tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14180230186786726382024-02-19T09:15:02.843-08:00ABER-RANTcounter cultureJohn's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.comBlogger95125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-17050404588613417762020-02-12T06:30:00.001-08:002020-02-12T06:30:30.418-08:00piano miniature no 3<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j_hstrsIOjQ" width="480"></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-88833927406353728232013-06-06T05:51:00.001-07:002013-06-06T05:51:25.891-07:00From the Reference Guide to Epidemiology of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the principal reference for instructing US courts in regard to epidemiology. The Manual states: “…epidemiology cannot objectively prove causation; rather, causation is a judgment for epidemiologists and others interpreting the epidemiological data.” [6], and “.. the existence of some [associated] factors does not ensure that a causal relationship exists. Drawing causal inferences after finding an association and considering these factors requires judgment and searching analysis.” [7] and “<b>[w]hile the drawing of causal inferences is informed by scientific expertise, it is not a determination that is made by using scientific methodology</b>.”.
Thus, while epidemiologists insist that their discipline is a science, clearly it is not the solid experimental science that produces reliable causal connections to fuel new scientific discoveries, successful technological advances, and defensible public health policies. More to the point, if <b>multifactorial epidemiology does not operate in the framework of science</b>, what warrants of reliability could it offer?
<b>It remains a fact that in over 50 years of trying to induce cancer in animals using tobacco smoke, not even one study has yielded a statistically significant result that links cancer to tobacco use</b><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-32290477173711105922013-01-30T03:21:00.002-08:002013-01-30T03:21:39.330-08:00Although there is substantial evidence of the health benefits of moderate drinking, there has been a continued campaign on the part of many alcohol opponents to suppress or deny these findings. For instance, Harvard epidemiologist Carl Seltzer, a co-investigator on the Framingham study, found positive effects of moderate drinking on heart disease 25 years ago. Seltzer was denied permission to publish these results by the US National Heart and Lung Institute on the grounds that an article about such results would be “scientifically misleading and socially undesirable in view of the major problem of alcoholism that already exists in the country.” (C. Seltzer, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 1997 50: 627-629, “Conflicts of Interest” and “political science”)
<a href="http://brusselsdeclaration.org/pages/alcohol_control/"></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-41265155678812748642012-12-04T02:16:00.002-08:002012-12-04T02:16:36.998-08:00smokers die younger?Arnott once again raises the myth that smokers die prematurely; this is easily refuted.Allow me to give you an example of why these studies show misleading results
Suppose that you were to compare the mortality of people who did their main grocery shop at a discount store, to the mortality of people who shopped at an expensive/high-end grocery store, You would most likely find that the people who shopped at the discount store died younger than those who shopped at the up-market store. You might (erroneously) conclude that it was the products being consumed that affected mortality, when in reality the two groups are not directly comparable, as people who shop at up-market stores tend to be wealthier and live longer anyway .
This scenario explains why for example, cigar smokers appear to live longer than non-smokers. The reason being that cigar smokers are over represented in the most affluent echelons of society.
Professor Peter Finch , when analysing Australian smoking mortality, found a difference in life expectancy of only a few days. this might be explained by the fact that Australia is a society that has a less noticeable differential between rich and poor.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-58810404806929527752012-09-14T01:13:00.000-07:002012-09-14T01:14:58.303-07:00Medical studies
If you wish to find out something about a particular population , and it is not feasible to test the whole population, then you may test a sample of that population providing that the sample is an accurate refection of the population. In order to get a valid sample one needs to select randomly across the the entire population.
Something to be avoided is self-selection.; this is in fact the major flaw in virtually all drug trials, in that they ask for volunteers, and this leads to bias.
You might be thinking What's wrong with using volunteers?<br>
Well, consider the following: Suppose you wished to ascertain the feeling of the general public towards the recent Olympic games. You might perhaps create a web-site asking people to complete a survey about the games. The flaw in the sample is here quite easy to spot. Only those who were interested in the games would volunteer, and therefore your sample would not reflect the the general population, some of whom must not be interested in the games.<br>
This sampling problem is of course due to having to obtain consent from the subject when dealing with human-beings, you can't force people to take part.. Although the US government have done precisely that in the past. Chemical and biological weapons were used on civilian populations without their consent in the following locations: <br>
Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950)
SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67)
Minneapolis (1953)
St. Louis (1953)
Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967)
Florida (1955)
Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58)
New York City (1956, 1966)
Chicago (1960)
<br><br>
One type of study that does not suffer from this flaw is a mortality study. So for instance you might wish to find out if LDL cholesterol increases mortality .from heart disease Here you can simple select a period , say a year, and then record the age of death and the LDL cholesterol level of the deceased,<br>
In fact a major study along these lines was conducted along these lines:<br>
In an eight-year study of about 26,000 men and women in Isehara, Kanagawa Prefecture, the death rate of men whose LDL cholesterol levels were between 100 mg/dl and 160 mg/dl was low, while the rate rose for those with LDL cholesterol levels of less than 100 mg/dl.
The LDL figures exhibited less influence on women, but the death rate still rose for women with LDL cholesterol levels less than 120 mg/dl.
A separate study of 16,850 patients nationwide who suffered cerebral stroke showed the death rate of people with hyperlipemia who died from a cerebral stroke was lower, and their symptoms more slight.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/sep/28/japan-study-high-ldl-has-lower-death-rate-than/<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-45412331266742158812012-09-04T11:16:00.001-07:002012-09-04T11:16:27.159-07:00It is a complete myth that smokers die prematurely
smoking rarely kills male ever-smokers before 50 years of age and female ever-smokers before 55 years of age, and does so very rarely at earlier ages. While deaths attributed to smoking do occur much more frequently with increasing age, so too do deaths from other causes and it is not clear how the ever-smoker's age-increasing annual risk of death due to his or her smoking should be apportioned between smoking on the one hand and simply aging on the other. The anti-smoking movement's message that smoking kills has to be interpreted from the balanced perspective of not only how likely it is to do so; but of how likely it is that other causes will pre-empt that possibility by leading to death before it eventuates. For instance, while it may be a cause of concern to a 65 to 69 year old male ever-smoker, and to a 70 to 74 year old female ever-smoker to be told that they have a yearly chance of about 1 in 100 that their smoking will kill them,that particular concern will not, perhaps, seem quite so overwhelming when they learn that, in any event, they also have about a 1 in 50 chance that they will die from other causes. To put the extreme case, an 80 plus year old ever-smoker is unlikely to be overly concerned that he or she has about a 1 in 30 yearly chance that it is their smoking that will kill them, when the yearly chance that other causes will do so is about 1 in 10.
extract from The Smoking Epidemic: Death and Sickness among Australian Smokers
Prof.Peter D. Finch
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/finch2.pdf
<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-66147818080660759392012-07-27T06:57:00.000-07:002012-07-27T06:57:00.521-07:00EducationI live in a small university town. I often chat with under-graduates and am constantly surprised to find that my old O-level grasp of their subject is usually as good as, if not better than, theirs. Why is that, when educational standards have never been higher?<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-81981792329678251212012-06-28T10:39:00.002-07:002012-06-28T10:41:42.205-07:00Bad words part 1<b>Pro-active</b><br><br>
There is no such word as pro-active<br><br>
You can <b>act</b> or <b>react</b>, but you cannot <b>pro-act</b><br>
You may be <b>active</b> or <b>passive</b>, but you can never be <b>pro-active</b><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-64809859092271083622012-06-19T06:03:00.002-07:002012-06-19T06:03:46.303-07:00The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking
By
J. R. Johnstone, PhD (Monash)
and
P.D.Finch, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Statistics (Monash)
Science is not always a neutral, disinterested search for knowledge, although it may often seem that way to the outsider. Sometimes the story can be very different.
Smoking and health have been the subject of argument since tobacco was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. King James I was a pioneer antismoker. In 1604 he declared that smoking was "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." But like many a politician since, he decided that taxing tobacco was a more sensible option than banning it.
