Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2011

“Obesity crusaders” use “inherently flawed instruments, such as BMI and apple-body shapes, to misinform the public”

Filed under: Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Patrick Basham and John Luik address the manifest failings of the public health crusade against obesity:

Since the anti-obesity campaign is allegedly motivated by scientific findings, it would seem reasonable and prudent to make doubly sure that those claims are factual and trustworthy. Yet, we continue to find that the case against obesity is significantly flawed. Not only are the claims of an obesity epidemic often wildly exaggerated, but the science linking weight to unfavourable mortality outcomes is also frequently nonexistent or distorted.

[. . .]

As Danesh suggests, other researchers have suggested concentrating on a measurement of the waist alone, while many cling to BMI, which calculates obesity based upon a weight-to-height ratio. Because of its easy applicability, BMI is universally used in officially defining obesity, despite its manifest shortcomings. The BMI is wholly arbitrary and has no scientifically valid connection with mortality.

“Obesity crusaders” are what we call the individuals who manufactured the obesity-epidemic story in the first place and continue, through application of inherently flawed instruments, such as BMI and apple-body shapes, to misinform the public. They are a relatively small group of public-health officials in the US, the UK, the EU, and the World Health Organisation, assorted academics (very many with close ties to the weight-loss and pharmaceutical industry), the International Obesity Task Force, and a collection of so-called public-interest science groups.

How are these obesity crusaders reacting to the unambiguously good news published in The Lancet? Surely, they rejoice at the fact there is one less thing for a health-conscious population to fret over? No, they are not in celebratory mood. Quite the contrary. The obesity crusaders did not waste any time on the New Good News; after all, the Old-Time Religion continues to serve them so well.

It gets worse for the “fat=early death” meme:

There is little credible scientific evidence that supports the claims that being overweight or obese leads to an early death. For example, Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in the US population there were more premature deaths among those who are normal weight than those who are overweight. Indeed, in this study, Americans who were overweight were those most likely to live the longest.

In the American Journal of Public Health, Jerome Gronniger found that men in the “normal” weight category exhibited a mortality rate as high as that of men in the moderately obese category; men in the “overweight” category clearly had the lowest mortality risk.

February 18, 2011

QotD: Drink an imported beer and make Mother Gaia cry

Filed under: Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers partner and renewables specialist Michael Timar:

    “If someone saves money from having cavity wall insulation put into their house, but then spends it on something which produces carbon emissions in its manufacturing, or takes an extra journey, then the environmental benefit is lost.

    “You have to think about what the effect is all the way down the chain — that if you use less, you might actually end up consuming more.”

    Mr Timar warned that people who had saved £100 by cutting their energy bills could use the cash to fund extra leisure activities, such as drinking imported alcoholic beverages in bars — or electronic gadgets, which are often shipped from overseas.

This is beautiful:

    It has been calculated by environmental experts that one single bottle of imported beer uses 900g of CO2 — wiping out two-thirds of the annual carbon savings made by replacing all light bulbs in an average home with energy-saving models.

Drink two and you’re in credit.

Tim Blair, “Tim Blair Blog: DON’T DO ANYTHING”, Daily Telegraph, 2011-02-18

January 27, 2011

UK government officials implicated in ADE-651 bomb detector scam

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

Remember the ADE-651? The bomb detector that could “detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills”? It now appears that British army personnel and civil servants were involved in the effort to sell the bogus device:

The government has admitted that the Army and UK civil servants helped market so-called “bomb detectors”, which did not work, around the world.

Export of the “magic wand” detectors to Iraq and Afghanistan was banned on 27 January 2010 because of the threat they posed to British and allied troops.

The move followed a BBC Newsnight investigation showing they could not detect explosives — or anything else.

Now Newsnight has learned that they are still being sold around the globe.

You can understand the attraction to potential scammers, as the things cost £11 to make (at most) and can be sold for £15,000 to unsuspecting dupes (or willing accomplices, splitting the profits) representing foreign governments.

January 17, 2011

Another reason to view self-reported study data with caution

Filed under: Britain, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

There’s a reason that studies that depend on direct observation/measurement often differ in their results from studies that depend on self-reporting by the group being studied — because people lie:

Many mothers are under so much pressure to appear like perfect parents that they cover up how much television their children watch or what they cook their families, according to a survey.

