Fausta's blog

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Cardiac critic, no evidence of torture flights, Fukuyama's lie, and today's articles

At Forbes, an article, Cardiac Critic, about cardiologist Steven E. Nissen.

On Wednesday, a panel of pediatricians will consider the safety of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that are commonly used to treat attention deficit disorder. In a perspective published online Monday night in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nissen lays out his case that drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall may cause potential risks to the heart that many patients don't appreciate--and that these risks should be spelled out in a clear, black-box warning for consumers.
. . .
In the NEJM editorial, Nissen spins what he sees as the worrisome story of these drugs. Methamphetamine was originally developed in 1891 and was first widely used in World War II to help Luftwaffe pilots stay alert. Newer versions (including one of the active ingredients in Adderall) were introduced as appetite suppressants in the 1950s and were soon being used to treat ADHD, then a rarely diagnosed disorder that made it hard for kids to function in school.

No evidence of torture flights
A couple of months ago the BBC newscasts made a big to-do of "torture flights", where the US allegedly flew foreign terrorists to countries where they could be tortured.

Well (via Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred), buried somewhere in the BBC News site, prominently absent from its TV newscast, and couched in scare quotes, 'No evidence' of torture flights

There is no evidence the US has used UK airspace for flights transferring terror suspects to countries where they could be tortured, the government says.

At the blogs
Smadanek takes a close look at NJ Budget - Expanding Health Insurance for Children. It comes to this:

Our state plan currently provides insurance for more than 3 times the estimated number of children living in poverty.

Or, in plain English, your taxes will go up.

Betsy has a post about George Mason. This George Mason, not 24's George Mason.

Also at Betsy's, Dr. Kauthammer takes on Fukuyama's fabrication. Fukuyama -- the "end of history" guy -- has a new book to peddle and claims to have had an epiphany from hearing a speech by Dr. K, where supposedly Dr. K declared the Iraq war "a virtually unqualified success."
Well, Fukuyama lied:

A convenient fabrication -- it gives him a foil and the story drama -- but a foolish one because it can be checked. The speech was given at the Washington Hilton before a full house, carried live on C-SPAN and then published by the American Enterprise Institute under its title "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.'' (It can be read here.)

As indicated by the title, the speech was not about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. The only successes I attributed to the Iraq War were two, and both self-evident: (1) that it had deposed Saddam Hussein and (2) that this had made other dictators think twice about the price of acquiring nuclear weapons, as evidenced by the fact that Gaddafi had turned over his secret nuclear program for dismantlement just months after Saddam's fall (in fact, on the very week of Saddam's capture).

In that entire 6,000-word lecture, I said not a single word about the course or conduct of the Iraq War. My only reference to the outcome of the war came toward the end of the lecture. Far from calling it an unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that "it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right.''

Louisiana Conservative takes on the food police, among others, in this Monday Night Bible Study.

Today's articles from Maria
The UK Times wants to you to know that Pet meat has less fat than Big Mac. If you want fat, follow Steve's advice: Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man