By the end of the century general opinion had changed. The Royal College of Physicians of London promoted smoking for its benefits to health and advised which brands were best. Smoking was compulsory in schools. An Eton schoolboy later recalled that "he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking". As recently as 1942 Price’s textbook of medicine recommended smoking to relieve asthma.
These strong opinions for and against smoking were not supported by much evidence either way until 1950 when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill showed that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer. A campaign was begun to limit smoking. But Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, had noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, "even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer."
Doll and Hill decided to follow their preliminary work with a much larger and protracted study. British doctors were asked to take part as subjects. 40.000 volunteered and 20,000 refused. The relative health of smokers, nonsmokers and particularly ex-smokers would be compared over the course of future years. In this trial smokers would no longer be asked whether they inhaled, in spite of the earlier result. Fisher commented: "I suppose the subject of inhaling had become distasteful to the research workers, and they just wanted to hear as little about inhaling as possible". And: "Should not these workers have let the world know not only that they had discovered the cause of lung cancer (cigarettes) but also that they had discovered the means of its prevention (inhaling cigarette smoke)? How had the MRC [Medical Research Council] the heart to withhold this information from the thousands who would otherwise die of lung cancer?"
Five year’s later, in 1964, Doll and Hill responded to this damning criticism. They did not explain why they had withdrawn the question about inhaling. Instead they complained that Fisher had not examined their more recent results but they agreed their results were mystifying. Fisher had died 2 years earlier and could not reply.
This refusal to consider conflicting evidence is the negation of the scientific method. It has been the hallmark of fifty years of antismoking propaganda and what with good reason may well be described as one of the greatest scandals in 500 years of modern science.
A typical example of such deception appeared in the same year from the American Surgeon General. This was "Smoking and Health",
the first of many reports on smoking and health to be produced by his office over the next 40 years. It declared that in the Doll and Hill study "…no difference in the proportion of smokers inhaling was found among male and female cases and controls." Fisher had shown this was not so. Fisher’s assessment and criticism of the Doll and Hill results is not mentioned, not even to be rejected. Unwelcome results are not merely considered and rejected. They cease to exist.
The work of Doll and Hill was continued and followed up over the next 50 years. They reintroduced the question about inhaling. Their results continued to show the inhaling/noninhaling paradox. In spite of this defect their work was to become the keystone of the modern anti-smoking movement: Defects count for nothing if they are never considered by those who are appointed to assess the evidence.
But their work had a far more serious and crippling disability.
From its inception the British doctors study was known to have a critical weakness. Its subjects were not selected randomly by the investigators but had decided for themselves to be smokers, nonsmokers or ex-smokers. The kind of error that can result from such non-random selection was well demonstrated during the 1948 US presidential election. Opinion polls showed that Dewey would win by a landslide from Truman. Yet Truman won. He was famously photographed holding a newspaper with a headline declaring Dewey the winner. The pollsters had got it wrong by doing a telephone poll which at that time would have targeted the wealthier voters. The majority of telephone owners may have supported Dewey but those without telephones had not. A true sample of the population had not been obtained.
The new Doll and Hill study was subject to a similar error. Smokers who became ex-smokers might have done so because they were ill and hoped quitting would improve them. Alternatively, they might quit because they were exceptionally healthy and hoped to remain so. Quitting could appear either harmful or beneficial. To avoid this source of error another project, the Whitehall study, was begun.
In 1968 fourteen hundred British civil servants, all smokers, were divided into two similar groups. Half were encouraged and counselled to quit smoking. These formed the test group. The others, the control group, were left to their own devices. For ten years both groups were monitored with respect to their health and smoking status.
Such a study is known as a randomised controlled intervention trial. It has become increasingly the benchmark, or as it is often referred to, the "gold standard" of medical investigation. Any week you can open The Lancet or British Medical Journal and you will likely find an example of such a trial to determine the benefits or harm of some new therapy. Such trials are fundamentally different to that of Doll and Hill. This is ironic because Hill had published the influential and much-reprinted textbook "Principles of Medical Statistics" where he considers the relative merits of controlled and uncontrolled trials. His praise is reserved for the former. Of the latter he is particularly critical: Such work uses "second-best" or "inferior" methods. "The same objections must be made to the contrasting in a trial of volunteers for a treatment with those who do not volunteer, or in everyday life between those who accept and those who refuse. There can be no knowledge that such groups are comparable; and the onus lies wholly, it may justly be maintained, upon the experimenter to prove that they are comparable, before his results can be accepted." This criticism by Hill can accurately be applied to the Doll and Hill study. According to Hill’s own criteria, his work with Doll can only be described as second-rate, inferior work. It would be for others to conduct properly controlled trials.
So what were the results of the Whitehall study? They were contrary to all expectation. The quit group showed no improvement in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rates due to heart disease, lung cancer, or any other cause with one exception: certain other cancers were more than twice as common in the quit group. Later, after twenty years there was still no benefit in life expectancy for the quit group.
Over the next decade the results of other similar trials appeared. It had been argued that if an improvement in one life-style factor, smoking, were of benefit, then an improvement in several - eg smoking, diet and exercise - should produce even clearer benefits. And so appeared the results of the whimsically acronymed Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial or MRFIT, with its 12,886 American subjects. Similarly, in Europe 60,881 subjects in four countries took part in the WHO Collaborative Trial. In Sweden the Goteborg study had 30,022 subjects. These were enormously expensive, wide-spread and time-consuming experiments. In all, there were 6 such trials with a total of over a hundred thousand subjects each engaged for an average of 7.4 years, a grand total of nearly 800,000 subject-years. The results of all were uniform, forthright and unequivocal: giving up smoking, even when fortified by improved diet and exercise, produced no increase in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rate for heart disease or for cancer. A decade of expensive and protracted research had produced a quite unexpected result.
During this same period, in America, the Surgeon General had been issuing a number of publications about smoking and health. In 1982, before the final results of the Whitehall study had been published, the then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had praised the study for "pointing up the positive consequences of smoking in a positive manner". But now for nearly ten years he fell silent on the subject and there was no further mention of the Whitehall study nor of the other six studies, though thousands of pages on the dangers of smoking issued from his office. For example in 1989 there appeared "Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking: 25 Years of Progress". This weighty work is long on advice about the benefits of giving up smoking but short on discussion of the very studies which should allow the evaluation of that advice: you will look in vain through the thousand references to scientific papers for any mention of the Whitehall study or most of the other six quit studies. Only the MRFIT study is mentioned, and then falsely:
"The MRFIT study shows that smoking status and number of cigarettes smoked per day have remained powerful predictors for total mortality and the development of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, cancer, and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. In the study population, there were an estimated 2,249 (29 percent) excess deaths due to smoking, of which 35 percent were from CHD and 21 percent from lung cancer. The nonsmoker-former smoker group had 30 percent fewer total cancers than the smoking group over the 6-year follow up."
This was untrue, as the Surgeon General was later to admit.
What the MRFIT authors themselves had to say about their work was quite different:
"In conclusion we have shown that it is possible to apply an intensive long-term intervention program against three coronary risk factors with considerable success in terms of risk factor changes. The overall results do not show a beneficial effect on CHD or total mortality from this multifactor intervention." (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial Research Group, 1982)
But in 1990 the Surgeon General published "The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation" and at last the subject was addressed. The Whitehall study was rejected because of its "small size". A once praiseworthy study had become blameworthy. The MRFIT results were described, this time truthfully: "there was no difference in total mortality between the special intervention [quit] and usual care groups." This and the other studies were rejected because the combined change in other factors - eg diet and exercise - made it impossible to apportion benefit due to smoking alone. This is absurd and illogical reasoning. If, say, a 10% improvement in life expectancy had been found then it might indeed be difficult if not impossible to say how much was due to smoking alone. But there was no improvement. There was nothing to apportion. Nevertheless, with such deceptive words the Surgeon General turned to an unpublished, unreviewed, un-controlled, non-intervention, non-randomised survey conducted for the American Cancer Society ("American Cancer Society: Unpublished tabulations"). The gold standard of modern science was rejected and replaced by the debased currency of what is by comparison little better than opinion and gossip.
