A bit of humor, and something unfair to McCain

First for some humor.

Friendly Atheist has a blurb about a female tennis star who did a photo spread for Playboy. He posted this photo with his article:

That reminds me a bit of this old Skip Jenkins Show post which featured this photo:

Of course, who could forget Jesus Jeans:

Hmmm, I suppose that is one way to sell Jesus to straight males.

Bush of Batman Were these things said by Bush or Batman?

Hat tip to Liberalsmustdie.

Politics

Fact Check points out that the premise of the reporter’s question is flawed:

Planned Parenthood is running a TV ad showing John McCain painfully groping for an answer to a reporter’s question: “It’s unfair that health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. Do you have an opinion on that?”

McCain had good reason to be flustered. The premise of the reporter’s question is a myth. We couldn’t find any data that show a disparity between health insurance companies that cover Viagra and those that cover birth control. The full range of contraceptives, in fact, are covered by more than 86 percent of private insurance plans written for employers. [...]

The ad implies there is a significant disparity between the number of insurance plans that cover Viagra and those that cover birth control. But that’s not the case. A 2004 report by the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute found that in 2002, 86 percent of the plans that insurance companies typically wrote for employers covered the full range of approved reversible contraceptive methods (birth control pills, hormone injections, implants, IUDs and diaphragms), and only 2 percent covered no methods at all.

The worry that Viagra, but not birth control, is being included in health care plans is out-of-date, according to Adam Sonfield, who coauthored the report. He says that when Viagra initially became available and insurers began to cover it, “there was concern that this was the case and that insurance companies really were covering erectile dysfunction drugs but were not covering contraception.” This concern, he says, helped spur efforts to get contraception coverage mandated in 27 states, and contraceptive coverage rates shot up as a result. Sonfield’s study, which asked insurance companies about employer-sponsored plans, found that coverage of contraceptive methods had tripled from 1993 to 2002. Sonfield says that the number of plans covering birth control likely has continued to increase over the last six years, though he stresses that U.S. health care is still short of complete coverage.

There probably are, however, some insurers who do cover erectile dysfunction drugs and don’t cover contraception, Sonfield told us. Guttmacher estimates that about half of all Americans with employer-provided coverage work for employers that self-insure, paying their employees’ medical claims out of pocket. And it is certainly a fact that some of these employers have, at least in the past, paid for Viagra but not birth control. For instance, in 2005 Union Pacific Railroad, a self-insuring company, was sued because it covered erectile dysfunction drugs but not contraceptives. A 2007 appellate court decision ruled that the company did not have to provide birth control coverage, but by that time it had begun to offer coverage under the terms of an earlier court decision. Other companies may still cover Viagra but not birth control, although in 2000 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that plans of this sort violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII applies to employers with 15 or more employees, employment agencies, labor organizations, and state and local governments.

As for Viagra, independent studies of coverage are sparse, but the ones that exist don’t show that the drug is covered more than birth control.

But it is true that McCain voted against mandating that birth control be covered by insurance plans:

When we asked Planned Parenthood whether insurance companies were denying coverage for contraceptives, the group pointed us to the text of a 2003 amendment introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), which would have prevented insurance companies from denying such coverage. The text of the amendment includes the claim that “half of traditional indemnity plans and preferred provider organizations, 20 percent of point-of-service networks, and 7 percent of health maintenance organizations cover no contraceptive methods other than sterilization.” This could be referring to a 1993 Guttmacher study showing that 49 percent of indemnity plans did not cover contraceptives, and that less than 20 percent of large-group indemnity plans and PPOs and less than 40 percent of point-of-service plans and HMOs covered the full range of reversible contraception options. By the time the Murray amendment was written, that information was 10 years out of date. Now, it’s 15 years old and irrelevant, given Guttmacher’s more recent findings.

Incidentally, McCain voted against the Murray amendment. In 2005 he voted against a similar amendment, this one proposed by Hillary Clinton. Whether or not he lacks an informed view, as he said, he has in the past opposed legislation to enact a federal mandate for contraceptive coverage.

