08.07.05
Posted in General at 7:00 pm by Clay
There are a lot of very good reasons to criticize president Bush.
The fact that he exercises a lot is not one of them.
Unbelievably, Jonathan Chait(Senior Editor of The New Republic) did that in a guest column of the Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 issue of the Capital Times.
To quote:
“…Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders ont he creepy. Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise. His full schedule is not publicly available. The few peeks we get at Bush’s daily routine usually come when some sort of disaster prods the White House Press Office to reveal what the president was doing ‘at the time.’ …
Bush’s insistence that the entire populace follow his example, and that his staff join him on a long run carries about it the faint whiff of a cult of personality. It also shows how out of touch he is. It’s nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.”
My first thought: Boy, Jonathan is grumpy. He needs to get some exercise.
That’s right. Exercise gives you more energy, a better-looking body, better health, improves at least some types of depression by as much as drugs or therapy, and is all in all extremely good for you.
Except when it kills people like Douglas Adams, but we’ll ignore that for now.
So, we have a nation full of couch potatoes, well over half of us being overweight, with a quarter of us being obese. The president evidently exercises around the amount that the government health gurus suggest, and somehow that’s bad?
That’s an unhealthy mindset. We need to get out of our cars and actually use our muscles occasionally. Thank goodness the president is leading the way and setting a fine example on how to balance work and life.
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08.06.05
Posted in General at 3:32 pm by Clay
Alternative medicine is problematic. It’s evidently medicine where you take anecdotal evidence, add a religion-like fervor, and then ignore all evidence to the contrary.
I say this, not because I’m against alternative medicine, but because I’m against continuing to use and do things that don’t work.
Research and development are good. If someone has an alternative medicine that they believe would work to solve some problem, they should be like the drug companies, and do efficacy testing on the drug. In other words, see if the herbs/treatment/whatever work, rather than finding a few people who believe they benefitted, and trumpeting that anecdotal evidence.
This is my problem with Bernadine Healy’s “On Health” article in the August 8th, 2005 issue(p56) of U.S. News & World Report. She considers the recent study on Echinacea where college-age people were sequestered and given a cold virus. They also were given Echinacea, starting at different points before and after the infection.
In that study, Echinacea made absolutely no difference.
So, what’s her response? Is it, “Well, evidently Echinacea has no effect in every tested circumstance, so the burden of proof is now on the pro-Echinacea groups to design and execute a decent study to back up their currently unfounded claims.”?
No, it’s, “Only one species of echinacea was tested. …. claims the herb extracts used were given at too low a dose …. The very same arguments would be raised if clinical research on mainstream therapies delivered such negative results. And in much of the world, herbs are mainstream.”
So, because people have been using a drug for many years that have no observable benefit, we shouldn’t “spade the little flower under yet”?
No. Echinacea does not work for colds. Yes, it is possible that under some certain conditions it may do something. It’s also possible that under some certain conditions it will kill you. Do I have any basis for stating that Echinacea kills people? No. Neither is there any basis for stating that Echinacea works.
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08.03.05
Posted in Wall Street Journal Opinion at 1:32 pm by Clay
“Bush Starts to Deliver for Big Business”
Wednesday, August 3, 2005, page A2 in the Wall Street Journal
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Posted in Wall Street Journal Opinion at 1:29 pm by Clay
On Monday, July 11, 2005, the Wall Street Journal(a great paper,
really) had a mind-boggling opinion article titled “Lessons of
Srebrenica”.
Now, why was this mind-boggling? It’s not really because of what the
article talks about; it’s a look back on what happened ten years ago in
Srebrenica, where slow and indecisive (in)action helped cause a
slaughter of roughly 7,200, as well as leading to further problems in
the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
So, the Wall Street Journal is on the side of intervention. Which, I’d
imagine, includes nation-building and attacking sovereign nations,
which I’m assuming the WSJ previously came out against when it was
Clinton doing the attacking.
And that’s the problem with this article. Sure, they’re on the side of
intervention now, and they, perhaps rightly, attack President Clinton
for “allow[ing] the Balkans to bleed for three years before he ‘did
something’”, but nowhere do they mention how and why the Republicans
hated the idea.
The WSJ finishes with, “It has become trendy in certain circles to
speak of ‘No More Srebrenicas’ …. If these people really believe the
slogan, then the policy to make it work already has a name. It’s
called the Bush Doctrine.”
When Bush campaigned for office before the 2000 election, he was
against the idea of nation-building. What changed things was 9/11.
After 9/11, the U.S. gained a lot more reasons to send our military
around the world. It’s not terribly fair to blame Clinton for acting
in a certain way during a different time; it’s like blaming Reagan for
terrorism because of his support of the Taliban.
As a personal aside, I disliked Clinton’s foreign policy. That
being said, it’s not a fair attack on his foreign policy to be
basically making the argument, “Clinton didn’t respond well enough to
9/11″, as 9/11 hadn’t happened, and it’s unlikely the Republican
congress or the American public would have been willing to support a
large American engagement where American interests were minimal to
non-existent.
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