This rejection of consistent results from controlled trials and the acceptance of far inferior data would not be countenanced in any other area of medical science. Anyone who suggested doing so would be met with howls of derision and questions as to their intelligence if not their sanity. But where smoking and health are being considered this debasement of science is commonplace and passes without comment.
In Australia in the same year there appeared a similar publication "The Quantification of Drug Caused (sic) Mortality and Morbidity in Australia" from the Federal Department of Community Services and Health. Its authors waste no time in discussing intervention trials. These receive not a mention, not even to be rejected. Instead the authors turned to several surveys of the kind ultimately used by the Surgeon General. In particular they used yet another study conducted for the American Cancer Society by E.C.Hammond, a gigantic study of a million subjects, another uncontrolled, non-intervention, non-randomised survey. This was a particularly bad choice. The dangers of very large surveys are well known to statisticians: because of their size it is difficult to do them accurately. The flaws in Hammond’s work were revealed when the initial results were published in 1954. Hammond himself was later to admit that his study had not been conducted as he had intended and as a consequence his results are to an unknown extent erroneous. But it was worse than that. His work became literally a textbook example of how not to do research. It can be found as example 287 in "Statistics A New Approach" by W.A.Wallis and H.V.Roberts. This was the ignominious and undignified fate of work which should only be quoted as a salutary example of the pitfalls which can await the researcher.
Two problems bedevil both Hammond’s work and other similar studies.
First, some of the volunteers who enrolled their subjects told Hammond that contrary to his instructions they had selectively targeted ill smokers. These results he was able to scrap but necessarily an unknown proportion of his final results must be suspect. Second, as was demonstrated at the time, his subjects were quite unrepresentative of the general public in a number of respects. In particular, there were relatively few smokers. It seems quite plausible that many healthy if indignant smokers would refuse to take part in his trial and this would produce such an aberration. These two vitiating defects are of the kind which have led to the widespread preference for gold standard trials.
But the continuation of Hammond’s work, with its demonstrated
faulty methodology, was used by the Australian authors to deduce that smoking causes premature death to the extent of 17,800 per year in Australia. Their conclusions should be compared with the results of a survey by the Australian Statistician in 1991 of 22,200 households, chosen at random. This showed "long term conditions", including cancer and heart disease, to be more common in non-smokers than smokers.
Even if they had used sound data to calculate deaths caused by smoking, this still would not have shown that smoking is overall harmful or causes an excess of deaths. Antibiotics kill some susceptible, allergic individuals but this fact does not show that antibiotics reduce life expectancy. If the data used by these authors is examined more closely it can in fact be shown that the mean age at death from smoking-related causes (eg lung cancer) is about 1 year greater than from nonsmoking-related causes (eg tetanus). See: http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/finch2.pdf
for details. This result does not necessarily show that smokers live longer than nonsmokers: smokers as well as nonsmokers die from both nonsmoking-related causes and smoking-related causes. But it is certainly not evidence for the belief that smoking reduces life expectancy.
During all this time health authorities have repeatedly and persistently lied to the public. Consider just one of innumerable examples. In June 1988, in Western Australia the Health Department in full page advertisements in local papers declared: "The statistics are frightening. Smoking will kill almost 700 women in Western Australia this year. If present trends continue, lung cancer will soon overtake breast cancer as the most common malignant cancer in women". What was frightening was not the statistics but the fact that a Health Department should lie about them. In 1987 the same Health Department in its own publications had said: "Suggestions by some commentators that lung cancer deaths in women will overtake breast cancer deaths in the next few years look increasingly unlikely…female lung cancer death rates have fallen for the last 2 years." It was predicted that breast cancer would far outweigh lung cancer for the next 14 years. What the public were told was not just an untruth but the reverse of the truth. This is classic Orwellian Newspeak. The public are given what George Orwell in "1984" named "prolefeed" – lies. Orwell must have smiled wryly in his grave.
Above all has been the repeated and world-wide directive that smokers should quit and live longer when every controlled trial without exception has demonstrated this claim to be false.
Is there anything that can be said with certainty about the health and life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers? The evidence indicates little difference. One important fact often causes confusion: an agent can be a certain cause of death and yet have the effect of extending life. Smoking could be a major cause of lung cancer or even the only cause yet also be associated with long life. The Japanese are amongst the heaviest smokers in the world. They also live the longest. The Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment smoked for a hundred years before dying at 122 as the world’s oldest ever person.
The resolution of this paradox lies in the simple fact that most agents have both good and bad effects on health and life expectancy and it is the net result which is of primary importance. This simple but crucial fact is often ignored or forgotten by medical researchers. Coffee causes pancreatic cancer says the newspaper article. Perhaps it does, but if it has a bigger and beneficial effect on heart disease then those who drink coffee may well live longer than those who don’t. Hormone replacement therapy may increase the incidence of certain cancers yet still have overall a beneficial effect. (See "The Contrapuntists").
It may now be apparent why there is such a general belief that smoking is dangerously harmful. There are 3 reasons. First, studies which in any other area of science would be rejected as second-rate and inferior but which support antismoking are accepted as first-rate. Second, studies which are conducted according to orthodox and rigorous design but which do not support the idea that smoking is harmful are not merely ignored but suppressed. Third, authorities who are duty-bound to represent the truth have failed to do so and have presented not just untruths but the reverse of the truth.
It may be argued that this is news about an old and settled subject. And who cares about smoking anyway. But smoking is really a secondary issue. The primary issue is the integrity of science. This has no use-by date. When the processes of science are misused, even if for what seems a good reason, science and its practitioners are alike degraded.
The Contrapuntists
A Parable
By
P.D. Finch
In a few years time an accidental by-product of genetic engineering leads to the discovery that certain living vibrating crystals can be manufactured very cheaply. When encased in a suitable holder and inserted in the ear one can hear, just for a few minutes, until body heat kills the crystal, beautiful melodies, rhythms and fascinating counterpoint. They are marketed as aural contrapuntive devices. Since they are cheap and become very popular, the Government taxes them. Users of the device become known as contrapuntists.
Some years later a new disease is identified when an increasing number of people drop dead, suddenly, for no apparent reason. Autopsies reveal a strange deterioration in the brain cells of those affected. An observant pathologist notes that in most of the associated post-mortem examinations an aural contrapuntive device was found in an ear of the deceased and the disease becomes known as SADS, an acronym for Sudden Aural Death Syndrome. Epidemiologists find that people who are not contrapuntists seldom fall victim to SADS and that, in fact, about 98 per cent of all such deaths are either current or former contrapuntists. The strength of association between aural contrapuntism and SADS is undeniable, the relative risk is as high as 50, i.e. a contrapuntist has about 50 times the chance of falling to SADS as does a non-contrapuntist.
An anti-contrapuntist health campaign is initiated and aural contrapuntive devices are taxed more and more heavily in an attempt to dissuade people from using them. The campaign is very successful and is vigorously supported by an unexpected alliance between animal liberationists, the music industry and the tone-deaf. Attention then shifts to passive aural contrapuntism, viz. the dangers posed by the sidestream melodic overflow from the devices in the ears of contrapuntists, in particular on the occurrence of SADS in non-contrapuntal spouses of contrapuntal men, the harm contrapuntal parents may do their children and the possible ill-effects suffered by the foetus of a contrapuntal pregnant woman.
After great initial success, however, the campaign falters when it becomes widely known that even though aural contrapuntism is so strongly associated with SADS, relatively few contrapuntists die from it each year and those that do have lived, on average, about one year longer than do non-contrapuntists and, moreover, at each age, are much more likely to die of other causes than of SADS itself. Politicians realise very quickly that they can now, with a clear conscience and with profit, tax aural contrapuntal devices even more heavily.
