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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 20, 2007
Global Warming and Solar Activity Changes Either: 1. Newspapers are publishing stories that are complete fabrications; or, 2. There are eminent scientists who have good reason to believe that anthropogenic global warming is far from certain. I've given previous examples--here's yet another: "The science is settled" on climate change, say most scientists in the field. They believe that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the globe to dangerous levels and that, in the coming decades, steadily increasing temperatures will melt the polar ice caps and flood the world's low-lying coastal areas. Labels: global warming Another False Gay-Bashing From Florida: BARTOW - On July 25, 2005, when Christopher Robertson reported that the mobile home he shared with his partner at Kings Manor Mobile Home Park in Lakeland had been set on fire and the words "Die Fag" were spray-painted on the front steps, it sparked widespread outrage.If the Uniform Crime Reports bias crime system works the same way that the rest of the Uniform Crime Reports system works, this was reported as an anti-homosexual bias crime in 2005--but won't be corrected, now that the actual nature of the crime is known. There are enough of these hate crimes against homosexuals that are reported--and later demonstrated to be made up--that it probably significantly inflates the FBI's figures for this category. A bit more disturbing: Robertson's lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Renee Reid, asked Jacobsen to delay the sentencing hearing for several months. Robertson has a job coming up that would last about six weeks and his employer needed him, she told Jacobsen.What is this, foster care? Why would you allow someone to be a foster parent with a serious criminal charge hanging over them? Labels: fake hate crimes More Evidence That Microsoft Is Part of a Conspiracy... But not the one that you might think. I'm reading Dr. Andrew Weil's Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being. In a chapter about ways to prevent senility, he discusses the importance of lifelong learning as a way of creating more neural pathways, which seems to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's and other forms of mental decline: But as I've thought more about it, I've realized that there is a particular cognitive experiences that gives the most essential kind of mental workout. You can get it in various ways. I will discuss two of them: learning to use a new computer operating system and learning a foreign language.So we can see the new release of Microsoft's Vista operating system as part of the doublesecret conspiracy to prevent mental decline! I knew it! Friday, January 19, 2007
"I Used a Polish Threading Die and an Indian Die Wrench" No, it's not the punchline to a very Politically Incorrect joke. I ordered up a 1 1/16"-14 threading die and a 20" long die wrench from MSC Industrial a couple of days ago. Ordinarily, "import" means "Red China" and if I have the choice, and it isn't too hideously expensive, I buy American for that very reason. But it is gratifying to see that "import" can mean other countries as well. The threading die (which worked absolutely perfectly for what I needed) is made in Poland--and there was no American alternative. The die wrench was made in India. Both looked like fine quality pieces of well-made machinery--and I don't have to feel guilty about putting money in the hands of a bunch of gangsters. Here's Someone That Could Use Some Help A rather bizarre delayed injury from duty in Iraq: TWIN FALLS — First, Robert Ramos' right arm went limp. Then the left. When the paralysis streaking down his body hit his lungs, he stopped breathing and collapsed in his fiancee's Twin Falls apartment. She knelt over him for 10 minutes, breathing air into his lungs until paramedics arrived.I'll be writing a check this evening to help out. It would be nice if others did likewise: Benefit for the Ramos family Creationism and the Grand Canyon There's an environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), that claimed the Bush Administration has pressured Grand Canyon National Park to refuse to take a position about the age of the features in the park to avoid offending the young Earth Creationists. The website eSkeptic--which initially bought into their claims--has now done some digging, and concluded that this claim wasn't even an honest mistake. After attemping to track down some of the claims made by PEER--and having them keep changing their story--eSkeptic concludes: PEER is an anti-Bush, anti-religion liberal activist watchdog group in search of demons to exorcise and dragons to slay. On one level, that’s how the system works in a free society, and there are plenty of pro-Bush, pro-religion conservative activist watchdog groups who do the same thing on the other