All available evidence suggest to the contrary.

Why do you think I sent you to Medline and the actual Surgeon General's report instead of some reporter's synopsis of the same studies? At the very least, read the conclusions at the end of each chapter of the Surgeon General report (hint: especially adult respiratory) to bolster your own position instead of shouting back that science is wrong. Scientific study is all about the fucking details, trying to parse which of a gazillion different factors is likely to lead to a specific result.

And you're so hyped up on lung cancer that you're forgetting all of the other health problems that have an association with tobacco smoke, including environmental tobacco smoke, like asthma, COPD, CHD, a variety of other cancers and reproductive problems. I'll talk to your oncologists if you talk to my pulmonologists. If a person doesn't have a genetic predisposition to lung cancer, he or she may very well have a predisposition to one of the other nasty, expensive to treat diseases that tobacco smoke exacerbates. And then I have to pay for his or her healthcare costs through increased insurance premiums or Medicare / Medicaid, and that's when it becomes a problem that I care about.

Bunifa told me he is smart enough to lube up before the pegging.

not intentionally. the party of interference subliminally wants there to be no smoking for those reasons, but truly believes its laws are justified for the stated reasons. it's like how you say Israel shouldn't defend itself so much, but your real motivation is that you subliminally hope everything will get better if we just go back to ignoring everything.

There is nothing subliminal about it. Things do not get better by carrying out war on people that aren't at war with you, even if they are sympathetic with those that are.

No, but they do by continuing to let those people who aren't doing anythng to you aid and support and host an enemy and its ever growing armaments that are intended to do a lot of harm to you. Keep thinking from a college sophmore;s perspective. Luckily there are intelligent world wise adults in charge in Israel. And trhe White hOuse.

A New Home for Penske
 

What is farsi for "sock"?

Ahmadinejad's blog




Sample poll: "Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war/"

Read it again:

What is instructive is that he was unable to state the simple fact "No I happen to be against Hezbollah." - the words appear to fail him.

Within the next sentence, he tosses off the "I condemn them" but then immediately wraps them into a conversation about both sides, and talks about "both sides coming together"

Which sides - a terrorist organization occupying another country and the Nation which it unilaterally attacked.

You're right about one thing - Dingell's comments are bewildering.

As to who is the hack, well....

A New Home for Penske
 

Off my corner, ho.

It appears DK has my proxy.

There is no way that you can read the full text of what Dingell said and think that Hanson represented it fairly. I'm not defending Dingell, who has an ability only seen in Congress to say very little at great length. But he clearly is saying that (a) he opposes violence, and (b) some negotiated settlement is necessary for peace. If you read (a) and nonetheless think he does not distinguish between Hezbollah and Israel, then you need Spanky to tutor you in reading comprehension.

It is similar to when Ty was unable to unqualifiedly condemn Arafat as a murderous thuggish ruggish terrorist. The left has Moral Compass with no bearings. It is just spinning wildly out of control.

If you read what the Left says as carefully as Victor Davis Hanson did, that is certainly true. I say this to you because you plainly do not bother to read almost anything linked here, or the longer posts for that matter.

Seriously, why can't Dingell just admit that Hezbollah is evil?

Why does he need to qualify it?

If the modern day left was in power during WWII we'd all be goosestepping and speaking german now. I like gewurtraminer and a little reisling from time to time, but overall that is not a palatable reality to me. Why can't the left find morality? Why do they hate G-d?

Why can't Rush Limbaugh and Hanson and Diane and Slave and you just admit that Dingell didn't say what you all are attacking him for? Why do you need to keep attacking him? In the middle of a war, with Islamo-fascist terrorists trying to kill us, why do you all spend so much time villifying honorable Americans for no good reason? Why do you care more about trashing political enemies than about fighting the war on terror?

I admit that he didn't say that Hezbollah was unqualifiedly an evil terrorist outfit. Is that what you were looking for?

You, too, can sign up for Spanky's reading comprehension course. If you get him to play poker while he's doing his teaching, you just might come out ahead.

A pretext is a lie.

What do WMD have to do with smoking restrictions?

I understand your point. My problem with the way medicine offers conclusions is that its very reluctant to admit the socially unpalatable finding implicit in its research (you're probably not going to get a disease from 99.9% of the things you do until you're quite old). The findings are always subtly geared toward making the readers as hyper-vigilant as possible, which, I think, actually causes our taxes to go up. Frivolous visits to docs and E/Rs are a fairly sizable chunk of medical costs each year.

I also have a problem with dumbing down data for the public. Why not tell Joe Shmoe he probably won't see any problems from weekend binge drinking or an occasional suntan or cigarette? It's true. Why do we always inflate the dangerous aspects of things?