1 http://www.la.utexas.edu/research/poltheory/james/blaste/blaste.html
2 Keynes, G (1978), "The Life of William Harvey", Oxford,
3 Lyte, H.C.M. (1899), "A History of Eton College (1440-1898", Macmillan
4 Price, F.W. (ed.) (1942), "A Textbook of the Practice of Medicine", 6th edition, Oxford University Press
5 Doll, R. and Hill, A.B. (1950), "Smoking and carcinoma of the lung", British Medical Journal, ii pp739-48
6 Fisher, R.A. (1959) "Smoking: The Cancer Controversy", Oliver and Boyd
7 Doll, R. and Hill, A.B. (1954), "The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits", British Medical Journal, i pp1451-5
8 Doll, R. and Hill, A.B. (1964), "Mortality in relation to smoking: ten years' observations of British doctors", British Medical Journal, i pp1460-7
9 Surgeon General (1964), "Smoking and Health" http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/sgr_1964/sgr64.htm
10 Rose, G. and P.J.S. Hamilton (1978), 'A randomised controlled trial of the effect on middle-aged men of advice to stop smoking', Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 32, pages 275-281.
11 Hill, A.B.(1971, 9th ed.) "Principles of Medical Statistics", The Lancet
12 Rose, G., P.J.S. Hamilton, L. Colwell and M.J. Shipley (1982), 'A randomised controlled trial of anti-smoking advice: 10-year results', Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 36, pages 102-108
13 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial Research Group (1982), 'Multiple risk factor intervention trial: risk factor changes and mortality results', Journal of the American Medical Association, 248, pages 1465-1477.
14 WHO European Collaborative Group (1986), 'European collaborative trial of multifactorial prevention of coronary heart disease: final report on the 6-year results', Lancet, 1, pages 869-872.
15 Wilhelmsen, L., G. Berglund, E. Elmfeldt, G. Tibblin, H. Wedel, K. Pennert, A. Vedin, C. Wilhelmsson and L. Werks (1986), 'The multifactor primary prevention trial in Goteborg', European Heart Journal, 7, pages 279-288.
16 Miettinen, T.A., J.K. Huttunen, V. Naukkarinen, T. Strandberg, S. Mattila, T. Kumlin and S. Sarna (1985), 'Multifactorial primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases in middle-aged men: risk-factor changes, incidence and mortality', Journal of the American Medical Association, 254, pages 2097-2102.
17 Puska, P., J. Tuomilehto, J. Salonen, L. NeittaanmSki, J. Maki, J. Virtamo, A. Nissinen, K. Koskela and T. Takalo (1979), 'Changes in coronary risk factors during comprehensive five-year community programme to control cardiovascular diseases (North Karelia project), British Medical Journal, 2, pages 1173-1178.
18 Leren, P., E.M. Askenvold, O.P. Foss, A. Fr¨ili, D. Grymyr, A. Helgeland, I. Hjermann, I. Holme, P.G. Lund-Larsen and K.R. Norum (1975), 'The Oslo study. Cardiovascular disease in middle-aged and young Oslo men', Acta Medica Scandinavica [Suppl.], 588, pages 1-38.
19 Surgeon General (1982) The Health Consequences of Smoking - Cancer: A Report of the Surgeon General.
20 Surgeon General (1989) Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking: 25 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General: Executive Summary and Full Report
21 Surgeon General (1990) The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation: A Report of the Surgeon General
22 Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health, Canberra (1988) "The Quantification of Drug Caused Morbidity and Mortality in Australia".
23 http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/hammond3.html
Wallis, W.A. and Roberts, H.V. (1962) "Statistics: A New Approach", Methuen and Co. Ltd.
24 Australian Bureau of Statistics: Smokers are less likely to have cancer, heart disease 1
Australian Bureau of Statistics, No 4382.0, "1989-90 National Health Survey: Smoking"
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/19jun2006.htm
25 Australian Bureau of Statistics: Smokers are less likely to have cancer, heart disease 2
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/ABS43820d.jpg
26 Two messages from the Western Australian Health Department
Subiaco Post, 28 June 1988: 12
Hatton, W.M. (1987), Cancer Projections: Projections of numbers of incident cancers in Western Australia to the Year 2001, Perth: Epidemiology Branch, Health Department of Western Australia.
Hatton, W.M. and M.D. Clarke-Hundley (1987), Cancer in Western Australia: an analysis of age and sex specific rates, Perth: Health Department of Western Australia.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/HealthDept1.jpg
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ray/HealthDept2.jpg
Installed 31 July 2006
7<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-77966820298141380712012-06-19T02:23:00.000-07:002012-06-19T02:23:48.811-07:00Tax Avoidance___Morally repugnant?<b>What is morally repugnant is a government that sets-up tax-avoidance schemes and then moans like fuck when people have the temerity to use them.</b>
A previous government removed the Inland revenue's duty to <b>only collect that tax which was due</b>; instead it switched the burden onto the tax-payer. It would therefore seem that it is every citizen's legal duty to avoid tax.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-5590197626075328722012-06-06T11:18:00.001-07:002012-06-06T11:18:13.676-07:00euro crisis...simple solution get rid of the single currency and let sovereign governments re-value their currencies
People wonder why in Britain we have a north-south economic divide...simple two different economic systems sharing a common currency, namely the pound...if a small region like England struggles HOW THE FUCK CAN IT WORK IN EUROPE YOU FUCKWITS<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-54385197277135397632012-05-23T19:31:00.001-07:002012-05-23T19:37:14.286-07:00My AquariaI haven't posted about fish-keeping before on this blog. So , I thought I'd describe the set-up in my two main tanks:-
<br />
<br /><br> <br>
<b>4 ft cold/temperate tank </b>
<br> <br>
One Ryukin (Miss )Piggy Malone( aka Doris)
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2JvNrMAQRaTmYZQg3tJ-21eBjlw__BfUXTkV-TzUnqV4F5q0uiQtCKeM2Jg64_TD5X_twetAXlY1QTKbq43BlO-bckNSFzOZr1JNPMCiZJ0wA9yuW0VPXiuXwC_MkSaxqfptcABVsC9k/s1600/Rocket+with+Ms.Piggy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2JvNrMAQRaTmYZQg3tJ-21eBjlw__BfUXTkV-TzUnqV4F5q0uiQtCKeM2Jg64_TD5X_twetAXlY1QTKbq43BlO-bckNSFzOZr1JNPMCiZJ0wA9yuW0VPXiuXwC_MkSaxqfptcABVsC9k/s400/Rocket+with+Ms.Piggy.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br> <br> A Moor named Jet (juv male)
<br> <br> An Oranda called Rocket (juv male)
<br> <br> 6 baby apple snails
<br> <br> planted with Amazon swords<br> <br> <br> <br>
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<br> <br> <br />
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<b>3 ft tropical tank </b> <br> <br>
<br> <br> 2 Bristlenoses Charley Farley(m) & Skitter (f)
<br> <br> 4 Adult Apple Snails
<br> <br> 8 neon tetras<br />
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<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br><br> <br> <br> <br> 2 Fire-Red Honey Dwarf Gourami:<br />
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<br> <br> 6 Black Neon Tetra
<br> <br> 2 Red Cherry Shrimp
<br> <br> 2 Dwarf African Aquatic Frog
<br> <br> Planted with Anubias & Amazon Swords
<br> <br> ----------------------------------------------------<br> <br>
I shall add to this given time-constraints<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-67836404274061122992012-03-13T12:33:00.002-07:002012-03-13T12:57:33.909-07:00In Gauderman et al. 1997 at pp.208-209 the authors stated:<br /><br />“The results from these analyses support previous findings that a major gene plays an important role in lung cancer risk. An additional finding not previously observed is that there is no apparent interaction between the putative lung cancer gene and smoking.”<br /><br /><br />At p.177 the authors wrote:<br /><br />“[T]he flaws we found in the nicotine research literature are of such magnitude and occur in such a regular fashion that they demand an explanation. A partial list of the methodological shortcomings compiled in this book includes:<br /><br /> <br /><br />I Systematic exclusion of subjects from statistical analyses<br />Absence of saline control groups for injected drugs<br />Result-biased selection of number of sessions to test manipulations<br />Absence of statistical comparisons [...]“<br />Also, from the same book:<br /><br />“Thus, nicotine’s role in maintaining the smoking habit bears no similarity to the role played by genuinely addictive drugs such as heroin, barbiturates, alcohol or other drugs to which nicotine is routinely compared.” <br /><br />In Sommers 1972, Dr Sheldon C Sommers, Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Council for Tobacco Research, a physician specialising in pathology and Clinical Professor of Pathology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and University of Southern California School of Medicine, gave evidence which included this statement, at p.96:<br /><br />“[S]tatistical mathematics can never prove cause and effect. All they show is a relationship requiring further study, usually experiments in animals, to find out the meaningfulness biologically of this relationship. I really believe that among the active researchers in these fields, there is no great preponderance of feeling that cigarette smoke is carcinogenic.”