My Quiet Life

I meant to post about this a long time ago. You probably remember the headline about this new startling statistic:

Statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March showed that more than one in four U.S. teen girls was infected with at least one sexually transmitted disease.

Oh my god! One in four teenage girls is a dirty, vile slut! Kids weren’t like this when *I* was a kid. Country’s goin to hell in a handbasket!! and so on..

Except, the actual CDC press release says:

A CDC study released today estimates that one in four (26 percent) young women between the ages of 14 and 19 in the United States – or 3.2 million teenage girls – is infected with at least one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus, and trichomoniasis).

The problem here is that of the four most common sexually transmitted diseases, two of them are not transmitted exclusively sexually: HPV and Herpes Simplex — HPV being by far the most common. And as far as I can tell the study made no distinction as to whether or not the disease was transmitted sexually (how could they?) So, all this hysteria seems a lot less justified when you realize it’s merely saying that 1 in 4 teenage girls has had either a cold sore or warts.

Growing number of U.S. parents declining to circumcise sons

Go out and get some sun this weekend. It’s good for you:

… research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren’t caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are “looking for a bogeyman that doesn’t exist,” argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor “is more likely a lack of vitamin D.”

…

But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D’s effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn’t take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

I’ll be right back, I’m gonna go chug a gallon of vitamin D milk.

Tim responded to my post opposing the smoking ban. Here is a rebuttal of sorts. ReBUTTal. Get it?

If I were the proprietor of a restaurant or some other public establishment, does it not make sense for me to want my business to appeal to the widest possible number of people? Certainly it does.

Actually, no. Restaurants (any businesses, actually) want to make the widest profit margins they can. This may or may not mean appealing to the widest number of people, but of course usually it does not. If it were, every restaurant would serve every kind of food at every price range, and offer every possible sort of atmosphere, etc. Restaurants will diversify their offerings to the extent that it no longer increases profits (economically speaking, they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns from their diversification).

This is the economic phenomenon of compartmentalization and specialization. The Hermitage Cafe has no non-smoking section, and I assure you, any non-smoking section they could accomodate to any worthwhile degree would not be worth the cost it would take.

I am unsure what percentage of the U.S. population are smokers, but I would hazard an educated guess that smokers represent the minority of us (at least I sincerely hope so).

This hardly matters. By this logic, the end result would be that restaurants would only cater to majority preferences, which makes no sense. Wherever there’s a majority, there’s a minority looking to spend money. The ignored minority is the seed of many a profitable business.

On another note, how many of you have dined at restaurants that putatively offered smoking and non-smoking sections, only to discover that only a half-height partition separated you and your party from someone suckin’ on a Marlboro? Not cool.

The quality of the isolation of non-smoking sections is irrelevant. The people that patronize such establishments obviously find the non-smoking section “good enough”, even if it’s not hermetically sealed. This is a false dilemma that ignores the third, much more likely option: that as people’s tastes increasingly stray away from smoking (as well they should), businesses will find it increasingly viable to decide to ban smoking in their establishment. Conversely, others would rush to fill the niche of the neglected minority (which, as I argue previously, Hermitage Cafe has essentially already done).

I have just as much of a right to enjoy my company and myself in this restaurant as you do, dear smoker.

This is debatable on its face, but I’ll wait for that until your later definition of the word “public”.

We share this space. It seems to be both selfish and unduly inconsiderate for you to expect me to alter my social preferences in order to accommodate your habit.

Your choice of words here is loaded: what is the difference between “social preference” and “habit”? Surely, cigarettes are addictive, but socially-speaking, they are both behaviours. You’re heaping exaltation onto your “social preference” because it happens to be the one that you prefer, despite being the minority.

The fact that I live downtown provides me abundant examples of similar social negotiations: The Luis Palau festival recently flooded the entire downtown area with Christians. Personally I found their “habit” of praising a fictional entity in the sky to be a little creepy and annoying, but I am not about to campaign to ban it.

Similarly, the Harleys that swarm downtown like locusts on steroids at their conventions are quite irritating. They are loud, ostentatious and pointless (loud pipes save lives is a load of crap). They are bad for my hearing and they keep me up at night. But, again, I am not about to campaign to ban it.