side. Maybe in a Hegelian process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis we find truth that way; at least at the level of talk radio. But journalistic standards and scholarly ethics still hold sway at all levels of discourse that matter, and to that end I believe we were duped by an activist group who at the very least exaggerated a claim and published it in order to gain notoriety for itself, or worse, simply made it up.It turns out that while the Grand Canyon NPS book store does carry a Creationist book, it is in the "inspiration" section, along with books about Native American myths about the origins of the Canyon. As one of the commenters over at Volokh Conspiracy pointed out: Growing up in a fundamentalist family, I always found it kind of odd that National Geographic would often include fairly strident anti-creationist remarks in their articles while practically fawning over the creation myths from other religious traditions. I mean, it's not as though the adherents of those traditions don't often believe their own myths as strongly as our fundamentalists believe theirs, often with far more deleterious social effects. It always struck me as a little condescending, perhaps with a tinge of racism: "It's cute for those ignorant third-worlders (or Native Americans) to have their myths, but we won't tolerate it among our own kind."UPDATE: Apparently Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist who used to be funny, also got taken in by this non-fact, as did one of Australia's fierce Bush-haters. You know, it doesn't surprise me that leftist Bush-haters bought into the story without bothering to check it. It was, you know, just too good a story to not be true! In this respect, the left isn't any different from anyone else. Most people don't question stories that they really, really want to believe. It is just that the left is so arrogant about their superior intellects! Labels: intelligent design Thursday, January 18, 2007
Playing Politics With National Security Genuine disagreements, fine. Playing politics, not okay: On Dec. 5, Newsweek magazine touted an interview with then-incoming House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes as an "exclusive." And for good reason.How did his opinion change so rapidly in a month? Or is it just that anything that Bush is for, Democrats have to be against? It is apparent that much of what drove Democratic Party campaigning the last several election cycles was not genuine disagreement about Iraq, but a need to differentiate themselves from Bush, so that they could get back in charge...but for what purpose? Probably to implement policies that do not enjoy popular support. Homelessness in Idaho The Idaho Statesman has an article today that reports Idaho has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the U.S.: I am always a little suspicious when an advocacy group sends out a press release. If the National Rifle Association sent out a study that claimed that restrictive gun control laws were causing lots of people to be murdered in their homes, I think few newspapers would assume that this was an accurate assessment of he situation before publishing an article. So I visited the National Alliance to End Homelessness website, looking for the sort of anticapitalist rhetoric that hopelessly discredited "homeless advocacy" groups in the 1980s. To my surprise, their discussion of mental illness recognizes that at least at the national level, mental illness is strongly correlated with homelessness: In addition to chronic health problems, approximately half of homeless people suffer from mental health issues. At a given point in time, 45 percent of homeless report indicators of mental health problems during the past year, and 57 percent report having had a mental health problem during their lifetime. About 25 percent of the homelessness population has serious mental illness, including such diagnoses as chronic depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and severe personality disorders.They seem to shy away from directly acknowledging that the problems of mental illness and substance abuse play a major role in causing homelessness. (I will agree: there are probably people that become mentally ill because of being homeless, but I would suspect that this is minor compared to the other direction: mental illness and substance abuse causing homelessness.) The Idaho Statesman article does acknowledge something that tends not to get discussed: the difference between chronic homelessness, and temporary homelessness: If you don't know what "bus therapy" means: a fair number of communities over the years have solved their problem of homelessness--especially those who are mentally ill--by buying a bus ticket to somewhere far, far away. Survey data that I have seen suggest that in Idaho (unlike many big cities on the coasts), homeless people are usually not mentally ill--but the chronically homeless are