Quick Hitts

One of the most insidious problems with socialized medicine is usually overlooked: It gives the lifestyle nannies a very potent way to control everyone else. Anyone who makes choices the nannies disapprove of will find their medical care delayed, and maybe even denied.

This has been going on for quite a while in England, where smokers are routinely discriminated against. They’re being moved to the bottom of waiting lists, and some doctors are simply refusing to treat them. And now it’s official – if you smoke, you can’t get surgery until you’ve quit for at least a month.

It can be argued that such discrimination is justified when the resource in question is rare. For instance, if there’s only one kidney available for every ten people who need one, it makes sense to ration it to the person who is the most likely to survive the operation and live the longest afterward. Requiring the patient to be as healthy as possible before the procedure isn’t unreasonable.

But for standard procedures that’s both an excuse and an admission that socialized medicine is, by nature, rationed.

Removing all the market forces and training people that medical care as “free,” (or worse yet, a “right”) removes all incentives to conserve resources. The system gets flooded, can’t handle the overflow, and becomes as congested as the entry way of a Wal-Mart running a special on mullet trimmers. Procedures that can be scheduled in days in free market countries require waits of weeks or months in socialized medicine countries. If they can ration care and demand behavior modification for the kidney patent, why not do the same for everyone else?

This is where the nannies come on board. These dour do-gooders demand that everyone else be as risk adverse as they are. They will simply not tolerate people choosing fun over safety or risk over longevity. Anyone with the audacity to stand up to them, to reject their meddling and make their own decisions, will lose their access to health care.

This is already the norm in Britain, especially with smokers. There’s little doubt it will spread to drinkers, and then, perhaps, to rock climbers and bungee jumpers and motorcycle riders. And people who speed, or have unprotected sex, or eat their meat rare. When everyone is being forced to pay for health care, then everyone has to stay in line, or else.

The ill fated Hillarycare plan would have made it a felony to go outside the system and buy your own health care. (Which ends any need to discuss whether or not Hillary is a fascist.) If this policy gets put in place, adults engaging in politically incorrect behavior would discover they couldn’t get care at any price.

We are already besieged on all sides by the nannies who are successfully demanding that Big Brother limit more and more of our decisions. If we are foolish enough to elect weasels who institute socialized medicine in the US, we may find ourselves faced with the choice of living according to the nannies demands or living without medical care.

I’ve been a Weird Al fan since he did “Another One Rides The Bus” in the early 80’s. Most novelty acts do one or two songs and then fade away. Some make a fortune with one holiday song like “The Monster Mash” or “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” and call it a career. You can count the number of novelty acts with long careers on your fingers, but with the exception of The Smothers Brothers, no one has lasted longer than Al. And while Tommy and Dick are just paying the rent playing their old stuff, Al keeps coming out with fresh, funny songs on a regular basis.

I’ve never seen him on concert, though, until last week, when he kicked off his Straight Outta Linwood tour at Albany’s Palace Theater.

The back of the stage will filled with large video screens. The show started with clips of Jay Leno, Johnny Carson, Dave Lettermen, and a dozen other talk show hosts saying “Please Welcome Weird Al Yankovic.” He took to the stage and blasted into one of his pop song polka Medleys. I’ve never been a big fan of these, but his energy was infectious and got things off to a good start.

Then the stage went dark and the screens played one of his Al TV fake interviews. It seemed to go on a little longer then necessary, but then the reason for it became obvious. Al was using the time for a costume change. And not just Al – the entire band came out in new costumes every couple of songs.

He did White and Nerdy early on, dancing around the stage like he was twenty years younger than he is. During “Your Pitiful” he did a slow strip tease, pealing off layer after layer of tee shirts, each one becoming a bit more pitiful.

The sound was decent – not perfect, but clear enough to hear most of the lyrics, even “Smells Like Nirvana.” The volume was just right – loud enough to know you were at a concert, but not loud enough to obscure the music. My only technical complaint was one effect that was way overused – extremely bright strobe-like lights that were flashed directly into the eyes of the audience. Al, when we’re sitting there in a dark theater with our eyes wide open and focused directly on the stage, those lights are almost physically painful. Please, knock it off. You should know better.

“Yoda” is one of my favorite W. A. songs (“I know Darth Vader’s really got you annoyed, but remember if you kill him then you’ll be unemployed”) and I was hoping it would be in the line up. It was. It started with a costume change, of course, and he did the “The Saga Begins” in it’s entirety. Then the keyboardist did a quick, fast thirty second rendition of The Maple Leaf Rag (strange choice, but it worked) and they blasted into a version of “Yoda” that would have made Ray Davies proud.

He didn’t skimp on the costumes. There were probably a dozen costume changes during the show. He (and the band) were fully Amish for “Amish Paradise” and for “Fat” he not only wore the fat suit, but the double chin facial prosthetics.

I was hoping he’d play “Don’t Download This Song” for his encore, but instead he did “Albuquerque,” which I hadn’t heard before, but the kids behind me knew word for word.

