OMG, Socialized Medicine is best...not a surprise.

Where are you most likely to die from non-communicable disease? YOU are more likely to be killed by a non-communicable disease (NCD), like cancer or heart disease, than anything else. In 2008 they accounted for 63% of the 56m deaths worldwide. Growing populations and increased longevity are making the problem worse. By 2030, 22% of people in the OECD club of rich countries will be 65 or older, nearly double the share in 1990. China will catch up just six years later. About half of American adults already have a chronic condition, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, and as the world becomes richer the diseases of the rich spread farther. In the slums of Calcutta, although infectious diseases claim the young; for middle-aged adults, heart disease and cancer are the most common killers. Isn't it also interesting, the countries with the lowest NCD deaths (Canada,Australia,France,Italy,Norway,Sweden,Denmark) also have, OMG, socialized medicine...

New Pub Mug & I'm back....no limits

There are no government standards that regulate the use of the words “natural” or “all natural.” I'm stunned...

Mouth Map:

Here is the link to the article...thanks, Rich http://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i44/Call-Food-Fixers.html?h=1718028921

An ice floe for every town...

Put the elderly on ice? By Amitai Etzioni, Special to CNN Amitai Etzioni says proposals to reduce spending on end of life care for people in their 80s are a slippery slope We're coming close to saying old people should be cast off, says Amitai Etzioni Some are arguing for a cease-fire in America's "war against death," he writes Etzioni: Capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion for intervention We should accept death and stop aggressive interventions when there's little hope, he says Editor's note: Amitai Etzioni is a sociologist and professor of international relations at George Washington University and the author of several books, including "Security First" and "New Common Ground." He was a senior adviser to the Carter administration and has taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and the University of California, Berkeley. (CNN) -- No one has come out yet and explicitly suggested that old folks like me (I am about to turn 83) should be treated the way the Eskimos, as folklore has it, used to treat theirs: put on an ice floe and left to float away into the sunset. We are, however, coming dangerously close. A recent study by Dr. Alvin C. Kwok and his colleagues finds that surgery is common in the last year, month and week of life. Eighty-year-olds had a 35% chance of going under the knife in the last year of their lives; nearly one out of five Medicare recipients had surgery in their last month and one in 10 in their last week. Nobody doubts that some of these surgeries were necessary. But major medical and ethical figures argue that they reflect our reluctance to accept death or let go, the surgeons' activist interventionist orientation and the way the incentives are aligned. As the surgeon Atul Gawande put it in The New Yorker: "Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop." It remained for Daniel Callahan, an influential bioethicist and co-founder of the prestigious Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institute in New York, to take the next step. In a May article in The New Republic, Callahan (with co-author Sherwin B. Nuland) argues for a cease-fire in America's "war against death," calling on us to surrender gracefully; Americans thus "may die earlier than [is now common], but they will die better deaths." Focusing on care for the elderly, Callahan and Nuland warn that our present attitudes "doom most of us to an old age that will end badly: with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly -- and expensively -- stretching out the suffering and decay." They hence call on us to abandon the "traditional open-ended model" (which assumes medical advances will continue unabated) in favor of more realistic priorities, namely reducing early death and improving the quality of life for everyone. They further advocate age-based prioritization, giving the highest to children and "the lowest to those over 80." The journalist Beth Baker summed up this position: "After people have lived a reasonably full life of, say, 70 to 80 years, they should be offered high quality long-term care, home care, rehabilitation and income support, but not extraordinary and expensive medical procedures." Baker's interview with Callahan reveals one reason this line of argument should be watched with great concern: Once we set an age after which we shall provide mainly palliative care, economic pressures may well push us to ratchet down the age. If 80 was a good number a few years ago, given the huge deficit and the pressure to cut Medicare expenditures, there seems no obvious reason not to lower the cut-off age to, say, 70. And nations that have weaker economies, the logic would follow, should cut off interventionist care at an even younger age. Say, 50 for Guatemala? Above all, age is the wrong criterion. The capacity to recover and return to a meaningful life is the proper criterion. Thus, if a person is young but has a terminal disease, say, advanced pancreatic cancer, and physicians determine that he has but a few months, maybe weeks, to live (a determination doctors often make), he may be spared aggressive interventions and be provided with mainly palliative care. In contrast, an 80-year-old with, say, pneumonia -- who can return to his family and friends to be loved and give love, contribute to the community through his volunteering and enjoy his retirement he earned with decades of work -- should be given all the treatments needed to return him to his life (which in my case includes a full-time job and some work on the side). We should learn to accept death more readily; we should stop aggressive interventions when there is little hope; we should provide dying people with palliative care to make their passing less painful and less traumatic. Such a case may not just be that of an elderly person succumbing to a terminal illness -- it can be that of a preemie born too early to survive, a youngster following a car wreck, a worker following a tragic accident. We should learn from the Eskimos -- they long ago stopped abandoning their elderly just because they got "too" old. The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni.