Such “white lies” also extend to how much “quality time” mothers spend with their partner, website Netmums said its survey of 5,000 people suggested.

The parenting site said mothers often made each other feel “inadequate”.

[. . .]

Almost two-thirds of those surveyed said they had been less than honest with other mothers about how well they were coping and almost half covered up financial worries.

Almost a quarter of mothers admitted to downplaying how much television their children actually watched — and one in five “span a yarn” over how long they played with their children.

January 15, 2011

Toronto really isn’t part of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

If Toronto was part of Canada, why would a forecast of five centimetres of snow (that’s about two inches) require a special weather statement from Environment Canada?

Really, Toronto? Five measly centimetres and you need a special “OMG! Snow!” notice from the weather folks? That’s too silly for parody.

I mentioned it to Elizabeth before starting this post, and she suggested that it’s another attempt to set up the media template for next year: “Look at the huge increase in special weather statements for the GTA over the last few years. Clearly this proves [global warming | climate change | climate chaos] is real.”

January 12, 2011

Another eco-panic? Must be Wednesday, then.

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

James Delingpole falls for the latest cry of ecological doom:

The Zoological Society of London has drawn up a hit list of the 10 attractive coral species most likely to die quite soon. Well, of course it has. Nothing suits the ZSL’s spirit of misanthropy and catastrophism better than another mournful litany of all the species loss which is bound to occur as a result of mankind’s ongoing crime of having the temerity to exist.

Look: those of us on the other side of the argument like corals too. The difference is, we see them as something to celebrate and enjoy rather than things to be regarded solely through a prism of guilt, self-hatred and apocalyptic despair. Naturalists never used to talk this way. Until the Nazis — and, before them, the German romantics — started poisoning the wells, nature was something we could all happily appreciate without being made to feel by yet another eco-fascist that we were personally going to be the cause of its imminent demise.

If the ZSL wants to make a list of pretty corals, why can’t it just distribute it with facts about their habitats and their formation, maybe with lots of nice shiny pictures for us all to wonder at? Why must they lace their message with doom and misanthropy?

I suppose their excuse will be that these corals ARE endangered and that something must be done by YESTERDAY at the latest. But is this another of those overblown eco-panics in the manner of the floating island of plastic bags twice the size of Texas which in fact turned out to be 1/100th the size of Texas?

It’s an unfortunate fact that in order to get media attention to their cause du jour, the situation not only has to be defined as simply as possible, it also has to be positioned in such a way that the media want to get the message out. The easiest way to accomplish this is to go apocalyptic: doom, Doom, DOOM!

December 20, 2010

Boris trims his sails

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

James Delingpole has a bit of fun at London mayor Boris Johnson’s expense:

. . . what sounds like a fervent declaration of faith in the Warmist creed may on closer examination be a perfectly innocuous statement of the bleeding obvious cunningly calculated to appease all Boris’s rentseeking chums in the City who stand to make a fortune from the Great Carbon Scam and would be most displeased if the Mayor of London were to show signs of wobbling.

Yet wobbling is, of course, exactly what Boris is doing. Or rather — remember, this is the man so ambitious he makes Alexander The Great look like Olive from On The Buses — he is slyly repositioning himself to take advantage of the inevitable collapse of public faith in the Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Ponzi Scheme.

All those thousands of people who’ve had their Christmas ruined as a result of Heathrow airport’s pathetic inability to operate in the snow; all those thousands who have been stranded shivering for eight hours at a stretch on our motorways; all those thousands who can’t use their local municipal sports club because the staff — as is the wont of public sector workers — can’t be bothered to allow themselves to be inconvenienced by the inclement conditions; all those people who are going to look at their electricity and gas bills come the end of next quarter and be appalled beyond measure by how increasingly unaffordable they are; all those businesses big and small whose profits are going to be seriously dented by our political class’s ongoing failure to address our transport infrastructure (and no I don’t mean the irrelevant high-speed rail link to Birmingham; I mean the much bigger problem of our shortage of runways at the airports serving London).

All these thousands of people add up to a lot of disgruntled voters ready to ask hard questions about everything from the size of the state (so patently NOT being shrunk to any significant degree by Cameron’s useless Coalition of the Unwilling) to the three main parties’ position on “Global Warming”.