So asking McCain why he voted “no” is ok.

Obama’s Berlin Speech…

You didn’t think that I would miss this, did you?

(more here)

More photos here.

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“A World that Stands as One”

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father – my grandfather – was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning – his dream – required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof.

On that day, much of this continent still lay in ruin. The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall. The Soviet shadow had swept across Eastern Europe, while in the West, America, Britain, and France took stock of their losses, and pondered how the world might be remade.

This is where the two sides met. And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.

The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.

And that’s when the airlift began – when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”

People of the world – look at Berlin!

Look at Berlin, where Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle.

Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security.

Look at Berlin, where the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate insist that we never forget our common humanity.

People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

Sixty years after the airlift, we are called upon again. History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall – a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope – walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers – dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.

In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them. Yet, in the absence of Soviet tanks and a terrible wall, it has become easy to forget this truth. And if we’re honest with each other, we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny.

In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common. In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe’s role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth – that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.

Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations – and all nations – must summon that spirit anew.

This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it. This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it. If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York. If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope.

This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century – in this city of all cities – we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet. This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all.

This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East. My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions. We must support the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy, and the Israelis and Palestinians who seek a secure and lasting peace. And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations – including my own – will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world. We must remember that the Cold War born in this city was not a battle for land or treasure. Sixty years ago, the planes that flew over Berlin did not drop bombs; instead they delivered food, and coal, and candy to grateful children. And in that show of solidarity, those pilots won more than a military victory. They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust – not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here.

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here – what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur?

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived – at great cost and great sacrifice – to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom – indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

Those are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. Those aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. It is because of those aspirations that the airlift began. It is because of those aspirations that all free people – everywhere – became citizens of Berlin. It is in pursuit of those aspirations that a new generation – our generation – must make our mark on history.

People of Berlin – and people of the world – the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us build on our common history, and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world.
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If you want a hoot, go to the Huffington Post coverage of the speech and read the comments; the wingnuts really have their undies in a bunch!

Oh yes, how wonderful it is to hear those from another country chanting USA, USA!!!!

Of course, there are some who just can’t stomach that.

Look, I know that not everyone will agree with Obama’s policies. When you cut to the chase, he is a mainstream Democrat and perhaps his views are a bit more liberal than yours (and less liberal than mine). But hey, while he is far from perfect, he is a reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful guy, and would it really hurt to have the USA actually liked by much of the rest of the world?

You know, there was a time during my lifetime when we weren’t considered bullies and demons (as a country, not as individuals). We were once looked up to by much of the world, or at least well thought of. Wouldn’t it be nice for that to happen again? Wouldn’t having allies actually help us with our “war on terror”?

Call outs to the blogs: Sandwalk and Anthropology.net

Workout notes 1 mile walking, taught Ms. Nancy’s yoga-lattes class, then 5.1 more miles of walking in 1:04. Basically, I warmed up for .75 miles, then did the rest at 2 minutes on, 1 off. That got me a 13:15 3-loops of the gooseloop, and a final mile of 11:51, which included my yelling at a swooping red winged black bird. The male was somewhat aggressive and stayed with me for about 40-50 meters, but didn’t actually beak me. Still, this can’t last too much longer, I think.

About the title Those two blogs: sandwalk and anthropology.net are blogs run by professionals; the former is a bio-chemist and the latter is run by anthropologists. I’d like to shout out a “thank you for letting interested lay-people participate” to those who run these blogs.

I’ll comment on what has gone in Sandwalk lately:

if you follow popular accounts of evolution, you may have heard the metaphor: Climbing Mount Improbable.

Here is a one hour lecture on this topic:

Sandwalk talked about this metaphor and found it wanting:

To begin with, you use the Mt. Improbable image as a metaphor for evolution. This is misleading since evolution encompasses more than just adaptation. It would be difficult to apply the “Climbing Mt. Improbable” metaphor to the organization of our genome, for example, since it’s clearly not well-designed and could never be characterized as the peak of an adaptive landscape.