Why? I live downtown. I chose to come here. I’d be an idiot not to expect things to be louder. If I wanted to live in a homogenous, gated community free of the distractions I find displeasing, I would live in the suburbs. But I don’t. I made the decision, and I have to live with the consequences of living with other people who (in this case) have not only as much a right, but also an established practice, to do what they do. I would never be so arrogant as to move downtown and suddenly decide that everything had to change to suit me. How is that any different?

Here are some definitions of the adjective public at Merriam-Webster Online:
exposed to general view; open
of, relating to, or being in the service of the community or nation
accessible to or shared by all members of the community

The dictionary definition is completely irrelevant here. Legal matters are defined in terms that rarely have any simplistic basis in a conversational lexicon — in fact, the legislation in question does define “public space” specifically, making a Merriam-Webster unnecessary:

“Public place” means an enclosed area of any place to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted, including airports, banks, common areas of multifamily housing facilities (i.e., apartment buildings and condominiums), entertainment venues, health care facilities, hotel and motel common areas, laundromats, public transportation facilities, reception areas, restaurants, retail food establishments, retail service establishments, retail stores, schools, shopping malls, sports facilities, theaters, and waiting rooms.

In this case, dictionaries aren’t our reference — our ever-evolving canon is. Your definitions of “public” are necessary, but not sufficient, to provide a working legal basis for deciding what behaviour we leave to the establishment-owner to permit or not. And as we can see above, the definition in the law includes a wide variety of establishments that are considered private in many other contexts. Certainly there is already behaviour that a business owner can choose to allow or not allow: sleeping in the establishment, eating or drinking in the establishment, taking off one’s clothes for money in the establishment (albeit with a pre-existing heavy dose of morality-legislation here). Indeed, a business owner has a near infinite variety of choices that are left to his own discretion. Why is it that suddenly when it comes to smoking, the establishment is suddenly a “public space”?

The public health issue is the wildcard here. I won’t go as far as Blake in attempting to debate the health consequences of second-hand smoke. It sucks whether or not you get lung cancer. But let’s be clear here: secondhand smoke is not some insidious, invisible threat. It’s not radiation seeping unseen from the ground. It’s not asbestos, silently scarring your lungs. Nor is it the same as food quality/poisoning issues which warrant public regulation. You don’t see salmonella before you eat it. But you can see smoke. It’s smoke. You see it. You get up. You leave. You become the neglected market which potential business-owners will swoop to pick up. You have your choice, the smokers have theirs.

Does it not strike a bizarre chord that the reality of this legislation will just mean an increase in establishments that jump through legal hoops to avoid the law? Declaring their place “private”, increasing patio space which will now be crowded with smokers. Not to mention the dreaded “doorway” effect, wherein nary a building is without the smokers clinging to the front, stinking up the place like some sort of foul barnacle. It’s a legal mess that is difficult to enforce. It’s a bad idea.

Okay, check out this recipe. It’s a basic butter/cream frosting. Here are the ingredients:

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup butter, softened
6-7 cups powdered or confectioner’s sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
6-9 Tbsp. milk
2 tsp. vanilla

And now the instructions:

PREPARATION:
In large bowl, cream butter until very fluffy. Add part of the sugar and salt and beat again. Continue adding sugar and milk in small batches, alternately, beating until very fluffy. Stir in vanilla. Fill and frost cake. If you have leftover frosting, put it between graham crackers for a fabulous after-school snack for your kids (or you!).

P.S. Have fun outliving your kids because they will die of diabetes-related complications at age 15.

Well, this makes me feel good. Amanda and I had some just roast chicken for dinner tonight and it was just sliiightly undercooked, but hey, what’s the worry, right?

Well, now of course I see that the USDA has announced that chicken salmonella rates are up nearly 80 percent.

That’s a lot of percents.

There’s evil afoot in this world, ladies and gentlemen. An unholy trinity of forces that wield such power we can never hope to compete. Am I talking about the legislative, judicial, and executive branches? the three stooges?

No, I refer to the triumvirate of evil: sugar, alcohol and caffeine.

The three things I am convinced are making the majority of Americans completely miserable — either separately, or more commonly, by working together. (I base this opinion of course on my own anecdotal experience. It’s, like, totally scientific.)

I’ve done a pretty good job of giving sugar and most refined carbs the boot from my diet. Booze is another matter (ahem).