December 7, 2010

Never mind the scientists

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

The British government is finding that scientific evidence is getting in the way of what they want to do, so they’re scrapping the requirement to have scientists provide input:

Ministers will not be required to seek the advice of scientists when making drug classification policy in future, under new government proposals.

The police reform and social responsibility bill, published last week, contains an amendment to the constitution of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) that would remove the requirement on the home secretary to appoint at least six scientists to the committee.

A further amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 would allow the home secretary to place temporary controls on substances for a year by statutory instrument.

The proposals will be of concern to the many doctors and scientists who have criticised the government’s treatment of scientific evidence in the wake of the sacking, last year, of ACMD chairman David Nutt. The then home secretary, Alan Johnson, removed Nutt from the post after the scientist criticised politicians for distorting research evidence and claiming alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than some illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.

Why waste a great opportunity to get up in front of the media and sound all “tough on crime” just because the scientists say it’s a load of bollocks?

December 3, 2010

Pay no attention to the statisticians behind the curtain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

James Delingpole has a handy guide to assure you that man made global warming is still happening:

“It’s all actually a sign that man made global warming is very much a live issue and that there’s more of it happening than ever,” says a top scientist, who holds the British record for securing grant-funding for global warming research projects so he must know what he’s talking about.

“Look at the Met office,” the scientist goes on. “They’ve just told us that 2010 is the hottest year since records began in 1850 and even though the stupid Central England Temperature record tells us something quite different and even though the year hasn’t actually finished yet they must know what they’re talking about and they definitely can’t have fiddled the data because the Met office is part of the government and they wouldn’t lie or get things wrong which is why that barbecue summer was such a scorcher.”

The big problem is, the scientist said, is that the public are really stupid. They think just because Dr David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit said in the Independent in 2000 that soon there’d be no snow because of global warming, when what he actually meant was that soon there’d be lots of snow and that this would be “proof” of global warming. The interviewer just missed out the word “proof” that’s all because journalists are lazy that way.

Yes, yes, confusing mere “weather” with climate again, I’m sure.

November 30, 2010

Apparently, the only solution is for us to all die off

Filed under: Americas, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

James Delingpole has some entertainment paraphrasing the Cancun climate talks:

Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said today in a quote I’ve made up but which is only slightly less absurd than what he actually said:

“Since the hacked Climategate emails, we expert Climate Scientists have come in for a lot of stick from sceptics and deniers in the pay of Big Oil who claim that we’re just a bunch of misanthropic eco-fascists for whom freedom of choice is a concept more abhorrent than a baby polar bear pickled in shale oil. But nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that it should be entirely up to the people of the earth how they choose to kill themselves. If they don’t wish to follow any of the fun suggestions outlined in the Royal Society’s latest paper ‘So you’ve decided to die for Mother Gaia?’, we’re more than happy to send round a team of our experts to do the job for them.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for David Cameron said he believed an outbreak of mass extinction would be “Great for Britain. Great for jobs.” He pointed out that after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, there had been some kind of similar economic revival as a result of there being more land, or people dying, or class barriers breaking down or some such, but that the exact details would have to wait for the forthcoming report on history teaching by Simon Schama, entitled: “Why death is the very least Britain deserves for the despicable colonial record which shames us all!”

November 20, 2010

True confessions time

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

James Delingpole celebrates the humble watermelon:

Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling, poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.

The first comes courtesy of German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer who has openly admitted what some of us have been saying for some time: that “Climate Change” has nothing to do with man’s modest and thoroughly unthreatening contribution to global mean temperatures, nor even with the plight of baby polar bears so sweet you could almost hug them if you didn’t know they’d take your arm off in a trice. All it is, really, is a Marxist exercise in minority grievance-mongering and wealth redistribution on a global scale.

Or, as Edenhoffer so helpfully puts it it Neue Zurcher Zeitung: (H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation):

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

The use of glamour to advance weak economic ideas

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Virginia Postrel highlights the power of glamour even in technical and economic arguments:

When Robert J. Samuelson published a Newsweek column last month arguing that high-speed rail is “a perfect example of wasteful spending masquerading as a respectable social cause,” he cited cost figures and potential ridership to demonstrate that even the rosiest scenarios wouldn’t justify the investment. He made a good, rational case — only to have it completely undermined by the evocative photograph the magazine chose to accompany the article.

