More about dieting

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed whenever I post a dieting thread I get quite a few commenters saying that the Gary Taubes diet worked for them.

I think that’s great if it does. But I’ve posted at length on my own bad experiences with various versions of that sort of approach. In summary, I felt awful, and I didn’t lose weight either.

So the diet is most definitely not for everyone. What’s more, I don’t see any evidence that in the long run it’s any more successful than any other diet in keeping weight off. There is no doubt that there are people for whom it works quite well, but no more than for any other diet—meaning there are not a whole lot, in the long run, compared to the numbers who try it.

This is no special condemnation of Taubes or Atkins or any other low-carb diet, it’s just in the nature of dieting itself. I’m curious, though, what you Taubes-advocates (you know who you are!) think of this article and this one. Let me make it clear that I’m not trying to talk you out of your diet. If it’s successful for you, that’s great.

Oh, and I’m not really fat. It’s just that same old 15 pounds I’d like to lose.

Speculation about the Aurora perp

The New Neo Posted on by

So far, the information we’ve gotten about James Holmes doesn’t really fit the portrait of the usual perpetrator of mass murder.

That doesn’t mean that, as more facts emerge, he won’t seem to have been unstable and isolated, and to have exhibited all sorts of warning signs. But so far the only things about him typical of mass murderers appear to have been his age and gender, and the fact that some acquaintances and neighbors have said he was somewhat of a loner.

So the following is complete speculation on my part—but the mass murderer comparison that occurs to me is with University of Texas sniper Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed a tower and killed 15 people and wounded 32 more in a shooting spree that was lengthier than Holmes’ but similarly lethal, although Whitman ended up killing himself as well, which brought the final toll to 16.

Whitman had been a student at the university, an Eagle scout, a Marine, and was a married man. Although there was some violence and instability in his history, and some sort of agitation had driven him to seek therapy in his final months (and to receive some medication), there was little that most people around him knew about and nothing noticeable to acquaintances that would have indicated that one day he would climb that tower and start shooting. In fact, he himself expressed puzzlement as to his motivation in a note he penned shortly before going out to perform his nefarious act (which, like Holmes’, was preplanned):

I don’t quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter…. I don’t really understand myself these days… Lately I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate. I consulted Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had…. I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.

If you read some of the other notes Whitman left (available at this link), you’ll find a person who clearly knows right from wrong, seems to regret his actions, and yet feels compelled to perform them, and knows he is going to die.

There is no real answer to what went on with Whitman, just as I doubt an answer will be forthcoming about Holmes, even though he is very much alive. But an autopsy was performed on Whitman, and revealed an interesting—and perhaps important—fact:

At the Cook Funeral Home the next day, an autopsy was performed as requested in Whitman’s suicide note and approved by Whitman’s father, Charles Adolf Whitman, and performed by Dr. Coleman de Chenar. A brain tumor was found and reported as an astrocytoma brain tumor; a subsequent Governor’s report investigation specified that the tumor was a glioblastoma. The document stated that this lesion “conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions.”

Had Whitman lived and been tried for murder, would this have legally diminished his responsibility? I haven’t a clue, nor am I advocating that this should have happened. It is difficult if not impossible to draw a line of cause and effect in this sort of thing, and when in doubt we must assume that mass murderers have free will and are responsible for their actions.

It may turn out that Holmes has some sort of similar identifiable problem. If, for example, he turns out to be a bona fide paranoid schizophrenic with delusions that fed into his decision to murder people, that could muddy the waters of personal responsibility considerably.

In the meantime, you might well ask: who cares? “Open Blogger” at Ace’s criticizes those who would jump to the conclusion that Holmes must have been insane to have committed such as act, and I agree with Open Blogger that (as a character in “The Dark Knight” says), “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” We call those people sociopaths or psychopaths, but that’s just a descriptive word, a shorthand way of referring to something we understand hardly at all.

Dueling political ads

The New Neo Posted on by

From the Romney camp:

And this one from Obama seems positively bizarre. It accuses Romney of making a false accusation, and then gives evidence that his accusation is true. To whom is it targeted, and who would it convince that it’s Romney who’s at fault and not Obama? Only the already-convinced—and it might even lose some of them:

Lots of Pacific garbage…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has been hauled up from off the coast of Hawaii.

But it wasn’t tsunami debris, nor was it plastic bags from grocery stores. It was the cast-off detritus of the fishing industry.

But it’s been put to some use:

The massive amount of garbage pulled from the ocean will now be put to use as fuel for electricity generation. Hawaii’s Nets-to Energy program removes metal from broken-down nets and cuts them up for combustion. The steam from the fires runs a turbine to create energy.