But even as a metaphor for adaptation the image is less than perfect. Most readers will see the peak of Mt. Improbable as a goal of adaptation, implying that evolution somehow recognizes that there is an ultimate perfection that all organisms seek to achieve by reaching the summit. As you well know (I hope) there are very few (any?) species that are perfectly adapted to their environment. If this were true, adaptation would cease because the species resides on the summit of Mt. Improbable.

Thus, in the real world, species tend to move about in the foothills rather than attempt to scale the highest peak. As long as they are good enough to survive and reproduce that’s all that’s required.

Yes, some individuals within the population might acquire a mutation that makes them a little more fit but in most cases the selective advantage will be too small to make much of a difference. I don’t believe there’s any great pressure to get to the top of Mt. Improbable. That’s why we usually don’t see perfection in nature. And it explains why most organisms do not look as though they have been designed by some intelligent being. If anything the “design” looks more like a Rube Goldberg creation, and I doubt that anyone would say that those creations represent the peak of perfection.

I prefer a different view of evolution, one that emphasizes chance and accident [Evolution by Accident]. For me, the metaphor of “Climbing Mt. Improbable” is quite wrong as a metaphor of evolution.

Main points (as I see them)

1. Evolution involves more than adaptation. For example, some mutations become fixed in populations just due to plain old randomness (e. g., consider the so-called “circle species”)

2. Adaptations are not only “imperfect”; they are not necessarily “optimal”; there is no “optimizing” force in play. Where it is true that if one organism (animal? ) benefits from a mutation then it will do better than those who don’t have the mutation; there is no reason to believe that what results is somehow “optimal”.

3. Having “mount improbable” there might conjure up the notion is that there is some perfect adaptation out there that will somehow be achieved in small steps.

Therefore I think that a more accurate metaphor might be: creating mount improbable: that is seeing the mountain as having been made, rather than climbed, by the evolutionary process and realizing that “getting there” involved many small changes, be they adaptations or random mutations that proved to be neutral.

Now for something from Anthropology.net: this article explores possible links between cultural and biological evolution. Here is one part of the article:

Whitfield summarizes research by Simon Kirby, which I didn’t know about but find fascinating.

“Kirby has asked subjects to learn a nonsense language and then teach it to new subjects, and so on. He found that the randomness quickly became regularized, as people unconsciously shaped words into something easier to remember and use, and devised rules to come up with words for things they hadn’t seen. Such a process may be at work in the spontaneous emergence over the past few decades of two sign languages—Nicaraguan Sign Language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. Each of these has moved rapidly from a system of gestures to a fully fledged language with conventions for grammar and sentence structure. Kirby plans to use them as a test bed for his ideas about how structure in language can rapidly emerge.”

In the piece, Whitfield also got to ask Mark Pagel’s what his thoughts are with synthesizing ‘the two’. Pagel is an evolutionary biologist. He was one of the coauthors of the paper with Simon Greenhill and Atkinson. He’s also published an earlier paper with Atkinson titled, “Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history.” Pagel responded saying,

“Languages are extraordinarily like genomes. We think there could be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those of genetic evolution.”

Sort of Rest Day

Training notes I’ve been tired over the past few days (escalation of swimming?) and so will teach my class (as a sub) and perhaps walk for an hour-70 minutes afterwards. I did get some sleep last night and that felt good.

Here are a couple of articles I found interesting:

Anecdotal evidence: often trumps science in the minds of many. Perhaps this is why we hang on to superstitions (e. g., searching for our lucky shirt to wear to that race, etc.) So, the question is: why is this hard wired into us? Here is the guess: when we were evolving, we may have found that our friend got sick after eating those funny berries. So, we thought: “those berries are bad for you” and avoided them.

Of course, it may be that the sickness was a coincidence or that our buddy was allergic to those berries.

Still, we weren’t really harmed by avoiding those berries (in most cases).

On the other hand, if we ate those berries and they really weren’t bad for us, we suffered and perhaps didn’t survive to reproduce and pass on our genes.