disproportionately so. I guess that's no big surprise. Any rational person will work very hard to get himself or herself out of the cold, and only a person with very serious mental problems would tolerate months on end of living in a car, or on the street. My daughter has just started an internship with one of the local private social service agencies assisting homeless families get on their feet. Perhaps because of the nature of the rules that they impose on those that they help, what she has been seeing are people who are not mentally ill. Van Heel agrees that growth and lack of affordable housing are behind the increase in the Valley’s homeless population. “I don’t think we do a good job of homeless prevention,” van Heel said. “We have a lot of agencies that try, but we don’t have enough funding for homeless prevention.”While this perhaps be painful to some environmentalists, putting up barriers to building homes would definitely aggravate the problem of "lack of affordable housing." I'm always suspicious of Governor Otter, but he did make an important point that needs to be kept in mind when discussing this amorphous mass that we call "the homeless": Homelessness is a personal tragedy that often becomes society’s problem, Gov. Butch Otter said.There are multiple causes of homelessness, and I think relatively few Idahoans feel any obligation to help someone who puts alcohol and drugs at a higher priority than having a place to live. Mandatory Gardisil Injections Count on Democrats to make a good idea mandatory: I'll resist the urge to make crass remarks about West Virginia's state of sexual morality. I won't resist the urge to comment about the Democratic insistence on requiring this. Now, I think Gardisil is a very good idea. I think the concerns that some people have about Gardisil encouraging promiscuity are misplaced. It protects against cervical cancer induced by most of the strains of HPV that cause it, but it is not 100%. It does nothing for a bunch of other STDs. Any girl who thinks tht Gardisil is going to make it safe for her to have sex as casually as Bill Clinton is probably not rational, anyway. Even for girls who plan to stay virgins until marriage, and stay married for life (a fine aspiration, and one that some actually are successful at doing), it is still a good idea. Your husband may not have had such high aspirations. You may lose your husband to death or divorce through no fault of your own, and remarry. There is a non-trivial chance you may be raped over the course of your lifetime. Why not get the vaccination? Still, this is properly an individual's decision to make. Why require it? There are other mandatory vaccinations as a condition of attending public schools, but these are against highly communicable diseases (such as rubella, measles, diptheria, pertussis). HPV is not highly communicable, by any conventional definition. Can Democrats leave this alone? Now, there is one other argument in favor of mandatory vaccination: if you wipe out the potential pool of HPV (at least the strains that cause most of the cervical cancer), over time, the disease will disappear. This is a plausible argument based on a communitarian model of public health--that because the society as a whole benefits from it, the minor nuisance, inconvenience, or even violation of the right of conscience that individuals suffer is trivial compared to the broader public good. But the same "public good, private disadvantage" argument can be advanced for laws that actively discouraging sexual promiscuity as part of trying to reduce STDs--and I somehow can't picture the Democrats getting behind that program. Wednesday, January 17, 2007
More Global Warming It snowed in West Los Angeles--places that I grew up in, and where snow was only the basis for a famously facetious mural, "Venice in the Snow." Labels: global warming Will I Be The Last Person To Get A Copy of My New Book? There's a number of complimentary copies of the book that I get as part of the contract--but for some odd reason, the publisher shipped them to my agent, not directly to me--but the agent only reports seeing four copies. Hmmm. This evening, a friend of my wife is a manager at the local Border's Bookstore in Boise called to tell us that he was opening an incoming shipment, and there were five copies of Armed America in the box--but labeled that they should go in the political science section, not the history section. Hmmm. Outgoing Email Temporarily Down I can receive email, but I can't send any at the moment. A more technical explanation: smtp.claytoncramer.com is not pingable. My email host, hostrocket.com, says that there's nothing wrong with that server--but I can't ping it, and when I do a traceroute to it, I get this: Tracing route to smtp-2.hrnoc.net [216.120.225.38]The last reachable host is hostrocket.com's external gateway--and everything stops there. I can traceroute to pop.claytoncramer.com without problems, so it would appear to be an internal problem for them. UPDATE: Working again! 