Prescription Painkiller Overdose Deaths on the Rise - ABC News

Prescription Painkiller Overdose Deaths on the Rise - ABC News:

'via Blog this'

For Rich's team...

For Doug: C'mon meat, throw me that weak ass shit...

Alas, if only I could eat chicken...

Farm to Fridge...

Thoughts on planning home defense...

Batting Practice video for upcoming season...

Lunch at the Pub...well, maybe next week

Benford's law...

"here are the distribution of first digits vs. Benford's law's prediction for total assets and total revenues."

In other words, corporate numbers behaving precisely as predicted by a purely statistical law! But here is where it gets truly strange. In her words, "Deviations from Benford's law have increased substantially over time, such that today the empirical distribution of each digit is about 3 percentage points off from what Benford's law would predict. The deviation increased sharply between 1982-1986 before leveling off, then zoomed up again from 1998 to 2002. Notably, the deviation from Benford dropped off very slightly in 2003-2004 after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act in 2002, but this was very tiny and the deviation resumed its increase up to an all-time peak in 2009." Said otherwise, the chronological change in this parameter allows some starting conclusions. As the Economist notes, "This regularity has been used to identify cases of fraud in public documents. Someone cooking books is likely to choose numbers somewhat randomly, generating a distribution of digits far more uniform than Benford's law would predict. Any divergence that shows up sets off alarm bells in those looking for funny business." Visually presented, it looks as follows:

Yes, book-cooking, in the purest statistical "correlation does not imply causation" has hit an all time high! Granted we doubt any regulator, least of all the corrupt criminal SEC, whose own Benford's law chart would look like a lie detector test hooked up to Jamie Dimon during a conference all, would admit this evidence in a court of law, but deluded investors who believe that corporation are being always truthful with data and reporting should probably be aware that that is certainly not the case. Per the Economist: "As Ms Wang notes, this isn't decisive proof of misbehaviour. It is suggestive, however, of the possibility that systematic number-fudging has been on the upswing in recent decades. Moreover, it's an excellent use of clever statistical analysis to provide a new perspective on an economic question." Considering the surge in white collar criminality over the past 3 decades, especially among financial firms, and the fact that this "index" is now at all time highs, we would hardly be as politically correct about the issue as the Economist. But that's us. As for next steps, "What types of firms, and what kind of executives drive the greatest deviations from Benford's law? Does this measure do well in predicting known instances of fraud? How much of these deviations are driven by government deregulation, changes in accounting standards, and traditional measures of corporate governance?" All these are fascinating questions that Wang will answer in the immediate future and we will advise readers when she does. For now, the take home message is this: if it appears that "they" are lying to you, "they" probably are. Just run a numerical regression analysis to prove it.

Mortamins....

SOME vitamins make you stronger. Others make your eyesight sharper, your hair shinier and your nails glossier. Now, though, it seems there are also vitamins which might give you prostate cancer or cut your life short in other ways. Two separate studies published this week sound a cautionary note for vitamin gobblers. Researchers funded by America’s National Institutes of Health set out to study whether vitamin E might decrease the risk of prostate cancer. To their astonishment, they discovered that it seems to do the exact opposite. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come on the tail of a big cancer-prevention trial. As part of that trial’s follow-up, Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic and his colleagues examined the effects of taking vitamin E supplements. They found a 17% increase in prostate cancer for men who took the vitamin, compared with those who took a placebo. The mechanism for this pernicious effect is unclear, and indeed the findings themselves are controversial. But the paper is the latest in a stream of damning research. Perhaps even more disquieting were results published a few days earlier in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In a study that looked at the health and habits of nearly 40,000 women over two decades, Jaakko Murso of the University of Eastern Finland showed that older women who admitted to taking multivitamins died at higher rates. This was despite the fact that the women who took supplements also tended to be slimmer and boast lower blood pressure than the women who did not. (Since supplement munching was self-reported, Dr Murso's study did not have a placebo control.) None of this is to say that people must immediately bin all vitamin-containing substances; vitamins are, after all, essential nutrients. Moreover, untangling cause and effect in studies like these is notoriously tricky. And it does not help that the boffins themselves seem baffled by the results. That said, they ought to give pause to the most voracious supplement poppers. The Centre for Responsible Nutrition, an American group representing the industry which caters to them, promptly condemned the research as “a hunt for harm”. That response was predictable—more than 150m Americans take vitamins each year, spending about $27 billion on the stuff.

Something for Edmund...and a cultural void