The picture showed a sleek train bursting through blurred lines of track and scenery, the embodiment of elegant, effortless speed. It was the kind of image that creates longing, the kind of image a bunch of numbers cannot refute. It was beautiful, manipulative and deeply glamorous.

The same is true of photos of wind turbines adorning ads for everything from Aveda’s beauty products to MIT’s Sloan School of Management. These graceful forms have succeeded the rocket ships and atomic symbols of the 1950s to become the new icons of the technological future. If the island of Wuhu, where games for the Wii console play out, can run on wind power, why can’t the real world?

Policy wonks assume the current rage for wind farms and high-speed rail has something to do with efficiently reducing carbon emissions. So they debate load mismatches and ridership figures. These are worthy discussions and address real questions.

But they miss the emotional point.

I guess it’s a sign of weakness for the economic folks that they don’t realize how much of the battle for public support can rest on non-economic factors. You might be able to win all the technical battles, but it’s often the emotional factors that determine victory overall.

November 8, 2010

Everybody sing along!

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

H/T to Clive for the link.

November 5, 2010

Now the sale of bogus explosive detectors makes more sense

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Remember a couple of items from earlier this year about a British manufacturer being arrested for selling fake bomb detection devices called the ADE-651? These devices were claimed to be so sensitive that they could even “detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills”. I figured that it was all just a kickback scam, but Strategy Page explains how the scam was not only possible but easy:

But it wasn’t just bribes that made the ADE 651 survive over a year of use in Iraq. Arabs, more than many other cultures, believe in magic and conspiracies. After the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, many Moslems again blamed Israel. A favorite variation of this is that, before the attacks on the World Trade Center, a secret message went out to all Jews in the area to stay away. Another variation has it that the 19 attackers (all of them Arab, 15 from Saudi Arabia) were really not Arabs, but falsely identified as part of the Israeli deception.

[. . .]

American troops arriving in Iraq go through a real culture shock as they encounter these cultural difference. They also discovered that the cause of this, and many other Arab problems, is the concept of “inshallah” (“If God wills it.”) This is a basic tenet of Islam, although some scholars believe the attitude preceded that religion. In any event, “inshallah” is deadly when combined with modern technology. For this reason, Arab countries either have poorly maintained infrastructure and equipment (including military stuff), or import a lot of foreigners, possessing the right attitudes, to maintain everything. That minority of Arabs who do have the right attitude towards maintenance and personal responsibility are considered odd, but useful.

The “inshallah” thing is made worse by a stronger belief in the supernatural, and magic in general. This often extends to technology. Thus many Iraqis believe that American troops wear sunglasses that see through clothing, and armor vests that are actually air conditioned. When they first encounter these beliefs, U.S. troops think the Arabs are putting them on. Then it sinks in that Arabs really believe this stuff. It’s a scary moment.

However, many troops learn to live with, and even exploit, these odd beliefs. Troops at one base discovered that they weren’t being attacked much, because many of the locals believed that the base was surrounded by a force field, so the troops would casually make reference to their force field, when they were outside the wire and among the locals. This reinforced the force field myth, and made the base safer. Other troops would invent new fantasies, like a pretending that a handheld bit of military electronics was actually a mind reading device. That often made interrogations go a lot quicker. Not all Arabs believe in this stuff, and those that didn’t and worked for the Americans, often as an interpreter, could only shrug their shoulders when asked about it.

October 29, 2010

Would KFC’s Double Down have been a hit without the Food Police panic?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Lorne Gunter salutes KFC and their surprise hit menu item:

Way to go KFC! Your Double Down sandwich has the health police in a tizzy. Those preachy, prancing, eat-your-peas pokenoses can’t decide whether to tax you, shield their children’s eyes from you or send you to re-education camp — or perhaps all three at once.

I’m am happy to hear your new bun-less concoction is your most successful new-product launch in company history. May the marketing mastermind who came up with the Double-D get an unhealthy bonus.

To be honest, I can’t even imagine trying one — two deep-fried chicken breasts wrapped around two strips of bacon, two slices of processed cheese and some sauce doesn’t appeal to me — except maybe as a dare; a Double Down Dare. Still, I am genuinely pleased that you have had the chicken balls to come out with an item that thumbs its nose so completely at conventional public-health wisdom.

I’ll never eat one myself, but I cheer on the spirit of those who tell the Nanny State’s food police where to go.

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