I picked up Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It’s a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood.
Emphasis mine. I’ll bet he typed this completely unironically. He also thinks that the Brookings Institution is a “right wing think tank.”
Amir Tehari writes about the boom outside Baghdad:
Newsweek has just hailed the emergence of a booming market economy in Iraq as “the mother of all surprises,” noting that “Iraqis are more optimistic about the future than most Americans are.” The reason, of course, is that Iraqis know what is going on in their country while Americans are fed a diet of exclusively negative reporting from Iraq.
Of course, it would have been better if he’s written “almost exclusively negative,” given that he was citing a positive Newsweek story as evidence.
And also of course, expect my anonymous and cowardly moronic leftist troll to show up in a minute or two with the daily “chickenhawk” stupidity, and demands that I go to Iraq.
Lawrence Altman describes the tremendous advances in medicine that we’ve made in the last half century:
Few people appreciate that medicine has advanced more since World War II than in all of earlier history. Newer drugs and de-vices and better understanding of disease mechanisms have vastly improved the care of patients. For male babies born in this country in 1960, the life expectancy was 66.6 years; for female babies, it was 73.1 years. In 2004, the figures, respectively, were 75.2 and 80.4. Medical advances account for much, though not all, of the gain.
My father had his first coronary in 1968, at the age of 45. He had a second one a little over ten years later, and died at age 55. I’m now several years past the age at which he had his first, and approaching the point at which I’ll live longer than he did, partly due to massive changes in lifestyle (he smoked and was overweight, and grew up on a typical Jewish diet of that era), but also because we can now monitor such things, and keep control of blood pressure and cholesterol, and if I do have a coronary event, I’ll have a much better chance of rapid and useful care than he did in either case. I continue to hope that I’ll live to see actuarial escape velocity.
Even more interestingly (at least to me), he also writes about the hubris and unjustified arrogance of the medical profession:
During my training, most professors said that all diseases were known. That hubris left doctors unprepared when AIDS came along in 1981 to cause one of history
I’m not a Christian, or an adherent to any other major religion, but I want to wish a very merry Christmas to all who welcome it. Probably no posting tomorrow. Enjoy your gifts.
If this happened tonight, it would make things seem a lot more like Christmas around here (currently in the eighties and muggy, with a forecast low in the seventies tonight). The current weather forecast for south Florida for New Years Eve is temperatures below freezing. We’ll see if that forecast holds up over the week.
[Christmas Eve update]
D’oh!
I’d forgotten that I’d switched my weather forecaster temporarily to Atlanta. Forecast for Boca is low of fifty degrees on New Years Eve…
In the course of searching for something else, I just ran across this old post, that I’d never seen before, in which I was astonished to read:
This brings me to Rand Simberg, a smart guy that is a big supporter of ID (that
…with a coarse-toothed comb?
Just wondering.
I’d never really given this much thought, but how come plants can contain proteins, but animals are a hundred percent noncarbohydrates?
[Update a while later]
A commenter points out I’m mistaken. OK, but that still seems like trace amounts, relative to how much protein that you can get from, say, soy. And when I look at any package of dead animal in the supermarket, it always has zero grams of carbs. So even if it’s not a hundred percent, there still seems to be a big disparity. Also, the example given, blood sugar, really part of the animal? I mean, yes, it can’t function without it, but it’s produced by absorbing food and has to be continually replenished. I was thinking about the animal itself. It seem like, for the most part, structurally, we’re meat, fat and bone, not sugar and spice and everything nice. (And does that mean that little girls contain more carbs than little boys, what with the snips and snails and puppy dog tails?)
A 29-year-old woman allegedly forged documents and assumed the identity of an Annapolis attorney, apparently for the sole purpose of having sex with an inmate at a Baltimore prison.
Colby Cosh remembers Carl Sagan.:
He continued to expound the gospel even as improved modelling showed that the likely effect would be closer to “nuclear autumn.” But his fancies came to an end in 1991 when he warned Western governments that ignition of the Kuwaiti oil fields by Saddam Hussein would be certain to induce the equivalent of nuclear winter. When Saddam lit the match, it was only Sagan’s prestige that fell to below zero. In his 1996 book The Demon- Haunted World, he all but acknowledged that his own “baloney detector” had suffered interference from his personal politics. Yet contemporary iconographers now claim that Sagan’s hypothesis, though wrong, frightened Mikhail Gorbachev so badly that Sagan can be credited with playing a “role” in ending the Cold War. (If you believe what the Soviet generals have to say on the subject, Ronald Reagan’s investments in missile-defence research — which Sagan fought to the point of civil disobedience– were more persuasive.)