Statistically speaking, if our base assumption were “those berries are safe for me” and we inorrectly rejected that assumption (even if they were safe), we may have made a type I error but it didn’t harm us. But a type II error (not rejecting our false base assumption) would be devastating.

So, in short, scientific tests work at avoiding type I errors (hence a high threshold, often 90-99 percent) but we are programed to avoid type II errors.

Here is the Scientific American article.

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

Take wheatgrass juice … if you can stomach it. The claims for its curative powers are bottomless. According to the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database (the “bible” of natural medicines: www.naturaldatabase.com), wheatgrass is “used therapeutically for increasing hemoglobin production, improving blood sugar disorders such as diabetes, preventing tooth decay, improving wound healing, and preventing bacterial infections.” And that’s not all. “It is also used orally for common cold, cough and bronchitis, fever and colds, inflammation of mouth and pharynx, tendency to infection, gout, liver disorders, ulcerative colitis, cancer, rheumatic pain, and chronic skin problems.”

The alleged salubrious effects of wheatgrass were promoted in the 1940s by a Lithuanian immigrant to Boston named Ann Wigmore, a holistic health practitioner who was inspired by the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar, recounted in Daniel 4:33, in which “he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.” Wigmore also noted that dogs and cats eat grass when they are ill and feel better after regurgitation, which gave her the idea of the wheatgrass detox. Because we have fewer stomachs than cows do, she hatched the idea of blending freshly cut wheatgrass into juice form for easier digestion—through either orifice—a practice still employed today. She believed that the enzymes and chlorophyll in wheatgrass constitute its healing powers.

According to William T. Jarvis, a retired professor of public health at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine and founder of the National Council against Health Fraud (www.ncahf.org), this is all baloney: “Enzymes are complex protein molecules produced by living organisms exclusively for their own use in promoting chemical reactions. Orally ingested enzymes are digested in the stomach and have no enzymatic activity in the eater.” Jarvis adds, “The fact that grass-eating animals are not spared from cancer, despite their large intake of fresh chlorophyll, seems to have been lost on Wigmore. In fact, chlorophyll cannot ‘detoxify the body’ because it is not absorbed.”

The relation between this hard-wiring of the brain and the propensity to swallow organized superstitions is obvious.

Can making decisions tire your brain? Yes! This might explain why some who think hard need some sort of brain relaxing activity (e. g., pleasure reading, physical stuff, etc.)

Political Has the surge worked? I’ll be blunt: I lack the expertise to give an accurate answer to this question, though I can say that violence has gone down. But to get a picture that describes some of the many factors that should be considered, read this article.

That still leaves the question: Has the surge really worked? I suppose if one looks exclusively at short-run casualty figures in Iraq, one could argue it did. It would work even better if the United States could send in another 200,000 troops. But the United States does not have another 200,000 troops to send in. And its collaborating countries have been withdrawing their troops, not sending more in. Of course, if you bribe a whole lot of Sunni sheiks, they will be on the U.S. side for the time being. And if you institutionalize ethnic expulsions, as in Baghdad, there is less room for some of the kinds of inter-Iraqi violence that had been previously occurring. And if Moktada al-Sadr thinks it is wiser to bide his time, there will be a temporary reduction in the kind of violence that had been occurring before.

But look at what has happened elsewhere in the Middle East because of the surge. In November of 2006, the United States and NATO had been congratulating themselves on the success of their efforts in Afghanistan. But since then, two things have happened. The number of U.S. casualties has soared, passing now those in Iraq. So has violence against Afghans. Suddenly the Taliban are back in a big way. And now, for the first time since 2001, the pundits are talking about the possibility of the U.S. losing the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

In short, when we discussing the questions we should consider:

1. Could the troops have been better used elsewhere and
2. What other factors (bribery, sectarian and ethnic cleansing, other programs) could have been involved? (think: “design of experiments and confounding factors”)

That is why I like the way Obama handles the question; he discusses these factors.