News

A homeless man was reunited with his cat after an earlier story ran about the cat having disappeared:

Samantha, the pug-nosed cat, and Daniel Harlan, a homeless man who owned her, were reunited Tuesday.

Harlan wept when Tom Neville, who had the missing cat for weeks, gave Samantha back.

"I thought I'd lost her for good," Harlan said.

The cat and Harlan got together again after The Chronicle ran a story Tuesday, along with a picture, about the cat's disappearance. Neville saw it and recognized Samantha as the animal he rescued from life on the streets.

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I wish Michelle Obama would quit swallowing the nonsense from the health food nuts who want to tell us what to put in our mouths and raid our refrigerators, if necessary.

She needs to talk to Paul Campos about the nonsense "obesity epidemic":

Paul Campos

rips apart the anti-"obesity" culture in this interview with the Atlantic:

Megan: Over the last five years or so, I've noticed that public health efforts about obesity are not just amping up the volume, but exploring increasingly coercive methods to induce weight loss: taxes on junk food, lawsuits against fast food companies (which are basically a tax on junk food), and so forth. Does that match your analysis?

Paul: It's the classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to "do something" about the crisis, usually by eliminating the folk devils.

That of course is the strategy for this crisis. If fat people are the problem, then the solution is to get rid of them, by making them thin people. The most amazing aspect of this whole thing, for me, has always been the imperviouusness of policy makers, and even more so people who consider themselves serious academics and scientists, to the overwhelming evidence that there's no way to do this.

I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population's average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace's average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources

It's all about prejudice, especially against women who don't conform to an unrealistic body size.

Miscellaneous.

I'll bet there will be no takers to Paul Campos' $10,000 challenge.
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No bodies were found at Barker Ranch.
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An idiot pilot got caught with his pants down--literally.
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Paul Campos

describes the media affair with John McCain, which isn't so much an affair as outright prostitution.

Actually it's more than journalistic laziness or masochism. We know McCain has changed positions repeatedly over the years, but the problem is he gives the national press corps unlimited access.

It's a corruption that needs to be brought out in the open for all to see.

Paul Campos

lets the medical establishment have it over the bogus "obesity epidemic." Now we find being "overweight" is even healthy.

The real disease is prejudice based on body size.

Paul Campos

takes on Harvard University's obsession with "overweight" people being at risk for disease and death.

The recent hysteria over "obesity," whatever that is, dovetails perfectly with our society's preoccupation with thinness as virtue. It has nothing whatever to do with concern for health:

Of course, one reason the Harvard claims are treated with such respect is that they tell people what they want to hear. Their claims dovetail perfectly with social prejudices that declare one can never be too rich or too thin, and with the widespread desire to believe that sickness and death can be avoided if one follows the rules laid down by the appropriate authority figures. Combine these factors with the social cachet wielded by the Harvard name, a willingness to make brazen assertions that run from serious exaggerations to outright lies, and lazy journalism of the "some say the Earth is flat; others claim it's round; the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle" type, of which the Scientific American article is only the most recent example, and you have a recipe for an epidemic of wildly misleading statements dressed up in the guise of authoritative scientific discourse.