1 1/16"-14 Dies I have been having a heck of a time figuring out how to make a Quick Release Toe Saver for the new Astro-Physics mount. They used to use a 5/16"-18 thread on the end of their counterweight shaft--a nice, standard, common size. Their new shaft uses a very odd size. They told me by email that the major diameter was 1.083", 14 threads per inch. However: when I had a friend use his fancy thread cutting attachment to do this, the first customer reported that it didn't fit, although it was close. The customer supplied with the counterweight extension shaft, which is female on one end, and male on the other, with identical threading. When I measure it with my micrometer, the major diameter is 1.079". Not surprisingly, the part that I had made won't quite fit. I notice that there is a 1 1/16"-14 die available. If the actual outside diameter is 1 1/16" (1.0625"), that's about 1.5% smaller than the major diameter of the Astro-Physics threaded part. I'm not sure if that would produce a loose fit--or a sloppy fit. The part is $54--quite a bit to spend on something that may turn out to be useless. Is there anyone out there with knowledge of the subject that can tell me whether a 1.5% difference is going to be a loose fit or a sloppy one? Oh, This Bothers Me I can't exactly explain why it bothers me, but it does: A high-end antique dealer on the Upper East Side is suing four unnamed homeless people for $1 million on the grounds that they've driven away customers by loitering on the sidewalk in "old, warn, and unsanitary clothing and cardboard boxes and old blankets which they convert into sleeping accommodations."I'm sympathetic to the antique dealer's concerns. There is probably no chance that he will be able to bribe these homeless people to leave the area, because they are probably not right in the head, nor should he have to do so. It is a pretty damning indictment of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Labels: deinstitutionalization Tuesday, January 16, 2007
How Many Legs Does A Horse Have? You may be familiar with the story of Abraham Lincoln engaging in an anti-Newspeak moment, asking how many legs a horse has, if you call a tail a leg? It still has four legs, Lincoln insisted, no matter what you call the tail. In essence, Lincoln was taking the Platonic notion of universals and putting it in terms appropriate to the masses. I have seen the claim made that autism is growing very rapidly in not only the U.S., but throughout the Western world, and a few years back, I mentioned those claims and some of the arguments attempting to explain why. This recent article from Time argues that much of the apparent growth in autism is about redefinition, not necessarily actual increases: How else to account for the fact that a disorder that before 1990 was reported to affect just 4.7 out of every 10,000 American children now strikes 60 per 10,000, according to many estimates--the equivalent of 1 in 166 kids?Keep this in mind when someone decides to blame the shocking rise in autism on global warming, chlorine in the environment, transfats, or Republicans in the White House. Idiotville, Oregon No, that's not where the state legislature meets: Idiotville is a ghost town and former community located in Tillamook County, Oregon, United States, near the mouth of Idiot Creek on the Wilson River, on the route of Oregon Route 6. Idiotville's elevation is 1200 feet. It is in the Tillamook State Forest, along the Tillamook-Washington county line, approximately 50 mi WNW of Portland. Nothing remains at the site. Welcome to the 21st Century This is an encouraging, electronic response to what sounds like a huge problem: Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.Yahoo! I know that my doctor uses a PDA to keep track of my medical stuff and write prescriptions, but there are apparently a lot of doctors who keep their prescription pad right now to the leeches and the tools for bleeding to remove excess humors. (I'm kidding, of course. Bleeding to remove excess humors went away from doctors by the end of the nineteenth century--and that, sadly, is something about which I am not kidding.) UPDATE: A reader with a professional interest in the matter tells me: Among the hospitals that call me in to prevent medication errors (by giving handwriting classes to the doctors), a fairly high percentage claim to have "computerized everything" 1 or 2 or 5 or more years ago … yet they still have handwriting problems, because of a crucial 1% to 5% of handwritten documentation that just won't go away. I Guess The X Files and the Jaguar X-type Are Both Out As Well I mentioned in 2005 that Turkey was attempting to suppress letters Q and W on signs because these aren't used in Turkish--only in Kurdish. This news story is even more bizarre: The letter "X" soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.The