<br /><br />In Sommers 1976 Dr Sommers said at p.269:<br /><br />“Now, as to lung cancer, there is a statistical association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. But at present the nature of the association or whether it is causal are not known. The test of the original Surgeon General’s report [USSG 1964] deals with the difficulties of assigning causality, but the summary and conclusions brush these aside, and assign a causality not demonstrably evident in the text. It is widely known that a statistical association is not by itself proof of causation. A statistical association may point to experiments that will help to determine whether there is cause involved.”<br /><br />Another:<br /><br /> In Furst 1982 Dr Arthur Furst, Director Emeritus of the Institute of Chemical Biology at the University of San Francisco, said at p.512:<br /><br />“For many years, I tried to induce lung cancer in animals with cigarette smoke, with no success, despite the most sophisticated smoking machines available. Not only were my colleagues and I unsuccessful, but so was every other investigator. There have been a very small number of published reports of lung cancers occurring in experimental animals during smoke inhalation experiments. Anyone attempting to interpret these as showing that smoking causes lung cancer must understand that animals, like humans, do spontaneously develop lung cancer even in the absence of any suspected carcinogen.”<br /><br />In explaining his conclusions as at September 2003, Professor Idle said that it was his judgment that cigarette smoking had not been established as a cause of human lung cancer. Indeed, as explained by him, the cause of cancer was unknown. Moreover, the mechanisms by which lung cancer developed were not known. Researchers had not produced squamous cell lung carcinoma in laboratory animals by inhalation exposure to cigarette smoke. No constituent or group of constituents, as they existed in the complex mixture which was cigarette smoke, had been shown to be a cause of lung cancer in smokers. In view of this, it could not be determined whether or not smoking caused lung cancer.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-63899902533129486472011-11-25T10:37:00.000-08:002011-11-25T10:38:10.190-08:00ER WHAT ?A friend of mine had to see a neurologist.....I report the gist of the consultation<br /><br />Consultant: you mustn't be around smokers<br /><br />Patient: I don't allow smoking in my house<br /><br /><br />Consultant: Just being around smokers would be dangerous for you<br /><br /><br />Patient: Well, as I said no one smokes in my house, or work, or car<br /><br />Consultant: SMOKERS ARE BAD FOR YOU WHETHER THEY'RE SMOKING or NOT !!!<br /><br /><br />I kid you not...this is the sort of mediaeval superstition we are all up against .<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-62690517861895530202011-07-09T07:03:00.001-07:002011-07-09T07:03:13.431-07:00The world financial crisis made a dent in sales of premium goods as Cuban cigars, while such smoking bans that each day are more and more spread worldwide are a real bane of the cigar industry.<br /><br />Habanos is trying to oppose the action by offering various lines of small cigars that can be smoked during a work break and also produce cigars specially created for women smokers.<br /><br />It was found that Cuba’s premium cigars dominate the world cigar market with 70% of all sales.<br /><br />However that market share excludes the United States as Cuba’s cigars are prohibited there in accordance with a decades-old trade embargo against the Communist island.<br /><br />The great domestic demand for lower-quality cigars, which are sold at very low price and are made from tobacco leaves grown elsewhere in the country, haven’t demonstrated the sign of slowing in spite of local smoking bans, which like many other laws, are not fully respected.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-80691618547476186472010-12-10T00:38:00.000-08:002010-12-10T00:57:20.014-08:00<table><tr><td valign=top><a href=http://www.guzer.com/videos/bertrand-russell-smoking.php><img src=http://www.guzer.com/videos/sbertrand-russell-smoking.jpg border=0 width=80 height=65 align=left><b>Bertrand Russell On Smoking</b></a><br><br clear=all></td></tr></table><br /><br />The London Hospitals study was the first British study to investigate possible causes of the growing epidemic of lung cancer. It was published by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill in 1950. Bradford Hill was a statistician, and Richard Doll was a young doctor. In the study, several hundred lung cancer patients in London hospitals were questioned about their past smoking habits and other behaviours, to see whether any pattern emerged.<br /><br />Many years later, Sir Richard Doll wrote:<br /><br />By the time we had data on several hundred patients it was obvious that the principal difference between the patients with and without lung cancer was their smoking habits, and we had to make up our minds whether the association was due to chance, bias, confounding, or to cause and effect. The evidence that led us to conclude that it was due to the last (and which led me to give up smoking in 1949) is described in our first paper... (source)<br /><br />In fact, the results eventually showed that in 649 cases of lung cancer, 647 were among smokers. . . .<br /><br />. . . It certainly looked like a very strong case had been made. The lung cancer patients were almost all smokers. It very much looked as if it was smoking that was causing lung cancer. Richard Doll clearly thought so, since he promptly gave up smoking. It also appeared to have convinced Sir George Godber:<br /><br />Almost half a century ago we learned that smoking was the main cause of lung cancer. Albeit our knowledge in 1950 was so limited,... (source)<br /><br />Godber was later to become one of the principal instigators of the notion of passive smoking - the idea that smokers not only harmed themselves, but also the people around them. . . .<br /><br />. . . we ought to ask of the London Hospitals study what fraction of its overall sample population were smokers, for this would give the fraction of lung cancer patients that might be expected to be smokers, if smoking carried no risk.<br /><br />And this figure is available in Table 4 of the study. There were 2 non-smokers and 647 smokers in the lung cancer study group. And there were 27 non-smokers and 622 smokers in the non-lung-cancer control group. So that, in the study as a whole, 97.7% of patients were smokers. This being so, we would expect that 97.7% of lung cancer patients would also be smokers, if smoking was unconnected to lung cancer. Instead we find that 99.7% of them were smokers. Is that particularly alarming? All we have discovered is that in a population in which nearly everybody smoked, nearly everybody with lung cancer also smoked: which is precisely what would be expected. Just as if nearly all the patients in the London Hospitals study were Londoners, it would be expected that nearly all the lung cancer patients would be Londoners as well.<br /><br />Looked at this way, the London Hospitals study tells us nothing. If anything, it might even be said to give smoking a clean bill of health.<br /><br />Nevertheless, when Doll and Hill commenced their next study, the much more well known British Doctors study, the focus was entirely upon smoking. The doctors were only asked about their smoking habits, and about nothing else at all. . . .<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-80121361621751456432010-12-09T01:35:00.000-08:002010-12-09T01:51:00.244-08:00bacteriaA few scientists have long held the belief that human cancers might well be caused by bacteria. Not that many years ago doctors were surprised to learn that peptic ulcers and cancers of the gut might actually be caused by acid-resistant bacteria. Why were they surprised? TB a precursor to lung cancer used to be mainly a disease of non-smokers, the tobacco smoke having antiseptic properties, was thought to inhibit susceptibility to TB. In the 60's doctors became alarmed that, with the immense reduction in TB, lung cancer was on the increase in the smoking population. They jumped to the conclusion that cancer was caused by smoking.<br /> How they must be dismayed by recent studies that show that aspirin, another chemical which has bacteria-resistant properties, has been shown to inhibit human cancers.The evidence is there for all to see, bacteria cause a range of diseases in human-beings which lead to cancers.<br />An aspirin a day, or 5 Player's Weights? Your choice, but I'm waiting for the ban on using aspirin in public places myself.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-60075874488202450212010-05-16T01:10:00.000-07:002010-05-16T01:20:21.095-07:00Smoking<span style="font-weight:bold;">His baton was a Malboro Red.......He'd hold an unlit cigarette an exceedingly long time, until it became fixed in the minds of his audience like a handgun. Then he'd make a grand production of striking a match and bring the flame to the cigarette tip. The next rounded phrase that fell from his mouth would be encased within a dollop of smoke. Then, when he flicked his ash---tap, tap--- everyone leaned forward and watched closely, as if Willie Mays were tapping his bat on the home plate. Something interesting was about to happen. At last, he dropped the burned match into the glass ashtray with a light <span style="font-style:italic;">plink</span>, he delivered the punchline or came to the crucial point, and I was tempted to yell, "Bravo!"