Month: July 2007

Via mph, Columbia Journalism Review discusses “50,000,” the magical number of fear:

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech about a major initiative to combat the “growing problem” of Internet predators, he cited a statistic that 50,000 such would-be pedophiles were prowling the Net at any given moment and attributed it to Dateline. Jason McLure, a reporter at Legal Times in Washington, D.C., (where I was formerly an editor), asked the show about the number. Dateline told him that it had gotten it from a retired FBI agent who consulted with the show. When the agent was contacted he wasn’t sure where the number had come from, terming it a “Goldilocks” figure — “Not small and not large.” He added that it was the same figure that was used by the media to describe the number of people killed annually by Satanic cults in the 1980s, and before that was cited as the number of children abducted by strangers each year in the 1970s.

Good things may come in threes, but things that want to harm your children or sacrifice you to Satan always appear in groups of 50,000.

NPR : Oswalt on Rats, Werewolves and Lollipops:

Great interview of Patton Oswalt on NPR today. He talked mostly about his standup, and his work on movie scripts (including why his work on Borat is uncredited).

Saw Ratatouille last weekend. I don’t see many movies but my wife and I are both Patton fans and this was a movie starring him which we could take the kids to — sold. Highly recommended. It was kinda sweet and touching but it never let that get to Disney smarminess proportions. Good stuff.

ABCNews has chosen to participate in the terrorizing of America by passing on Officially Leaked Rumors of an impending, “spectacular” terror attack. I guess people were getting a little jaded with the whole Bright Angry Orange Alert Level of FEAR technique.

A secret U.S. law enforcement report, prepared for the Department of Homeland Security, warns that al Qaeda is planning a terror “spectacular” this summer, according to a senior official with access to the document.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that this report, if it even exists, has the same value as every other politically convenient terror scare we’ve heard in the past six years.

Junk Food Science (Sandy Szwarc) usefully explodes many health care myths, but tends to lean far right when politics comes up (using the word “socialist” to mean “authoritarian” for example…).

Laurie Toby Edison, blogger behind Debbie of “Body Impolitic,” here picks apart a recent post where Szwarc’s reasoning suddenly becomes slipshod as she tries to minimize the problem of the vast numbers of Americans without insurance and therefore without reasonable options for access to healthcare.

Sanity with regards to health care in general and fat in particular seems to be an area where the Left has dropped the ball big time, so you end up with unusual spectacles like Tucker Carlson, usually an all-around jerk, holding forth compassionately on the injustice fat people in America suffer. I guess he’s allowed to be decent about that since his designated opponents are generally not.

Junkfood Science: “Just lose weight” — another story:

Mrs. Koppel explained that she went for a complete physical in 2001 because she couldn’t walk for half a block without needing to stop and catch her breath. At the end of the physical, her doctor simply told her “lose ten pounds and you’ll feel like a new woman.” She said she was not given a simple breathing test that she now knows is available in every community and would have diagnosed her problem.

While on vacation with her family, she couldn’t even walk three steps and was gasping to breathe. Her breathing was noisy and difficult. Rushing to Mayo Clinic, it was only then that she was given a breathing test and discovered she had COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). Her COPD had progressed so far that she was given five years to live.

My mother-in-law might be alive today, might have lived to see her grandchildren enter kindergarten, if her physicians had been willing to consider that her sudden loss of 80 lbs might be a symptom of something, say, failing kidneys, rather than a reason to celebrate.