article is, shall we say, not particularly sympathetic to the commission, and mentions some previous examples of their enlightened approach to reality--stuff that makes you suspect someone didn't get the memo from NASA: Among the commission's deeds is the famed 1974 fatwa — issued by its blind leader at the time, Sheik Abdul Aziz Ben Baz — which declared that the Earth was flat and immobile. In a book issued by the Islamic University of Medina, the sheik argued: "If the earth is rotating, as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom."You can see why leftists everywhere see no reason to assume that the West has anything over Islam. UPDATE: A reader shares the following story that smells apocryphal--except for idiocy like this above: A friend of mine told me of an incident years ago. Apparently, during negotiations over one or another of the peace accords in Israel, the Arab side took issue with one of the symbols used in typewritten documents. Treating Illegal Immigrants Like They Are Breaking the Law According to this Idaho Statesman article, state senator John McGee is preparing a bill that would require most state and local government agencies to get verification of legal status before providing services: Caldwell GOP Sen. John McGee is still working out the details on a bill that could affect everything from health care to library cards. It would require all adults getting state or local taxpayer-funded services to show that they are citizens or legal residents of the country.Emergency medical care and immunization would be exempted from this requirement. Not surprisingly, the left can't see the forest for the trees: Progressive and liberal groups, including the Idaho Community Action Network, said the bill is a step in the wrong direction, even though it may not actually change much.Hmmm. So do laws that treat felons differently--such laws create "divisivness" and "marginalize" felons. But I'm sure that the left would object to those laws as well. I confess that I am not thrilled about denying services to people that are paying sales, property, and income taxes. But I am even less thrilled by people ignoring our immigration laws. It isn't like we don't allow immigrants from other countries, and residents of other Western Hemisphere countries get a disproportionate fraction of the quota. If the legal immigration process is too complex and slow (and from what I have read, it is), then let's reform that process--not ignore it because rich people want cheap maid and gardening services. Need A Compact 35mm SLR? I am making an attempt at selling my older Pentax ME Super 35mm SLR. This is a Pentax ME Super with the Pentax 50mm f/2 lens, a 28mm Super Albinar f/2.8 lens, flash attachment, remote shutter release, and manual. The lens all have (and have always had) UV filters on them to protect them from dirt and scratches. The camera works beautifully, and has never given me any trouble. (I recently upgraded to a Pentax K10D digital SLR.) If you are interested in getting started in film astrophotography, or just want a high quality, very compact and light 35mm film SLR, this is a good choice. If I could get $100 for all of this, I would be a happy person. I also have a Super Albinar 80mm-205mm zoom lens for the camera as well which I would be willing to throw in for another $120. (That way I can get enough money to buy a new zoom telephoto lens for my new camera.) You can see pictures of all the gear here. Monday, January 15, 2007
The Pursuit of Happyness Will Smith's new movie (and the misspelling is for a reason) managed to even get my cynical son wildly happy. This is one of the most heart-warming--yet grittily realistic movies that I have seen in a very long time. The story is simple: it is about a young father, struggling to make ends meet in 1981 San Francisco, who responds to adversity with courage, determination, and a positive attitude. This a period piece, and since I actually spent some time in San Francisco in 1981, and moved to the Bay Area in 1982, there were so many little details that caught my eye and said, "Someone put the effort into getting this right." The Berkeley Farms milk cartons. The cars on the streets. The (in retrospect) ridiculous fashions. This is based on a true story, of a young man who starts from hard times, and works his way up the ladder as a stockbroker, and in that respect alone, it makes it atypical of most people in such difficult circumstances. Of course, many people in difficult circumstances start to whine about the unfairness of the world, instead of recognizing what the hero does--that when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he wisely wrote about the right to "the pursuit of happiness"--not necessarily the right to actually reach it. Our hero gets through difficult times because at his core, his values say that in America, you can go as fast and far as your wits and ambition will carry you. There are parts of