Amazon portal

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to my attention that some people who’ve installed Ad Blocker or similar programs on their computers may have had the Amazon widgets on my right sidebar disappear as a result, which would make it difficult for them to order from Amazon through my blog. So I’ve created an alternative method here.

Just click on this link and order, and I think that should work.

I’m creating a new category on the right sidebar called “Amazon orders,” and putting this post in it. That way you can always find it if you need to.

Of course, if your screen is showing the Amazon portal on the right sidebar, please feel free to use that. Thanks very much!

Mass murder in Colorado

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, my thoughts went to the victims of the horror, and my initial impression (before the shooter had been identified) was that the perp would turn out to be an isolated crazy person rather than a terrorist connected with Islam or al Qaeda. Don’t know why I thought so, but perhaps it had something to do with the venue and method of the killings.

If previous experience was a guide, the case would also feature accusations of a right-wing affiliation for the shooter that would in all likelihood turn out to be false, and calls for more gun control as well as calls for more opportunities for concealed carry. The former occurred right on schedule, when the 24-year-old shooter with the all-too-common name of James Holmes was misidentified (ignorantly, sloppily, unforgivably, callously, incompetently, recklessly, purposely—take your pick) by ABC news as 53-year-old Tea Party member James Holmes of Aurora.

The Tea Party has been falsely demonized from the start by reporters, pundits, and political operatives eager to pin various offenses—racist or violent—on a movement that in actuality has been remarkably free of them.

As for the real perp, we learn that he had withdrawn from a graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Denver, that he told police his apartment was booby-trapped and they found that to be so, and that he was apparently dressed as the Joker when he committed the crime.

Would someone else in the crowd with a weapon have mattered? I have my doubts in this case. The scene must have been very chaotic: a darkened movie theater is not a good place to get the visibility and clarity necessary to do something about felling a perp in the act.

Mediscare

The New Neo Posted on by

Coming a bit ahead of schedule.

I thought it would be saved for September, but it’s about to happen. Perhaps Obama’s run out of other lines of attack, or perhaps there’s a different strategy for the fall. Anyway, now we have the predictable one:

…[T]oday when Obama begins a two-day swing through the crucial state of Florida — with all of its seniors — he’ll introduce another attack: hitting Romney on Medicare and the Ryan budget. Per the campaign, the president “will discuss his commitment to strengthening Medicare, and a new report tomorrow that highlights the devastating impact Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could have on the 3.4 million Floridians that rely on Medicare.” Bottom line, per the campaign’s guidance: Obama will argue that Romney — through his support for the Ryan budget plan — advocates ending Medicare “as we know it.”

What did Obama mean by “that” in “you didn’t build that”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Gringo” makes an interesting point about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark:

A big part of the problem is that ∅bama said something that could be interpreted several ways.

Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

If you include the first sentence, the third sentence means that the business owner didn’t make the infrastructure building happen. If you emphasize just the last two sentences, the implication is that the business owner is not responsible for his success.

That ∅bama made a statement with ambiguous meaning contradicts the image of ∅bama as the great wordsmith, the great speechmaker. While Dubya mangled the Queen’s English from time to time, it was pretty clear what he meant. Dubya’s meaning, whatever his problems with syntax, could not be MISUNDERESTIMATED. You knew what Dubya meant.

The lefties have been crying that all three sentences have to be read together. In that case, ∅bama is making a misleading statement, because by paying taxes which funded building roads and bridges, business owners DID help make it happen.”SOMEBODY ELSE” implies that business owners had nothing to do with building infrastructure which is FALSE- as they helped fund them.

Even if you include the first sentence, there are PLENTY of other statements in ∅bama’s Roanoake speech where ∅bama implied that people weren’t responsible for their own success, or where he denigrates individual success. Look up smart people and working hard.

Obama’s message had seemed very clear to me when I first read it and then listened to it. But in retrospect I can see that Gringo is correct, and that there’s a more ambiguous interpretation, although you have to work very very hard to see the alternative one through the maze of Obama’s perhaps-tortured syntax.

Gringo is also correct that even the less offensive interpretation of Obama’s words is only marginally less so, because of course businesses pay taxes (especially those on gas) and user fees such as tolls. And Gringo is further correct that there are plenty of other indications in Obama’s speech that he is saying exactly what we originally thought he was saying—which is that business owners don’t really create things.

