve had lent his name and reputation to adult stem cell research, this type of progress might have been made soon enough to do him some good, while helping to prevent the further commoditization of human life.

Wish I'd said that

How is it that something so utterly appropriate can be considered unprofessional?