the film that are the weird blending of reality and fiction that are inevitable in such a story. Our hero doesn't end up at a no-name stockbroker, but Dean Witter. When he looks for shelter for his son and himself for the night, he ends up at Glide Memorial Church--and it appears that the Rev. Cecil Williams is playing himself. Rev. Williams is one of those characters that drives me a bit crazy. His theology and politics were a constant source of frustration to me when I lived in the Bay Area, but Glide Memorial was certainly very active in its efforts to alleviate suffering among the poor and homeless of San Francisco in those days, and I presume that nothing has changed since then. Of course, Williams and Glide Memorial were also intimately tied (along with most of the rest of the San Francisco political establishment) with the Rev. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. (See also here, and here, and here.) There is one, and only one brief moment of language you can't use on television--and I am a little mystified why it is here, unless it is to get the rating up to PG-13, since anything less makes a movie unwatchable by teenagers. UPDATE: Here's a newspaper account of the real story. In some ways, it is more dramatic than the movie, in some ways a bit less so. Labels: film reviews More About Statins & CoQ10 A reader forwarded a couple of journal articles concerning the possible hazards of using statins. One article is by Hedva Barenholtz Levy and Heather K Kohlhaas, "Considerations for Supplementing with Coenzyme Q10 During Statin Therapy," Annals of Pharmacotherapy 40[February 2006]:290-4. This article agrees that blood levels of CoQ10 decrease by about 20-40% at low to mid-range doses--but indicates that CoQ10 levels in muscle (which is what really matters with respect to muscle function) appear not to have suffered statistically significant declines. Huh? This might explain why Merck hasn't put any energy into selling the combo statin/CoQ10 drug that they have patented. So why have some researchers, such as the ones mentioned in the article I linked to yesterday, suggested a connection? I notice that the studies mentioned in Levy and Kohlhaas's article are relatively short-term--like 24 weeks duration. Perhaps CoQ10 blood levels decline first, and it takes longer durations for CoQ10 levels in muscles to decline? With lots of chemical processes, equilibrium matters. If you reduce the level of a chemical in one part of the system, eventually, the level of a chemical in another part of the system declines as well. Could it take many months of statin use before CoQ10 levels in muscle decine to match blood levels? Another paper was James J. Nawarskas, "HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitors and Coenzyme Q10," Cardiology in Review 13:2[March/April 2005], 76-79. This one mentioned studies that examined different subgroups--and I think there's a good point in doing so. It also points out that different studies have given somewhat different results, with some patients experiencing drops in CoQ10 blood level in response to statin therapy, while others actually experienced increases (although the sample groups aren't huge). This paper also points to evidence that while CoQ10 levels in blood often fell--level in muscles actually increased for many patients! The authors theorize that the increase in muscle coenzyme Q10 concentrations may be a reflection of increased synthesis of coenzyme Q10 or possibly decreased degradation of coenzyme Q10 in muscle cells. These same investigators replicated these findings in 19 hypercholesterolemic men who received 20 mg simvastatin per day for 6 months.31 In these individuals, serum coenzyme Q10 concentrations decreased by 25% with simvastatin, whereas muscle coenzyme Q10 concentrations increased by approximately 10%. In aggregate, these 2 studies demonstrated that changes in circulating concentrations of coenzyme Q10 do not correlate well with changes in muscle coenzyme Q10 concentrations. Furthermore, there simply are no data correlating statin-induced myopathy to reductions in either circulating or tissue coenzyme Q10 concentrations.This article goes on to say that there is no study that yet demonstrates that oral supplements of CoQ10 are necessary for good health--but that also there is no real health hazard to taking CoQ10 supplements along with statins. This article also hints that there might be substantial differences within groups. People with family histories of high cholesterol (as I have) might benefit from these supplements more than others. I suppose it is always worth remembering that there is considerable variation in human beings, based on genetics and current health. I am starting to take CoQ10 as an experiment. A reader was surprised that a doctor would prescribe statins without supplemental CoQ10; his cardiologist did so. My doctor's reaction is that it at least can't hurt. I will see if the energy increase that Dr. Weil's book suggests (and that CoQ10's function in mitochondrial energy production would imply) actually takes place. Sunday, January 14, 2007