Let’s look at Obama’s words once again:

…[L]ook, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something ”“ there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Note that Obama repeats “you didn’t get there on your own” twice, for emphasis. He likes rebutting that strawman, but who has ever said that his/her success occurred in a total vacuum? Then Obama jumps to the suggestion that hard work and brains aren’t really related to success, and that successful people cannot be differentiated from the unsuccessful on either of those characteristics, and are successful not because of anything special they do but because they got “help.” He ignores the fact that most of the “help” he lists—the American system (of what: government? business?), and roads and bridges—is available to everyone equally, and everyone is not successful.

So, if the successful are not differentiated from the unsuccessful by their brains or their hard work, nor the “American system” or its roads and bridges, then why are they successful? Is it chance? Is it patronage?

Or is it race or gender? Is this the “American system” Obama really means—racial or gender discrimination? And if so, then why isn’t the “help” of affirmative action that’s been going on for decades causing minorities and women now to be the most successful of all?

Or is it another factor he lists, “great teachers,” that makes all the difference? But if so, what makes some teachers great and others not so great? Is it that great teachers had great teachers? Is it great teachers all the way down?

And what about this sentence, which has gotten a bit lost in the “you didn’t build that” shuffle? It’s pretty amazing all on its own:

Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

In the world according to Obama, companies are parasites on the research done by the government to create the internet, and the government did this (out of the goodness of its heart, I suppose) for the purpose of allowing these companies to make money. If one looks at the actual history of the internet, it’s pretty easy to see that government provided a lot of the early impetus and funding to the many individual academics/scientists/researchers/think-tankers who in fact “invented” the internet, but the original government purpose was military, and the “internet” that was created bore little resemblance to the internet as we now know it. Let’s see:

People often say that the government created the Internet. This is not true.

The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government…

The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other — indeed, often only the same model of computers…In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the “OSI” or “Open Systems Interconnect” group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide “internetwork” that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called “GOSIP” or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.

What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP — a networking standard the government tried to kill off…

Government threw money at many networks, including the TCP/IP Internet. TCP/IP was influenced by many things, among them the government. But what government most gave TCP/IP was its benign neglect as it spent its guidance, vision, leadership, and energy on developing the OSI network.

See also this, which makes the connection between government funding and private business innovation more clear and gives a lot of detail:

The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network.

Of course the designers could not have foreseen what the (commercial) internet has become. Still, this reality has important implications for how the internet works ”” and explains why there are so many roadblocks in the continued development of online technologies. It is only thanks to market participants that the internet became something other than a typical government program: inefficient, overcapitalized, and not directed toward socially useful purposes…

In other words, the internet would have been a pretty good example of the “it takes a village” approach that Obama was supposedly describing—the interface of government and private enterprise to create a whole, with each bringing its strengths and weaknesses into the mix. But instead he made it a case of the fruits of beneficent government effort being expropriated by private businesses to make their money.

In looking at Obama’s speech again, I got more curious not just about the internet, but about how roads and bridges are funded. Who might that “somebody else” might be who Obama says finances the highways and bridges for those businesses? I got this information:

About 70 percent of the construction and maintenance costs of Interstate Highways in the United States have been paid through user fees, primarily the fuel taxes collected by the federal, state, and local governments. To a much lesser extent they have been paid for by tolls collected on toll highways and bridges. The Highway Trust Fund, established by the Highway Revenue Act in 1956, prescribed a three-cent-per-gallon fuel tax, soon increased to 4.5 cents per gallon. In 1993, the tax was increased to 18.4 cents per gallon, where it remains as of 2012.

The rest of the costs of these highways are borne by general fund receipts, bond issues, designated property taxes, and other taxes. The federal contribution comes overwhelmingly from motor vehicle and fuel taxes (93.5 percent in 2007), and it makes up about 60 percent of the contributions by the states.

There’s also something called a Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax that applies “only on highway motor vehicles which have a taxable gross weight or combination weight of 55,000 pounds or more.”

I could go on and on for hours, I suppose, doing research in order to try to uncover what percentage of these fuel taxes and tolls and other taxes are paid by businesses. But if you just think about the proliferation of trucks on the roads it’s clear that successful businesses pay quite a bit of this cost. And if you consider who buys bond issues, it’s certainly not the poor, it would have to be the “successful,” or at least somewhat successful.

I know, I know; logic isn’t really the best approach to all of this, because Obama’s statements weren’t meant to appeal to logic, whatever he really was meaning to say. They were meant to appeal to those who feel resentment of others who are successful, or those who feel guilt about their own success. Come to think of it, many of his supporters probably fall into one or the other of those two categories.