But caffeine. Whoo boy. I’ve “quit” drinking caffeine so many times I’ve got it down to a fine art (hint: Goody’s powder contains caffeine, acetominophen and aspirin. It comes in powder form for easy dosage modulation, and the painkillers take the edge off the withdrawal headache.)

Lately, my caffeine addiction has really gotten out of hand — I was going through 1/2 to a whole pot of coffee a day, plus easily 5-6 diet cokes a day at the office. Yeah, I have a problem. I was pretty much resigned to my fate — that I just wasn’t able to function in this society without being a hopeless caffeine junkie. Lately, however, my urticaria has been particularly bad, preventing me from working out as diligently (okay, at all) as I normally aspire to. In my neverending search for relief from the urticaria, I am constantly finding Some New Thing to blame it on, and then proceeding to post-hoc rationalize all the confluences I overlooked in the past. This year, it’s caffeine. I started drinking caffeine around the time the urticaria started (when I was around 15/16 — drinking a bottle of Coke at school every morning). I found some interesting articles that show that a correlation between urticaria and caffeine has been observed in others. So who knows.

Not to mention that caffeine just plain makes me feel like crap. Sure, a good caffeine buzz is great for productivity, but once you get really hooked, you wind up like Krusty the Clown, free-basing moon rocks. “All this does is get me to normal.” Meanwhile, I sleep like crap; I wake up feeling drugged, and I’m a walking zombie until I get my dose.

So, here I am, yet again, trying to kick the vile drug. I spent last week scaling down my intake, and today is my first caffeine-free day. My head hurts.

Via US Food Policy, I see that Michelle Holmes wants to attach some strings to the use of food stamps to limit their purchase of unhealthy food.

Is this ethical? What happens when the authorities are largely wrong about what might be causing an obesity crisis (for example, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say, hypothetically, the last 50 years of strict low-fat policy)?

What happens when someone disagrees with our health policy? Are they to be left their own devices to find food? This is a dangerous idea. Food policy should gravitate towards education, not mandate. People aren’t going to eat healthy by force — they need understand why they should be making an effort to be healthy, but they need to decide on their own terms what “healthy” means.

Also, the larger point being ignored here is that “food stamps are still buying soda pop, potato chips and deep-fried frozen dinners” not because people are stupid or ignorant. But rather, newsflash, junk food is infinitely cheaper than healthy food. So here’s a different idea: use food stamp policy to make healthy food cheaper. I am not really a policy/administrative wonk enough to provide a useful suggestion as to how to go about this. Suggestions?

Check out this picture. It’s a picture of a snack store in a Missouri school.

Now you know why Type 2 Diabetes is decreasing referred to as “late/adult onset”.

So I was reading this debate from a few years ago about pharmaceutical patents and financing, and in it, Dean Baker lays out his plan for an alternative to pharmaceutical research financing that doesn’t involve a patent/profit motive. Here’s a brutally edited snippet to get the jist of his idea across:

.. what I propose is to have a publicly funded system. … Can we have publicly funded research? Does that seem far-fetched? Well, it better not seem farfetched because we already [do], about thirty billion a year, in publicly funded research primary through the National Research Institutes of Health. … what would I propose, you know, as an alternative, I would say, lets roughly double it, we ll get to the numbers in a minute, but instead of having NIH just do basis research, let s bring the products through to development.

So, there’s that. I’m not entirely swayed, but I am still plowing through the transcript. Richard Kingham was Baker’s primary opposition, and he makes some good points about why Baker’s idea might be flawed, but Kingham said something that really struck me as odd, which is going to make it very hard for me to take him seriously in the rest of this debate. Baker asserts that patent litigation and development of copycat drugs are overly-costly, and in responding, Kingham says this:

But in any event, unless the Federal Government were a complete sap, it would have to defend its patents too, against the private sector of the United States and against foreigners. You can t rid of the defense of patents, there will always be people who want to challenge them or want to infringe them and it will be necessary to spend money to deal with them. And by the way, nobody arrests infringes. You have to sue them and get injunctive or other relief against them. There s no government agency that goes out and arrests patent infringes.

Am I misreading, or is he entirely missing the point of Baker’s idea that there wouldn’t be any patents to defend? Publication and dissemination of the results of government-sponsored research was the cornerstone of Baker’s case. I find it amusing that Kingham actually suggests that the government would have to be a “complete sap” to dare to pursue the health of its citizens instead of a monopoly profit mechanism.