OVO

Does anyone else think it is weird that they use the ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor’ in a car commercial?

Only Anarchists are Pretty.

From a remarkable Guardian Unlimited commentary by Ben Goldacre titled A Tonic for Sceptics: “Sceptics, and the placebo effect, are easily misunderstood. Since I’ve made a modest second career out of rubbishing alternative therapies (or rather the pseudoscience of the claims behind them), you might expect me to be pleased with a new analysis of 110 placebo-controlled randomised trials of homoeopathy, published in the Lancet, showing there is no evidence that homeopathic tablets perform any better than placebos. Obviously, it’s an important and useful finding. But it misses the mark.

“The placebo is arguably the most interesting phenomena in medicine, because it goes far beyond the effectiveness of little white sugar pills, into the cultural meaning of treatment. It has been shown, for example, that green sugar pills are a more effective treatment for anxiety than red sugar pills, because of the cultural meaning, we might parsimoniously assume, of the colours green and red.

“Likewise, studies have found that salt-water injections can be a more effective placebo treatment than white sugar pills – not, I might add, because there is anything particularly useful about salt water injections, but because the ceremony of performing an injection is a far more invasive, authoritative and dramatic intervention.

“It gets far stranger. A placebo operation in the 1950s was found to be as effective for the treatment of angina as the real operation it was being compared with. Reading the paper 50 years later, the most striking part is the discussion section, where they quietly drop the operation and nobody stands up to point out the incredibly strange discovery that a placebo operation works for anything, let alone angina.

“Branding, of course, is the key to the efficacy of little white sugar pills. Marketing, after all, is nothing if not engineered cultural meaning. A four-way comparison among sugar pills and aspirin, in either unbranded aspirin boxes or packaging mocked up to look like the Disprin brand, showed that the brand-name packaging works, because of the huge wealth of cultural background material – the adverts, the word-of-mouth endorsement, the childhood experiences – that packaging plays on. The change in packaging had almost as big an impact on pain as whether the pills actually had any drug in them.”

It take a good deal of science to run a railroad. There are all sorts of challenges in mathematics, physics, geography, cartography, ecology, metallurgy, and on and on and on. You don’t want just anybody building bridges over towns or blasting tunnels through mountains. You want men and women of science. It also takes a good deal of money to run a railroad. Materials to buy, rails and trains and stations to build, permits to file, oh goodness but it takes some money to run a railroad. So I’m sure the Cascadia Project was glad to get a USD $9.35 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Cascadia Project wants to build ‘a long-term initiative to develop balanced, seamless, and expanded transportation systems among Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.’ Sounds good to me! They’ve got the money, now let’s look at the science. Hmmm… it looks like the Cascadia Project is an initiative of the Discovery Institute. They have that science channel on television, right? No, that’s not right. The Discovery Institute is ‘a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank headquartered in Seattle and dealing with national and international affairs.’ That sounds fine. What sort of thinking do they do in this think tank? Let’s see… oh my, you mean to say that The Discovery Institute is the main agent behind ‘intelligent design?’ Is that the sort of science you want running the railroads? Bill and Melinda, what were you thinking?

In the movie 28 Days Later, ‘animal rights’ activists steal animals from a laboratory only to learn the animals had a fatal disease that can affect humans. In Manawatu Australia… [link].

I likes me some Matthew Barney. So huzzah for Drawing Restraint 9, a new movie!

Long-time readers of American Samizdat should remember this post from February 2005, which included this quote from the New York Daily News: “New York City health officials are investigating whether a baby boy died after contracting herpes from the rabbi who circumcised him, the Daily News has learned. The probe was launched after city officials realized that three infants in the city who tested positive for herpes last year all were circumcised by Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer. The Rockland County-based Fischer is a prominent mohel – someone who performs religious circumcisions. Under Jewish law, a mohel is supposed to draw blood from the circumcision wound to remove impurities. While many mohels do it by hand, Fischer uses a practice little known outside ultra-Orthodox communities called metzizah bi peh, in which the mohel uses his mouth. On Oct. 16, 2004, Fischer performed a bris, or religious circumcision, on twins. Ten days later, one infant died of herpes, and the other tested positive for the virus, according to papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court by city lawyers.”