Statins & CoQ10 I'm reading Dr. Andrew Weil's Healthy Aging at the moment. He makes some very important points about why he thinks the prospect of life extension (living much longer than the norm today) are probably unrealistic, but that it is possible to reduce illness and misery at the end of life--what he calls "compression of morbidity." You might not live any longer, but instead of spending the last five years dependent and suffering, it might be the last few months, or the last year. That's worth quite a bit, I think. Parts of the book give some hints that Dr. Weil spent a lot of time studying Asian philosophy and religion, but it is all rather subtle--if that's what it is. For the most part, he seems profoundly grounded in Western medicine and science. It's a fascinating book, written with tremendous authority. (Of course, I've learned to verify claims, especially by those who write with authority.) One of this claims that hit close to home, because I take 10 mg of Lipitor everyday as a cholesterol reducer, is concerning Co-Q-10 (coenzyme Q, or ubiquinone). In addition to acting as an antioxidant, it increase oxygen use at the cellular level, improving the function of heart muscle cells and boosting capacity for aerobic exercise.... Note that the widely prescribed statin drugs inhibit the body's own production of this compound; anyone on a statin should be taking supplemental Co-Q-10.So I went searching for information about this. I found this site that seemed to be venturing into wild conspiracy theory land, claiming that Vitamin C in superdietary level was as effective as statins for preventing heart disease, and that the depletion of Co-Q-10 in the body caused by statins was a major risk: The pharmaceutical giant Merck has known for more than 15 years that statin drugs interfere with CoQ10 biosynthesis; leading to low serum levels which cause muscles to atrophy.The following claim from one of two 1990 Merck patents (4,933,165) is to add CoQ10 to statin drugs in order to overcome statin induced myopathy:Okay, the language is actually pretty calm, but I notice that the author describes himself as:1. A pharmaceutical composition comprising a pharmaceutical carrier and an effective antihypercholesterolemic amount of an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor and an amount of Coenzyme Q.sub.10 effective to counteract HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor-associated skeletal muscle myopathy. Owen R. Fonorow, Ph.D., NaturopathWell, "naturopath" doesn't impress me, particularly, and I must confess that Vitamin C attracted its own little collection of cranks, back when Linus Pauling (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) first started singing its praises. But when I used scholar.google.com to search for scholarly papers about "statin CoQ10", I found quite a number of references that suggest that this guy, and Dr. Weil, know something that I suspect a lot of doctors prescribing statins should know. In many cases, all I could get was the in context section that included these words, and I could not get to the actual articles because of subscription requirements: HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors and coenzyme Q10 - group of 3 »One article that I could get to, while not a scholarly journal, at least can't be called a wild-eyed anticapitalist ranter, and that is Smart Money, the Wall Street Journal's magazine of personal business. The article says much of what the "naturopath" above had to say--that there were serious questions about whether those taking statins who are suffering from adverse reactions (such as memory loss, severe muscle pain, liver damage, impaired heart function) might be suffering from depletion of CoQ10 caused by the statins. The article also mentions that Merck (the maker of Lipitor) patented a combination CoQ10/Lipitor pill back in 1989 specifically to address this problem--but has never made it, and that Canadian labeling on Lipitor suggests taking CoQ10 supplements. Now, the article also suggests that much of the hazard from statins is at the higher doses. It also says that Lipitor, which is offered in 10 mg, 20 mg, and 40 mg does, gets most of its benefit at even lower doses than 10 mg. So why doesn't Merck offer it at a lower dose? Primarily for the convenience of doctors, who would otherwise have to spend more time titrating the dosage for best cholesterol levels, may be driving the lack of lower doses of Lipitor. When a doctor starts you on Lipitor (and I presume on other statins), he checks your cholesterol levels a few months later, as well as checking liver function. If 20 mg does the job, he will cut you back to 10 mg, and see if the cholesterol level stays low. But if there was a 5 mg dose, or a 2.5 mg dose (as