The tour has just started, and the tickets are pretty reasonably priced, so if you get a chance treat yourself and your friends to a night of Weird. Hell, you can take grandma and the kids. Although I’m used to seeing a wide range of ages at concerts these days, the spread was really huge at this one. There were old farts like me, farts even older than me, twenty somethings, thirty somethings, teenagers and adolescents. I had never thought about it before, because he doesn’t make a big deal of it, but he does a clean show. As much as I enjoy good raunchy comedy, I have an extra dollop of respect for someone who can be clean and funny, because it’s considerably harder to do.

A while back, while YouTubeing, I came across a Weird Al video I hadn’t seen before, but like most of his videos you’ll appreciate it more if you watch the original first.

The video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues (actually a movie clip) is one of the first rock videos that was more than a recording of a concert. Embedding Youtube videos in WordPress is far more painful and complex than it should be, so you can view it by clicking here.

And here’s Al’s Version.

If you didn’t like this concert review you probably won’t enjoy this review of a Warren Zevon show or this one of the Toronto SARS concert.

About a month ago my doctor told me my diabetes medicine wasn’t working as well as it used to, so he added Avandia into the mix. It worked very well – after a week or so my blood sugar had dropped to nearly normal levels.

A week after that the media started reporting that this stuff could make your heart attack you. According to a study the risk of myocardial infarctions went up 43% for Avandia users.

I wasn’t too worried, because a 43% increase isn’t much when it comes to epidemiology. Statistics are a yardstick, not a micrometer. Even studies that are well done and honest don’t yield exact numbers, just approximate increases in probability. Because of that, and because there are errors in every study, increases of less than 100% are usually not worth getting excited about. But still, I was taking the stuff, so I set out to see if there was any validity to the claims.

The first article I found said it was based on combined information from 42 studies. That means it’s a meta analysis. That means it’s probably crap. Meta analysis, a study of studies, is the most difficult kind of study to do correctly, and the easiest to fake and manipulate. They are almost always garbage.

Other articles explained that Avandia increases water retention, and that can, in turn, cause a slight increase in heart attack risk. OK, that sounds plausible , but what were the real numbers?

I found the entire study on line, and discovered it was even more useless than I expected.

The Risk Ratio of increased heart attacks (RR) was 1.43, which translates to a 43% increase. But the Confidence Interval (CI) was 1.03 to 1.98. Although the CI is technically not the same as a margin of error, it works the same way. The real number could be a .03% increase. Or a 98% increase. Or any number in between.

If the lower bound of the CI had been 1.00 instead of 1.03, the RR would have been statistically insignificant. The study would probably have never been published, and we wouldn’t be reading all these scary articles.

But wait, there’s more. In the methodology section of the report we’re told: “Six of the 48 trials did not report any myocardial infarctions or deaths from cardiovascular causes and therefore were not included in the analysis because the effect measure could not be calculated.” A half dozen studies showed no heart attacks so they left them out. This is the very definition of cherry picking.

And then my mother-in-law, who is also a diabetic, sent me this article. It fills in even more details and shows just how appalling this study was. It explains that there were 14 additional deaths out of 25,000 people taking Avandia. Statistically, a variation that tiny means nothing.

Oh, and the Doctor behind it? He’s funded by Takeda. Takeda manufactures Actos, a drug that competes with Avandia.

I think I’ll keep taking the stuff.

If you’d like to become an expert at ferreting out dishonest medical studies, read Statistics 101 and Statistics 102 on The Facts.

Those wacky fundies are at it again. This time they’ve got a board game parents can use to reduce the IQ of their children. Or, as they describe it:

At last, a board game that reveals the insanity of perhaps the greatest hoax of our times — the unscientific “theory of evolution.”

“Intelligent Design vs Evolution” is unique in that the playing pieces are small rubber brains and each team plays for “brain” cards. Each player uses his or her brains to get more brains, and the team with the most brains wins.

So he prize for winning this game is, literally, tiny brains.

Perfect.

Five students at the Galesburg Illinois high school have been denied their diplomas, not for anything they did, but because people in the audience had the audacity to cheer when they walked across the stage.

Clarke Campbell, president of the Indianapolis school board, defended the idiocy. “It’s an important, solemn occasion,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for celebration before and after.”

I get the feeling Clark doesn’t get invited to too many celebrations before or after anything.

Nanny Nation Notification

The Pig Party is one of the cruelest jokes played by frat boys. The winner is the brother who comes home with the ugliest girl.

The appears to be a secret equivalent of that game among state legislators. The winner is whoever comes up with the most unworkable, unconstitutional and embarrassingly idiotic law possible. The Massachusetts junk food law, listed below, has no chance of winning against New York‘s law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Currently being hashed out, this law would make it a class E felony, punishable by 4-6 years in prison. That’s the same as the penalty for third degree rape.

But wait, there’s more. Afraid that the Senate would win the Worst-Law game without them, the house has added provisions that would require console makers to add parental controls to all game consoles sold in the state.

Nanny Nation Notification

The government of Massachusetts has always been long on big brotherism and short on brains. They continue in that tradition with a proposal to ban “junk” foods from high school cafeterias, vending machines, and get this: bake sales. Before mom can bring in her cookies or cupcakes, she’ll have to send them off for an expensive nutritional analysis.

One sure sign you’re dealing with a nanny: they use the phrase “a level playing field.” It’s the nannies second favorite expression, right behind “for the children.”