This shit doesn't work, OK?

"There cannot be two kinds of medicine, conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work."

—The New England Journal of Medicine, 1998

.....On Fridays, I receive my weekly edition of What’s New?, written by physicist Bob Park.
.....Last Friday, Bob reported on the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Evidently, a woman named Josephine Briggs has now replaced Stephen Straus as director of the organization. Writes Park, she “is expected to continue his policy of rigorous science.”
.....The skeptical and scientific-minded Park is a fan of the NCCAM. How come? Aren’t good critical thinkers foes of “alternative medicine”? Yup.
.....When Straus died seven months ago, Park reported:

[As the first director of the NCCAM, Straus’s] task was to turn the quack-dominated Office of Alternative Medicine [OAM], created by Congress, into a scientific center. He did it with grace, the only way possible, subjecting one quack cure after another to randomized double-blind tests, while enduring attacks from scientists who thought he moved too slowly. One after another all failed.

.....Wikipedia explains that

NCCAM was established in October 1991, as the Office of Alternative Medicine, which was re-established as NCCAM in October 1998. Its mission statement declares that it is "dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science; training complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) researchers; and disseminating authoritative information to the public and professionals."

.....—“In the context of rigorous science.” That’s the crux.
.....Wikipedia explains that the NCCAM does have its critics:

Critics attest that despite the publicized intentions at its founding, NCCAM and its predecessor, the Office of Alternative Medicine, have spent more than $800 million on … research since 1991 but have neither succeeded in scientifically demonstrating the efficacy of a single alternative method nor declared any alternative medicine treatment effective.

.....Surprise, surprise!
.....As I recall, Park approves of NCCAM on the grounds that, though research on CAMs is arguably a total waste of time and money, the operation of NCCAM—i.e., its systematically putting CAMs to the test with scientific rigor—is the best way to teach the public what it otherwise will not learn.
.....And what’s that?
.....This shit doesn’t work. OK? It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
.....Long live the NCCAM! Well, sorta.

Odd place

We live in such an odd place, really.

• Do local right-wing ministers (named “Wiley”) ask God to off their critics? Indeed they do. (See WILEY DRAKE: REVEREND OR AYATOLLAH?, Buena Park pastor again prays for critics' demise, God, justice and the infidels.)

• Do big newspapers utterly drop the ball on corruption in the County Sheriff’s Office and then refuse to acknowledge the droppage or the abysmal extent of said droppage? Again, indeed they do. (See REGISTER "DIDN'T HAVE THE GOODS" ON CARONA, Was media too slow in Carona case?.)

• Do public officials get paid a shitload of money for doing virtually nothing—or, worse, for doing a phenomenally shitty job? Indeed, they do. (See Some in public still angry about salary increase, Turd.)

• Great weather, though.

Nice day

Along Santiago Canyon Rd.

Sunny Girl

From Modjeska Grade

Stood on these rocks, lost my balance, fell down hard. Dropped my camera, too. On the rocks.

Lambrose Canyon Rd.

1-800-672-3888 (Red Emma)