<br /><br />J.R.Moehringer</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-5552186455371027042010-05-14T01:11:00.000-07:002010-05-14T01:12:33.514-07:00The Living Longer MythWe are not living longer, we are just not dying younger<br /><br />Listen <a href="http://www.ppnf.org/catalog/ppnf/mpegs/audio_clips/2009-03-02_The_Living_Longer_Myth.mp3"><span style="font-weight:bold;">HERE</span></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-52466465647811427572010-03-05T03:44:00.000-08:002010-03-05T03:45:02.613-08:00<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/V9wFD8TBvbQ&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/V9wFD8TBvbQ&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-1904923041861451762009-10-24T07:19:00.000-07:002009-10-24T07:39:56.696-07:00Smoking and healthpostulate: Smoking is unrelated to lung cancer<br /><br /> Recent studies suggest that lung cancer may be a genetic disease<br /><br /> There are no studies showing that nicotine is a carcinogen. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /> August 1, 1990 edition of the Wall Street Journal</span>. A Study was conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University Medical Centre (New Orleans): Albert Einstein College (NY). The researchers studied 300 families in Southern Louisiana, who had a history of lung cancer, and compared them with 300 controls. The researchers concluded lung cancer is an inherited disease. Based upon retrospective studies 35 the researchers concluded that if a person had two copies of the lung cancer gene, his chances of getting lung cancer by the age of 50 would be 14% if he did not smoke, increasing to 27% if he were a heavy smoker. In the more likely case of an individual having only one copy of the gene, the researchers concluded that a non-smoker would have practically no risk of getting lung cancer by age 50, but for a heavy smoker the risk increased to 5% by age 50, 16% by age 60, and 25% by age 75.These figures remain highly contentious. There is an interesting quote from Neil E. Caporaso, a researcher at the US government-owned National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. one out of eight smokers will be stricken with lung cancer (which is another way of saying that seven out of eight will not). Considering the fact that one out of every five Americans dies from some form of cancer, and that lung cancer is the most common form of cancer in persons between the ages of 45 and 74, and the second commonest form in persons over that age, Mr. Caporaso's estimate of the risk seems very modest and wholly at variance with the position taken by most government scientists, who shriek hysterically that smoking "causes" lung cancer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> a very interesting study was recently reported, which confirms that if there is a risk involved in smoking, it has been grossly exaggerated . On May 23, 1995, the Associated Press(US) reported on a study made by Dr. Gary Strauss. Strauss analysed 685 <span style="font-weight:bold;">lung cancer patients</span> seen at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston(Mass) between <span style="font-weight:bold;">1988 and 1994</span>. He found that <span style="font-weight:bold;">59% of the patients were non-smokers</span> at the time their cancers were diagnosed. Of these, 8% of the entire sample had never smoked; 51% had smoked at one time but had given it up. Of the 51% who had quit, nearly one fourth had been off cigarettes for more than 20 years. On average, the former smokers had been off cigarettes for six years. Lung cancer is not always diagnosed in non-smokers, because doctors aren't necessarily looking for it. Currently, according to the CDC, 25% of the (US)population are smokers. In the study years (1988-1994), the percentage was as high as 30%. Thus, purely on the basis of demography, we would expect between 25 and 30% of the sufferers from lung cancer, or for that matter, hangnails or acne, to be current smokers. 41% of the cases studied by Strauss were current smokers. Given the role of detection bias (doctors more likely to diagnose lung cancer in smokers than non-smokers), the 41% figure suggests that the lung cancer risk for current smokers may be little or no greater than for non-smokers. In the article, Dr. David Burns of the University of California, seems to support the view that giving up smoking is not the "cure" for lung cancer. He is quoted as saying, "These folks have done what we told them to do, yet they are still at substantially increased risk. What can we do for them? We owe these people an answer." Burns suggested that it may be possible to device a genetic test to spot lung cancer. I would go further and suggest a genetic test to spot the likelihood that somebody will get lung cancer. Whether, in such an individual, giving up smoking would do any good, I don't know, but such individuals probably would choose not to smoke, just as I choose not to eat starches and sugars. The same article also reports that <span style="font-weight:bold;">deaths from lung cancer have increased by 51% between 1980 and 1994, despite a drop in the percentage of adults who smoke from 42% in 1965, to 25% in 1993.</span> Isn't it about time to stop blindly adhering to the notion that lung cancer will disappear if people simply give up smoking?<br /><br />Actually, Dr. Burns is not the only medical doctor who has begun to question that simplistic notion. Julian Whitaker, MD( October 1995) "<span style="font-weight:bold;">Since 1950, the incidence of all cancers in people between the ages of 50 and 60 years has increased by 44%, with even higher increases in some of the more deadly forms of cancer. Breast and colon cancer went up 60%, prostate up 100% and testicular cancer for men between the ages of 28 and 35 went up 300%. Lung cancer has gone up 262%, an increase that is obviously not related to cigarette smoking, because over the same period the number of people smoking cigarettes dropped from 50% to 25%..." </span>Doctor Whitaker expresses no opinion as to the reasons for the startling increases in cancer in recent years.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-40193165453292419802009-08-17T01:18:00.000-07:002009-08-17T01:19:56.226-07:00A-levelsIn 1965, when grades were first awarded, 10% of places were to be allocated for As and 20% for Es. In other words you were assessed against your peers, thus sorting out the best candidates for higher education, which was then free.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-36090428867415545312009-05-15T10:42:00.000-07:002009-05-15T10:43:38.122-07:00Open europe1. Lisbon Treaty: 82% want referendum in UK, even if all other countries ratify<br /><br /> <br /><br />A new Populus poll for the Times has found overwhelming support for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, even in a situation where it has already been ratified by Ireland and the rest of the EU. 82% of people agreed with the statement, "If Ireland and other countries ratify the Lisbon Treaty on the future of the European Union, Britain should hold its own referendum on the issue", with 52% strongly agreeing and only 14% disagreeing. 92% of Conservative voters, 76% of Labour voters and 85% of Liberal Democrats voters agreed that Britain should have a referendum on the Treaty. (Times, 13 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />The poll also showed that 58% of voters believe that the balance of powers between Britain and the EU gives too much power to the EU, including a clear majority of supporters of all the main parties. 28% say the balance is about right and 6% say too little power has been given to the EU. In response to the question, "If the Lisbon Treaty goes through and the new post of President of the EU is established, the job should go to Tony Blair", only 34% of people agreed, and 63% disagreed. 51% felt that Britain benefits from its membership of the EU.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Meanwhile, a poll in Germany found that 70% of people want the Lisbon Treaty to be re-negotiated, and a separate poll found that 73% of Germans agree that "the EU takes too many powers from Germany". (Neues Deutschland, 15 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Germany is one of four countries that has yet to complete ratification of the Treaty - in addition to Ireland, the Czech Republic and Poland. German President Horst Köhler has said that he will not sign the Treaty into law until after the German Constitutional Court has given its opinion on whether the Treaty is compatible with the German Constitution, which it is expected to do after the European elections in June. (Focus, 5 May; European Voice, 6 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />In Poland, President Lech Kaczynski is still to sign. Likewise, in the Czech Republic, the Treaty is awaiting the signature of President Vaclav Klaus, following the Senate's approval of the text by 54 votes to 20 on 6 May. (FT, Irish Times, 7 May) President Klaus has said that his signature is "not on the cards" until after Ireland holds a second referendum on the Treaty, expected in the autumn. The leader of the Liberals in the European Parliament, Lib Dem MEP Graham Watson, has attempted to pressure the Czech leader, saying, "Václav Klaus should now sign the document in blood - ahead of the EU summit in June." (WSJ, 7 May; Aktualne, 12 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Meanwhile, the Irish government is trying to fast-track work on the so-called 'guarantees' it plans to offer to Ireland in exchange for a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, reportedly in an effort to stop Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who is against the Treaty, from 'wrecking' an EU leaders' summit in June. Ireland hopes to persuade the other 26 member states to agree to the wording at a foreign ministers' meeting on 15 June, so that EU leaders meeting later in the same week can merely rubber-stamp the deal, without debate. In order to sideline President Klaus, the Czech government has decided that the EU leaders' summit will be chaired by the Prime Minister instead. (Irish Times, 14 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Irish Europe Minister Dick Roche has promised that the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland will not be on the same text, saying "we cannot and will not put the same package to our people later this year." (Irish Times, 5 May) However, in reality, it is extremely unlikely that Ireland will be able to make any actual changes to the Treaty, since any change to the text at all will require re-ratification of the text by every EU member state - including the UK.