That linkage creeps me out. Do we have to dumb everything down for the average American?

What do you mean "we," kemo sabe?

That's rather open ended, isn't it?

He clearly (i) refused to condemn Hezbollah when given the opportunity and (ii) proceeded to treat Hezbollah and the State of Israel as if they have some moral equivilency.

You're getting caught up in trying to knock Hanson - an always excellent read in my opinion - and ignoring the implications of Dingell's viewpoint. That somehow, the terrorists and Israel are on equal footing.

I'm noting that you said this the next time the fat debate comes up. We've got a major obesity problem in this country because people don't think that extra donut is going to have an impact one way or another. And yeah, they're probably right about the single donut.

But then, the causal link between obesity and morbidity is about as tenuous as second hand smoke and cancer, so no worries.

"of course I condemn....yada yada yada, la la la, look over there......oh yeah, war is bad kumbahyah...

For the umpteenth time, yes, he did.

ummm

Yes, but fat people are ugly. Smokers look cool.

At least for the first ten to fifteen years they smoke, and then not so cool.

Against my better judgment, sanity, and the interests of my billable hours, I went and read the link.

Ty -- while I may agree with you about the Repub penchant for attacking and blaming and finger-pointing -- essentially, fighting their political opponents rather than fighting the country's military opponents -- I cannot agree with you on Dingell. His statement was anemic, to say the least. I confess to having skimmed over the loooooong part, but if there is something in there that identifies Hezbollah as the terrorist, the aggressor, the bastards who use Lebanese as human shields, you haven't identified it. The rest of his statement did cast Israel and Hezbollah as equally at fault, and equally bad actors.

One reason I've been so acid-filled in these Israel discussions is my concern that my brethren on the left do just this. Let us never forget who the terrorists here are.

And, let us never forget that our country suffers when people refuse to criticize members of their own party. See, e.g., Iraq.

Yes, but old people are ugly anyway, so who cares?

Damn you! Or damn the fact I wasn't on here for like a whole 5 min and didn't beat you to it.

Went for a snack?

I nominate Sidd for most improved player of the year. Seconds?

No. Did that earlier. Didn't miss much. Had an Actual Work-Related Discussion with someone.

Second, subject to striking the last paragraph.

Also, you're confusing medicine with public health. Public health is about treating populations and finding out what causes disease so it can be avoided. Epidemeology, the field of study that you've ranted the most against, is a public health discipline. It's the reason we drink clean water. It's the reason we pinpointed the HIV virus as a sexually transmitted disease. It's the way we track Avian flu.

Medicine is about treating individuals. It is completely anecdotal in nature, and it depends almost entirely on the individual patient. If you flip through a medical journal, say JAMA or the New England Journal, you'll find a lot of case studies and randomized trials. (This week, it's all HIV all the time, because of the AIDS conference.) If you show up at grand rounds in any teaching hosptial, usually the presentations are on various individual cases. Drug and other interventional trails are also based on randomized reports of individual cases. When the results of an intervention start to a) be beneficial and b) generate the same results in different patients with the same disease, the intervention is adopted as the standard treatment.

In some respects, public health is an attempt to avoid having to resort to medicine. The goal of public health is to keep the population healthy so that medicine is not needed. Once you get sick, the public health part is irrelevant (except, of course, you're now a data point for future public health research) and the medicine part kicks in. Your doctor isn't worried about what got you there; they're worried about how to fix you. He or she is going to tell you about what's going on with you personally and he or she is going to make treatment and diagnosis decisions based on your individual history (including family history, social history, lifestyle and your physical condition (height, weight, blood tests, x-rays, CT scans, and any other diagostic tools that he or she uses in his or her practice)).

So your rant is against public health, not medicine. I, for one, am a fan of John Snow, and I vaguely subscribe to the germ theory of disease. Your milage may differ.

Just for Fun
 

For all of my leftwing liberal secular humanist morally relativistic G-d hating pals here, I have a neat worktime diversion:


Atheist Hangman

Enjoy, and don't say I never gave you anything.

http://www.atheistsunited.org/multim.../hangman_6.gif

Bullshit he did.

"Dingell's full statement: "No, I happen to be -- I happen to be against violence, I think the United States has to bring resolution to this matter. Now, I condemn Hezbollah as does everybody else, for the violence."

Dingell said he was pointing out that if the United States is to be an honest broker in the Middle East, it must talk to both sides."

Why do you conservatives hate Democrats? When we're trying to fight a war on terrorists, why do you keep trying to divide us?

United we stand.

Then they stop smoking and get fat.