Amazingly I agree with something someone from Oxfam says: “the million farmers in east Africa who rely on exporting their goods to scrape a living would see Gordon Ramsay’s assertions as a recipe for disaster”.

Then again, on their website: “we support calls for strong political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

Hmm.

That explains the situation in Burma, a military dictatorship.

Food aid, and the kind of infrastructure aid the US Navy provided Indonesia after the tsunami, would help people in Burma in the short term. In the long term, they need to get rid of their oppressive government.

Al Gore, on the other hand, blames global warming.

Looking at actual incidences of strokes reported, for example, only 1.1% of ‘normal’ weight women suffered a stroke (221 of 19,849), compared to 1.4% of the ‘obese’ women (103/7,126). When reported as a relative risk, that’s a 30% higher risk associated with obesity. But it is an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.34% after 11 years or 0.03% a year difference — clinically meaningless and statistically untenable.

And 0.7% (140) of the ‘normal’ weight women had heart attacks compared to 1.27% (91) of the ‘obese’ women. Reported as a relative risk, it’s an 81% higher risk associated with obesity. But it’s an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.55% over 11 years or 0.05% a year difference — again, not clinically meaningful.

Credible evidence-based medical care does not take an untenable correlation and claim it proof of a causation and then flop it around into a treatment recommendation. The take-home lessons for us are to always ask ourselves what researchers are actually measuring and if they are asking the right questions. Next, always be suspicious of secondary analyses using data from a study that wasn’t designed to answer that question and is trying to splice meaning from untenable findings. Finally, don’t fall for scares based on relative risks or odds ratios, keep the actual data in perspective.

So far, no surprises for me. I’ve always been suspicious of “20% more likely to get disease X” type claims.

But the article goes on to question the benefits of exercise in general. Apparently, some exercise correlates to longer life, but additional exercise does not. In fact, the correlation reverses. This is news to me.

Other articles on the site talk about something I’ve never heard of: the Obesity Paradox. Study after study has found that fat people live longer.

Fat people live longer.

Can everything we are told by government and the media be so completely wrong? I need to read more (and from more sources) to be sure, but I already know that everything we are told about global warming is wrong, so why not health?

Perhaps what happens is that institutions (government agencies; NGOs; charities) start off with an issue, then grow and make that issue so central to their existence that they simply can’t admit they are wrong and end up fabricating, spinning and lying to cover up the holes in the evidence. For some reason, the media goes along with all this. Lazy journalists, presumably.

Hat tip: Counting Cats.

Update: Some papers from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society that show that if you get fatter when you get older it’s probably a good thing: Association Between Body Mass Index and Mortality in an 80-Year-Old Population; Body Mass Index and Nine-Year Mortality in Disabled and Nondisabled Older U.S. Individuals; Weight, Mortality, Years of Healthy Life, and Active Life Expectancy in Older Adults; Body Mass Index Is Inversely Related to Mortality in Older People After Adjustment for Waist Circumference. (First link followed from another Junkfood Science article.)

I can’t quite bring myself to vote for UKIP. I don’t like the EU, and the candidate makes libertarian noises, but I like immigration. I’m also in favour of freeing up planning and building more houses, and the UKIP man is against this.

I’ve read a good argument for simply not turning up, but low turnouts get interpreted as apathy. I’m not apathetic, I want to abolish the office of mayor. There’s no tickbox for that. Of course, I’m not sure how a lot of spoiled ballots would be interpreted. It would be quite funny if there were more of them than votes for the greens or that awful communist woman, though.

It goes without saying I agree with the campaigners that allowing weapons to be carried would make the campus safer.

What I find interesting is that the BBC is introducing to Radio 1 morning show listeners in their teens to 30s the novel (to them) idea that guns have a self defence role. I think this is new.

I chose the horse because it was the second favourite but still had good odds. I also chose it because it is called “Comply or Die”, which is an excellent name that sums up the choice you have when dealing with governments.

I used a web bookie called Betfair. Their special feature is that they match up individuals to bet against each other, and just take a small commission. So instead of betting against a monolithic bookmaker, you’re betting on a free market.

You can see prices go up and down in real time. In the case of events like football and Formula one, the market stays open during the event, and as things develop you can see the prices change. So when Lewis Hamilton gets off to a slow start, his odds dramatically rise.

I’m not sure if the odds track the actual chance of certain outcome, but they certainly track the aggregate perception of the chance of an outcome. As such, Betfair markets probably have predictive qualities. I think the idea of using markets for predicting outcomes has been tried a couple of times, for example by the CIA to predict terrorist acts, or some such. Antoine Clarke has written about this, too.