What has the above-mentioned investigation revealed? Thank goodness, the most important aspect of this story – the feelings of Jewish adult men who pass along fatal diseases to infants as they suck blood from their penis – has been respected. Some quotes from the New York Times: “A circumcision ritual practiced by some Orthodox Jews has alarmed city health officials, who say it may have led to three cases of herpes – one of them fatal – in infants. But after months of meetings with Orthodox leaders, city officials have been unable to persuade them to abandon the practice. The city’s intervention has angered many Orthodox leaders, and the issue has left the city struggling to balance its mandate to protect public health with the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. [...] Since February, the mohel, Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, 57, has been under court order not to perform the ritual in New York City while the health department is investigating whether he spread the infection to the infants. Pressure from Orthodox leaders on the issue led Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and health officials to meet with them on Aug. 11. The mayor’s comments on his radio program the next day seemed meant to soothe all parties and not upset a group that can be a formidable voting bloc: ‘We’re going to do a study, and make sure that everybody is safe and at the same time, it is not the government’s business to tell people how to practice their religion.’” [...] The use of suction to stop bleeding dates back centuries and is mentioned in the Talmud. The safety of direct oral contact has been questioned since the 19th century, and many Orthodox and nearly all non-Orthodox Jews have abandoned it. Dr. Frieden said he hoped the rabbis would voluntarily switch to suctioning the blood through a tube, an alternative endorsed by the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest group of Orthodox rabbis. But the most traditionalist groups, including many Hasidic sects in New York, consider oral suction integral to God’s covenant with the Jews requiring circumcision, and they have no intention of stopping. ‘The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practiced for over 5,000 years,’ said Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after the meeting with the mayor. ‘We do not change. And we will not change.’ David Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization of Orthodox Jews, said that metzitzah b’peh is probably performed more than 2,000 times a year in New York City. [...] The inconsistent treatment of Rabbi Fischer himself indicates the confusion metzitzah b’peh has sown among health authorities, who typically regulate circumcisions by doctors but not religious practitioners. In Rockland County, where Rabbi Fischer lives in the Hasidic community of Monsey, he has been barred from performing oral suction. But the state health department retracted a request it had made to Rabbi Fischer to stop the practice. And in New Jersey, where Rabbi Fischer has done some of his 12,000 circumcisions, the health authorities have been silent.”

And there you have it. As long as you blame an invisible monster that lives in the sky, it sure seems like you can get away with most anything. The state regulates circumcision, except when you are acting as the agent of an invisible monster that lives in the sky. There is cause for concern in the health of the public, but the feelings of those who are acting as the agent of an invisible monster that lives in the sky are more important. Three infected babies, one dead, all had blood sucked from their penis, but it was done in the name of an invisible monster that lives in the sky so it’s okay. Suck blood from a baby’s penis as pornography, go to prison for life. Suck blood from a baby’s penis and blame an invisible monster that lives in the sky, write it off your taxes.

I advocate the withering away of religion under the twin spotlights of reason and scorn. How about you?

[first published at American Samizdat]

“Stupid Stuff, Faster!” See you at the Portland Adult Soapbox Derby.

Want to get some postage stamps with an image of your choice on them? Try PhotoStamps or ZazzleStamps. The cost is the same, both encourage you to make ‘special deliveries’ (GET IT?), both have pictures of weddings and babies and babies and weddings and puppies to inspire people who don’t know what to put on a stamp. And neither would be happy if you tried something like this.

The Pricelessware list is a compilation of software collected through a yearly vote by the participants of the “alt.comp.freeware” newsgroup. It is a list of what people have voted as “the best of the best in Freeware”.

Domino Pressure. Shockwave game, neat.

Kax. You’re going to see many copies of this game in the near future.

Coil lyrics, A-H, I-Z.

New York Changing. Fifty pairs of photographs by contemporary photographer Douglas Levere and world-renown photographer Berenice Abbott. Abbott’s iconic photographs, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, were taken in the 1930s and first published in her landmark book, Changing New York (1939). More than six decades later, Levere used the same camera Abbott had used and returned to the same locations at the same time of day and the same time of year. Indeed, he took on the role of detective as he successfully sought to understand and replicate every aspect of Abbott’s process. When seen side by side, these two remarkable bodies of work reveal much about the city and the nature of urban transformation. Perhaps more than anything else, these carefully crafted images powerfully suggest that in New York, the only constant is change.

Science Daily reports: “Results from the first long-term study of online videogame playing may be surprising. Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players’ ‘robust exposure’ to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression. [...] Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said. Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.”

If exposure to a ‘message’ were able to cause a behavior to occur, then we would all be falling in love from all the love songs on the radio; we would all be religious from all the religious messages in the media; we would all be fashionable and physically fit; we would all be in the know and popular from reading this blog; and so on. Media never causes a behavior to occur.