by RED EMMA
.....AFTER a mass shooting, I always make a point of checking in with the National Rifle Association. Friday morning I went to its impressive website to look at what might be going on over at the propaganda organ of the weapons industry. You know, after five human people were killed at Northern Illinois University and a gay teen was murderized by another little kid with a handgun here in the Southland, at an Oxnard junior high.
.....The gun pimps seemed not to be addressing either killing at all. No, instead, the NRA’s “Top News Stories” were: Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program Reaches 21 Millionth Child, Deadline Approaches for NRA Youth Education Summit, and NRA Club University to Be Held in Austin, Texas.”
.....Wow. Stop the presses already. Oh, and guns don’t kill people. Mentally ill children kill people.
.....No mention either of the predictable, even necessary crime for which the NRA is directly (yes, directly) responsible in yet another case of students at a college killed by a mentally ill person or homophobe or misogynist or Regular Guy who found it easy enough to buy multiple weapons and bullets or find them in Dad’s closet or garage or wherever these assholes, all NRA supporters of course, keep their shit. No, instead, an attack on Rosie O’Donnell.
.....So, beyond checking in, I always make a point of actually calling the NRA’s toll free number. 1-800-672-3888.
.....“I am just calling,” I said on Friday morning, “to acknowledge the work of the NRA.” I paused here. (Red has done this before, because I am an asshole, so I kind of have it down. It’s fun, if you like this sort of thing, like tearing the wings off of flies or talking to Republicans.)
.....“Well, thank you sir,” said the minimum wage-paid stooge who sits in a call center somewhere in a “right-to-work” state.
.....“Yes,” I continued, “I wanted to thank you for your consistent and tireless work to get weapons into the hands of people who kill their wives, or students or little kids, especially women, and especially this week, at high schools, colleges and universities. I wanted to make sure that you know just how much I hold the NRA responsible for confusing the Second Amendment with the right to make weapons manufacturers wealthy and lobbying to challenge reasonable restrictions on purchase of handguns and for….”
.....And so on. You get it. The guy let me talk. In fact, I have never been hung up on. These are polite people, at least for a while. It’s my impression that the NRA doesn’t get many of these calls (damn shame, too) and that the Call Center phone op doesn’t quite know what to do. Finally he or she understands the rhetorical tack, as obvious as a sinking ship, and thanks me quickly and hangs up.
.....It’s all useless and petty, mean and pointless. It doesn’t make me feel better, but it makes me feel. Bad, too. Not as bad as must feel the useless public officials who can’t seem to follow the clumsy and obvious cause and effect of billions spent by this criminal outfit and the reliably, only completely predictable next shootings, which epidemiologists and doctors can see coming, not to mention law enforcement, Congress and anybody with a brain in their head. I like to cringe when the elected official makes a public statement, because it feels bad too. When the president of the college and the governor of the state offer that there’s not much we can do, except help the victims’ families and pray and develop, yes, better communications and safety mechanisms at public institutions, maybe install more phones. Yes, more phones. Phones. (Because there aren’t cell phones everywhere?) And never, ever point out the complicity of the Colt and Glock companies and their paid hustlers for the profiteers and fetishists of mechanical death made easy. No, so scared or coerced or bought off are they, so far, far away from what is most obvious and clear that they chalk it all up to fate or “a sign of the times we live in” (actual quote, heard on NPR) without reading the actual sign right there, which reads, clearly, written in blood, thank you, legible from anywhere in the world in any language, “National Rifle Association: Sponsor, Gun Violence.”

— RE

Andrew Tonkovich

Sunny is a brat

An introduction to Sunny Girl.
For cat-lovers only. (Click on the arrow.)

On My Mind

~
When Rebel Girl was a child, a teenager and then a young adult, there was no place she felt safer than at school. School was where she went to see how the broken world could come together. She still feels that way, that what we all do together is ultimately world-mending – but it's different now and it was, she realizes different even then, back when she felt so safe; maybe she was just lucky.

Earlier this week, in Oxnard, a 15-year-old student was shot by another student, an 8th grader. The victim was reportedly openly gay and lived at a group home for abused and neglected children. This morning's newspaper reports that shooter's home life may have also been troubled, with his father's record of domestic abuse and drunk driving. No reports yet on the origin of the gun. The victim is now officially brain-dead, on a ventilator and the 14-year-old shooter is facing 50 years to life.

Then yesterday, in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student who had stopped taking his medication, opened fire, killing 5, wounding 15 before killing himself. According to this morning's NY Times, the shooter "bought two of the four guns used in the attack — a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9-millimeter Glock pistol — six days ago, and they were legally registered to him, authorities said. [He]carried the shotgun in a guitar case and the pistols and ammunition strapped to his body, concealed by a coat…He proceeded through a side door to the lecture hall’s stage, and immediately opened fire without speaking. Forty eight casings and 6 shotgun shells were found at the scene, indicating more shots than initially estimated by witnesses."

UPDATE: Click on Cold Spring Shops, a blog by Stephen Karlson, a professor at NIU, for a closer look at that campus community in the aftermath of the shooting.

“This is just like Pearl Harbor”

.....FROM this morning’s New York Times:
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?:

.....A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
.....Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
.....Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall….
.....Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge….
.....But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
.....Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
.....She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
.....Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
.....Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
..... “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
.....The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
..... “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
.....At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”….