<br /><br /> <br /> <br />2. Lib Dems row back from 'in or out' referendum<br /><br /> <br /><br />Labour yesterday launched their European election campaign in Derbyshire with Gordon Brown suggesting that Britain risks becoming isolated in Europe if 'eurosceptic' parties succeed in the June elections. Brown said "I believe as we consider our future at these elections on 4 June it's also important to remember that we must work within the European Union, not be isolated in Europe." He added that "being outside Europe is a threat to jobs in this country." (El Pais, Reuters, BBC,15 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />In response to the launch Shadow Europe Minister Mark Francois alluded to Labour's broken promise on holding a referendum on the renamed EU Constitution. He said, "What is the point of Gordon Brown launching a European election manifesto when he broke his main promise on Europe in his General Election manifesto? Labour's EU promises cannot be taken seriously while they are denying people their say on the renamed EU Constitution." (PA, 14 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats launched their campaign on 12 May with the slogan "Stronger together, poorer apart." Leader Nick Clegg said: "We are stronger together and poorer apart, it's as simple as that." Asked whether the manifesto contained a commitment to hold a referendum on British membership of the EU - an idea the party has much vaunted over the past year in response to criticism that they went back on their promise to hold a referendum on the EU Treaty - Nick Clegg told a press conference, "Yes, it's in the manifesto."<br /><br /> <br /><br />However, in fact the manifesto contains no clear commitment to a referendum, stating only that the Lib Dems "have argued" for one. It says: "Liberal Democrats have argued for a referendum on whether Britain stays in or leaves the EU. We are the only party confident enough to put the pro-European case to the British people on the big issue facing us - and let the people decide. Britain will only win the case for a flexible, democratic Europe in Brussels if we settle our arguments at home on whether we should be part of the EU or not." (Lib Dem Manifesto, 12 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />This represents yet another U-turn for the Lib Dems on Europe . At the last election, the Lib Dems joined Labour and the Conservatives in promising a referendum on the EU's Constitutional Treaty - which was later rejected by the French and the Dutch in referendums in 2005, and eventually renamed the Lisbon Treaty. However, instead of honouring that manifesto promise when the Treaty came up for ratification in the UK , Nick Clegg instructed his MPs to abstain from a vote on whether or not there should be a national referendum. He even sacked from his frontbench the handful of Lib Dem MPs who voted with their conscience in favour of the promised referendum. <br /><br /> <br /><br />When the vote moved to the House of Lords, Lib Dem Peers changed tack yet again, choosing not to stick to the line taken in the Commons and abstain, which would have helped the motion for a referendum succeed, and instead voting against a national referendum.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Throughout this episode, in an effort to pretend they were not going back on their promise, the Lib Dems claimed - and continue to claim - that they were instead in favour of a wider referendum on Britain 's membership of the EU. Nick Clegg said: "The EU could be a lot more liberal and democratic, and the Lisbon treaty would help it to do both. So let's trust the people with the real question: in or out?" (Guardian, 25 February 2008)<br /><br /> <br /><br />However, the failure to include a clear and undisputable commitment to such a referendum in the new manifesto proves that this was just a cynical ploy by the Lib Dems to distract attention from their decision to renege on the original manifesto pledge for a referendum on the Treaty.<br /><br /><br /> <br />3. News in brief<br /><br /> <br /><br />Italian bank receives more than €180 million in EU farm subsidies. A list has been published which discloses the largest beneficiaries of EU farm subsidies. These include an Italian bank in Milan, a French chicken farming giant and an Irish producer of Weight Watchers meals and Yorkshire puddings. The largest single payment, €140 million, went to the Italian sugar company Italia Zuccheri. The Italian bank ICBPI, received more than €180 million in five payments. EU member states were required to publish the recipients of subsidies on 30 April, although Germany has so far refused to do so on the grounds of privacy. (NY Times, EUobserver, Debate Farmsubsidy.org Materials Farmsubsidy.org, EU Farm subsidy millionaires 2008, Farmsubsidy, 8 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />EU working rules mean Ministers need two limousine chauffeurs. The Government Car Service is to double the number of official drivers who act as chauffeurs for Ministers' limousines. This is because of European regulations on working hours, which mean that Ministerial drivers cannot drop a Minister off after a late Commons vote at 11pm, and pick them up at 9am the next morning. The Working Time Directive requires professional drivers have breaks of at least 11 hours between shifts. The rules mean that approximately 80 new drivers will need to be employed and existing drivers will not be able to boost their wages by doing overtime. (Sun, 12 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />EU civil servants under investigation for benefit fraud awarded money from EU due to mishandling of investigation. 14 EU civil servants investigated for suspected benefit fraud have each been awarded €3,000 from the EU, after it transpired the EU's fraud watchdog, OLAF, failed to tell them that they were to face criminal proceedings in Italy. In a 2002 audit, 230 officials at the Joint Research Centre in Italy - one fifth of the total number of employees there - were found to be claiming a disability benefit. €5.7m was disbursed to staff between 1996 and 2002, an average of €25,000 each.<br /><br /> <br /><br />OLAF said that this "could appear, at first sight, suspect, and should be the object of an in depth review". However, on referring the case to the Italian judiciary to conduct an investigation, OLAF neglected to inform the civil servants. The EU's court for civil service employment disputes then ruled that this was in breach of their rights of defence, and awarded the 14 who brought a complaint €3,000 each in damages. (England Expects, Berlaymonster, 6 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />French Finance Minister touted as new Commissioner. Speculation has been mounting over who could fill the available posts in the new Commission, due to installed in the autumn. There are rumours suggesting that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Commission President José Manuel Barroso agreed at the end of April that French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde could become the next EU Competition Commissioner. Some reports also suggest that Lagarde could also be in line for Internal Markets Commissioner, as well as French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier. Spanish PM José Luis Zapatero reportedly agreed to support Barroso for another term as Commission President, in exchange for an important economic portfolio for the Spanish Commissioner, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also insisting that Barroso give Germany a top Commission portfolio. (Die Welt, Le Figaro, 13 May; Le Monde, FTD 14 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />British family arrested over £1m EU regional funds scam. Five members of a Durham family have been charged with offences relating to a scam involving nearly £1m of European grants. Money paid from the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund through the UK Government to companies based in County Durham, was supposed to be passed on to help people find work through various initiatives and training courses. It is alleged that the money was used by the family to buy land, houses, a vehicle and to finance building work, while large amounts of cash were also transferred abroad. (Newcastle Journal, Open Europe research, 11 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />EP approves proposals for 'burden sharing' of asylum seekers in EU. The proposals introduced a 'solidarity clause' in order to assist member states that claim to be overburdened by asylum seeker demands. This provision foresees member states accepting a percentage of asylum applicants - possibly in accordance with their population size. (European Parliament, CDU/CSU, SPD, Die Presse, EUobserver, 8 May)<br /><br /> <br /><br />Proposed EU hedge fund regulations may lead to mass migration from the City. Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey has threatened to move his business out of Britain because of the EU's proposed directive to regulate hedge funds and the Government's new tax rate on high earners. Charles Price, founder of hedge fund business Palmer Capital, also admitted that he was weighing up his options, saying "firms have no choice but to consider moving given the lack of clarity about the regulatory environment." Kinetic Partners, which helps relocate hedge funds to Switzerland, have said they are advising 15 hedge funds that are actively considering leaving. (Sunday Times, 11 May)<br /><br /> <br />4. Open Europe Brussels office<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe has recently opened an office in Brussels, near the seat of the EU institutions, at 115 Rue du Trone, Brussels 1000. Journalists can contact Pieter Cleppe, Head of the Brussels office, on 0032 2 540 86 25 or 00 32 477 68 46 08.<br /> <br />5. Open Europe Events<br /><br /> <br /><br />Westminster or Brussels: Who rules Britain?<br /><br />On 11 May, Open Europe held a debate in London, looking at the impact of EU legislation in the UK and how scrutiny of EU legislation works in Westminster.<br /><br /> <br /><br />The panelists included Gisela Stuart MP; Lord Trimble; Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP; and David Heathcoat-Amory MP.<br /><br /> <br /><br />To read a summary of the event, please visit our events page:<br /><br />http://www.openeurope.org.uk/events/<br /><br /> <br /> <br />6. Open Europe in the news<br /><br /> <br /><br />Allegations raise concern over Eurojust's impartiality<br /><br />14 May EUobserver 15 May Diario de Noticias<br /><br /> <br /><br />EUobserver reported on allegations that the head of the EU's judicial co-operation body Eurojust, Jose da Mota, put pressure on prosecutors in Portugal in order to stop a corruption investigation involving Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates. EUobserver quoted Open Europe's Stephen Booth saying, "These allegations are incredibly serious and, if proved, call into question the political independence and credibility of Eurojust".<br /><br /> <br /><br />Stephen was also quoted by Portuguese daily Diario de Noticias saying "If it is proven that Eurojust is not politically independent, then what is the system for...it is a bad sign for citizens, which diminishes their faith in justice". <br /><br /> <br /><br />Lisbon Treaty being forced through Europe<br /><br />11 May American Spectator: Bandow<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe's Mats Persson was quoted in the American Spectator in an article looking at the future of the Lisbon Treaty. He said, "Ever since the Irish voted No to the Lisbon Treaty in June, politicians in Ireland and across Europe have tried to find ways to force this unwanted document through - against the clear will of the people."<br /><br /> <br /><br />Enough bureaucrats to fill a town<br /><br />11 May De Pers<br /><br /> <br /><br />Following EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes' claim that the EU has no more bureaucrats than an "average town in the Netherlands", Dutch Socialist Party MEP candidate Dennis de Jong refuted the claim, and cited Open Europe's research, which found that the EU employs 170,000 people.<br /><br /> <br /><br />The cost of EU regulation to the UK<br /><br />8 May Solihull News<br /><br /> <br /><br />The Solihull News cited Open Europe's research on the cost of EU regulation.<br /><br /> <br /><br />MEPs pass amendment to telecoms package<br /><br />7 May WSJ<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe's Pieter Cleppe was quoted in the WSJ following the European Parliament's vote to pass an amendment to the telecoms package, which would make it illegal for countries to disconnect people from the internet without a judicial decision. Pieter said that several members of Parliament "wanted to make a statement on upholding these rights" ahead of the European elections.<br /><br /> <br /><br />The cost of the EU's climate package<br /><br />7 May Salon24<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe's research on the cost of the EU's climate package was covered by Polish news site Salon24.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Coca Cola and EU propaganda<br /><br />7 May Dagbladet Arbeideren<br /><br /> <br /><br />Denmark's Dagbladet Arbeideren cited Open Europe's research on EU communication policy, which showed that the EU was spending more on propaganda than Coca Cola spends on advertising each year.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Centralising tendency of the European Parliament<br /><br />5 May BBC Today in Parliament<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe Research Director Mats Persson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today in Parliament discussing the centralising tendency of the European Parliament. Mats said, "It's very hard to find examples, and I can't think of any right now, where [MEPs] say, 'well, this is not for us, this is probably better decided on the national level'. You just hope that that will happen more often in the future because there are a lot of things that they decide on that, quite frankly, are better decided locally, regionally or nationally."<br /> <br />7. Support Open Europe<br /><br /> <br /><br />Open Europe is a small, lean operation which relies entirely on individual donations. We produce cutting-edge research on all aspects of EU policy, targeting both politicians and the media to campaign for radical reform of the EU. We unearth high-impact stories and hold high-profile events, and, uniquely for such a small team, we are quoted and interviewed several times a week in the media.<br /><br /> <br /><br />We believe there is a better way forward for Europe, and we need your help in trying to make our vision a reality.<br /><br /> <br /><br />If you support our work and would like to help us continue to do it, please click the link below to find out how you can donate. Anything you can give will go directly to helping us counter the spin from EU officials and EU-funded lobby groups, and allow us to make our case for a fresh approach to Europe.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Thank you for your support.<br /><br /> <br /><br />http://www.openeurope.org.uk/about-us/makeadonation.aspx<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Open Europe is an independent think tank campaigning for radical reform of the EU. For information on our research, events and other activities, please visit our website: openeurope.org.uk or call us on 0207 197 2333.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-47248447791378338782009-05-11T01:31:00.000-07:002009-05-11T01:36:15.058-07:00CIDER RULESRecently there has been an annoying advert for 2Genuine Pear cider" on our tellys. Which claims that unlike other "Pear Ciders" it is made completely from pears. <br /><br />well , what a bunch of Fuckwits...if it is made from pears it ain't fucking cider<br /><br />Cider: A drink made from fermented apple juice<br /><br /><br />Perry; a drink made from pears<br /><br /><br /><br />IT IS PERRY YOU HALF-BRAINED FUCKWITS<br /><br /><br />STOP ABUSING THE LANGUAGE, MORONS !<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1418023018678672638.post-52442141063957605382009-05-02T05:31:00.000-07:002009-05-02T10:13:47.786-07:00Flu bunkumOn average there are 12,000 deaths per annum from FLU in England and Wales, when was the last time you saw that figure published?<br /><br />That is quite a lot of people, why aren't people panicking about it ?<br /><br />2.2 Excess Mortality<br />Excess mortality due to influenza occurs in most winter seasons but is especially marked<br />during epidemics. The average annual excess mortality attributable to influenza in recent<br />years is around 12,000 deaths per annum in England and Wales,(11) although there is<br />considerable yearly variation and some years are notably much higher than the average (est.<br />26,000 in 1989/90 epidemic). Excess mortality in England and Wales associated with the<br />three pandemics of the 20th century has also varied widely; this was estimated at 198,000<br />civilians in 1918/19, and 37,500 in 1957/58. In 1968/69 and 1969/70 (both seasons<br />considered to be associated with the influenza A/H3N2 pandemic) there were an estimated<br />31,000 and 47,000 deaths respectively.(7) Therefore the extent of mortality associated with<br />the next pandemic cannot be reliably predicted although it is reasonable to plan for a<br />scenario worse than a severe winter epidemic of normal influenza.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.dhsspsni.gov.uk/pandemicclinicalguidelines-01.pdf">Read more here</a><br /><br /><br />So why are we getting upset about a very few cases of Flu in Mexico? It is NOT an epidemic, neither is it a pandemic.....In fact it isn't even a blip.......a barely noticeable outbreak of Flu. <br /><br />I reckon the government are going to use this to impose their Nazi measures upon us still further.<div class="blogger-post-footer">http://johnholmesmain.zoomshare.com/</div>John's New Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00062230865991670256noreply@blogger.com0