It’s unclear exactly who they are or what they did, but why blow up something like that unless you have an axe to grind with the British? Perhaps the Home Office should keep in mind who its friends are, and are not.

Anyway, I’ve long been convinced that what is termed “inequality”, that some people are richer than others, is not a bad thing per se. The argument I’ve heard before comes from Norberg, who points out that if everyone gets twice as rich inequality doubles. Hayek makes a different kind of argument.

If today in the United States or Western Europe the relatively poor can have a car or a refrigerator, an airplane trip or a radio, at the cost of a reasonable part of their income, this was made possible because in the past others with larger incomes were able to spend on what was then a luxury. The path of advance is greatly eased by the fact that it has been trodden before. It is because scouts have found the goal that the road can be built for the less lucky or less energetic. What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually become available to all.

This seems obvious especially if you think about consumer electronics. I have a high definition television, a Playstation 3 and a HD-DVD player. They were expensive, (and one of them will soon be obsolete because I have also helped pay for one of the necessary mistakes that all this experimentation leads to) but not as expensive as they were. They will get cheaper and more people will have them, just as they can now buy a DVD player from Asda for £20 while I bought one for £200 soon after they first became available.

Hayek goes further: “There is no way of making generally accessible new and still expensive ways of living except by their being initially practiced by some.”

Indeed, if manufacturers had to wait until *everyone* could afford a HDTV before selling them to anyone, they would never have been developed in the first place. The same applies to central heating and expensive medical treatments.

Hayek goes further still: “There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, ‘undeveloped’ countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better that it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.”

This link between inequality and progress means that if government tries to achieve equality through wealth redistribution, progress will slow because there will be no rich people to sell new and expensive things to. This is important because…

…most of the gains of the few do, in the course of time, become available to the rest. Indeed, all our hopes for the reduction of present misery and poverty rest on this expectation. If we abandoned progress, we should also have to abandon all those social improvements that we now hope for. All the desired advances in education and health, the realization of our wish that at least the large proportion of the people should reach the goals for which they are striving, depend on the continuance of progress. We only have to remember that to prevent progress at the top would soon prevent it all the way down, in order to see that this result is really the last thing we want.

The walk passed a branch of Waterstones near the London School of Economics that called itself the economists’ bookshop. I couldn’t resist and bought a few books.

The Inns themselves are unexpected peaceful enclaves. I don’t know who owns them exactly, but they have the feel of private property onto which the public is invited. This warning sign certainly leaves that impression:

Here is another:

Such language, with its calm declaration that this is our park and if we don’t like you we will simply evict you, seems so very civilised. Contrast it with the language found on signs in public parks with their lists of specifically prohibited behaviour and threats of fines, as enumerated by committees of tedious local officials and enforced with state violence.

“Is that filming, sir?” says a white shirted woman.
“Huh?” I mumble.
“Is that filming?” She points. I look down, and notice my camcorder in my hand.
“No,” I say, feeling indignant that I would even be asked.
“Can I see?”

I hold out my camcorder. She makes a show of checking it. To really tell if it’s filming you have to open the screen or look through the viewfinder. She does neither. She waves me on.

“Would it have been a problem it was? Isn’t it allowed?”
“You’re not allowed to film in a control zone,” she explains.
“I bet you’re filming us!” I don’t say, my self preservation instincts kicking in.

What is it about this incident that riles me so much? Is it that I’ve never heard of a control zone and resent the expectation that I understand its rules? I do, but that is not the reason. Is it that I feel threatened by the criminalisation of bumbling tourists who forget they have left their cameras on? I am, but that is not the reason.

No, it’s that some people get to act all superior bossing others about to no useful end and the Universe (via my taxes) rewards them for it. Why can’t they get real jobs?

The deputy leader of Israel’s Likud party, Moshe Feiglin, has been excluded from Britain by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith using powers invoked after the July 2005 London bombings — even though he had no plans to visit.

[…]

In a swipe at the government’s refusal to exclude Ibrahim Mousawi, the editor of a Hizbollah journal who has been in Britain on a speaking tour, Mr Feiglin went on: “I almost feel honoured, because of the way that the British government is behaving, to be marked as the bad guy by a government that supports terror. I see it almost as a compliment.”

If I was the patriotic type who thought the British government was anything more than the thieving thugs that they are, I’d be ashamed of my government. But these people do not represent me.

(Link via Devil’s Kitchen. Jameel sent me another link.

A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan’s Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world. As of this writing YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling. So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan’s Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.