the article above suggests would be good), this would take multiple tries to see if you were now at the right dose. This is all very troubling. I have not had what I consider any remarkable incidents of memory loss (other than those little frustrations that already start to afflict you when you get past 45), and I can't really point to the sort of severe muscle pain that affects some of the worst Lipitor side effect patients. But it does scare me a bit, especially because I do worry a little about heart function. The last treadmill test I had, some months back, the cardiologist said that I was unusually fit for a man of my age. Still, my wife takes me out of hikes around the hills that lately have just exhausted me, when she is just getting going. I suspect some of this has been that I tend to be a mouthbreather, and that tends to put a lot more cold air into your lungs than nosebreathing. When we go for a walk, it is often 20 to 25 degrees--and it seems as though nosebreathing, while more effort, leaves me less exhausted. As a first step, I am going to get some CoQ10 tomorrow, and start seeing if it makes a difference. If Dr. Weil is right, I should get some benefit relatively quickly from increasing my dietary intake of it. CoQ10 is used by the mitochondria of your cells as part of the energy conversion process. I found a very interesting paper by someone on the faculty at the University of Washington explaining that while CoQ10 can be obtained in the diet, the body also manufactures it, but: Normal blood and tissue levels of CoQ10 have been well established by numerous investigators around the world. Significantly decreased levels of CoQ10 have been noted in a wide variety of diseases in both animal and human studies. CoQ10 deficiency may be caused by insufficient dietary CoQ10, impairment in CoQ10 biosynthesis, excessive utilization of CoQ10 by the body, or any combination of the three. Decreased dietary intake is presumed in chronic malnutrition and cachexia(12).The paper also mentions the risk associated with statin use and reduced CoQ10 levels. So why have you not heard of CoQ10? 4. If CoQ10 is so effective in the treatment of heart failure, why is it not more generally used in this country?Unfortunately, I do not find this hard to believe. As I observed several years ago, when I put together what I have learned about becoming wealthy, there is really no money in telling people how to do some very important things--and so no one tells you these things you need to know. UPDATE: I'll be updating this later. I have obtained a couple of papers on the subject that are interesting--not necessarily contradictory, but that include some interesting shades of gray about the above questions. I Just Scratch My Head At Arguments Like This Dinesh D'Souza has a new book out that, from the description, just mystifies me--especially because I have previously been quite impressed with D'Souza: “In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.Now, Classical Values isn't too happy about this claim, which considering his sexual orientation is no surprise. I share D'Souza's disgust with the left's focus on redefining selfishness and depravity as normality. There's no question that much of what passes for wisdom on the left offends Muslims (as much of it offends most Christians). But that's not what is driving this hatred. The February 2006 Smithsonian had a fascinating article about how Sayyid Qutb came to the United States, and was so horrified by the sexual immorality and materialism of Americans that he went back to Egypt--and eventually became a major influence on Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta. At this point, you are wondering, "Where did Sayyid Qutb go that left him writing stuff like this?" “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”So where did poor Qutb end up? Disco era New York City or Los Angeles? Did he wander into a strip club? Perhaps he got lost at a gay pride parade? No, Greeley, Colorado. In 1950. Oh yeah, that's a wild, depraved, and sexually promiscuous place! Pretty obviously, what Qutb was doing was projecting his own sexual desires for these American women with their "round breasts... full buttocks...and... shapely thighs" in a period that is among the more sexually restrained periods. Significantly, some of the 9/11 hijackers spent their time in America, the land of the depraved...visiting strip clubs. There are strong arguments against much of the leftist defense of sexual immorality, but stopping the Islamists from hating us isn't one of the reasons. The real reason is the cognitive dissonance between what Islamists want to believe--that they are specially blessed because they follow the one True God--and the reality that they are not only desperately poor, but not only the "Crusaders," but even a bunch of cow-worshipping idolators are about to pass them up in wealth--and without sitting on an ocean of oil at $60 a barrel. |
