Another Wonder Of The Internet

This isn't even the strangest thing I've seen on the Internet today. It's still pretty strange, though. It's Sponge Bob performing Green Day's "Holiday":

Image credit: Screenshot of this YouTube video by Cujo359

Yes, once again someone is whining about copyrights, so you have to click on the picture to be taken to the video.

Enjoy it when you get there.

Quote Of The Day

Caption: Ooh, an explosion! Is this a great country or what?

Image credit: Cujo359

Had I seen it in time, this would have been part of yesterday's post, because it fits right in with that theme. Scarecrow explains what the Fourth of July is reminding a lot of us about this year:

And I would have mentioned Afghanistan and Iraq and climate change and health care . . . in the title except I ran out of room.

Where is all this mindless happy talk and patriotic gibberish coming from? Americans should be ashamed of what they’ve allowed to happen to their country over the last decade and furious at those who misled them.

Dan Senor, former Bush official and neocon apologist, is a man who can’t get any of his economic facts straight, and he wasn’t even asked whether his boss’s upaid for $3 trillion wars, with tax cuts and drug plan might have some connection to the debts he now finds so offensive.

It’s the 4th of July! The Gulf is Dying, the Recovery Is Stalled, 15 Million Need Jobs and the National Bird Is an Ostrich

As with one of last week's quotes, the title itself is worthy as a quote of the day. Paul Krugman provided some details about what Dan Senor didn't know, but the basic idea is that Senor didn't want to see it. Japan's situation was, and is, pretty clear for anyone whose job doesn't depend on not seeing it - they are solvent, and they are just coming out of a very long recession their own fetish for fiscal austerity largely created.

The Rockets' Red, Squiggly, Glowy Thing

Image credit: All images by Cujo359

This year, I tried using the "fireworks" setting on my camera for the first time. This setting uses a long exposure, and seems to adjust the contrast somewhat to make the fireworks nicely visible without being washed out. It really requires a tripod, or a very steady hand. After standing more or less in the same spot for several hours, I had neither. As you can see, the results were what might have been considered artistic in the days of film cameras. Now, they just elicit comments like "Dude, you need a faster ISO".

At the location we were at, many people brought their own fireworks. This is one of the better pictures of their endeavors:

Sometimes. it was hard know where the fireworks would happen. This would have made it tough to use a tripod, I think:

Thankfully, as the evening wore on, the fireworks became more frequent, as well as more predictable:

Some of the images didn't look half bad:

Click on the images to enlarge.

If you want to see how a modern digital camera handles fireworks, you might want to check out Dana Hunter's pictures

Odds 'N Ends For The Fourth

Image credit: Cujo359

Just a few things around the 'Net that might be of interest...

First of all, Liz Ditz of I Speak Of Dreams has written a terrific post that links to my article about DDI and Quackwatch. There's an executive summary:

The very, very short version: an independent health-care-fraud muckraking association is being intimidated, via a law suit with a $10 million dollar claim. The suit has been filed on behalf of a for-profit laboratory that does millions of dollars of business providing tests that enable quack or questionable "therapies" for heart disease, autism, and other conditions.

The for-profit laboratory has deep pockets and has associates with even deeper pockets.

If you want to support health-care-fraud muckraking, go here to donate. If you are a skeptic or dislike legal bullying, you should donate.

Health Consumer Activist Group Subject to Legal Threats -- Send Help

[link from original]

This article goes into a lot of detail that I skipped in mine. It's worth a read, I think. It turns out there's now a petition to sign as well. That's the link to the text of the petition. You do read the text of petitions before you sign, don't you?

The second bit of business is this article by Ian Welsh on what it ought to mean to be American:

On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values. Perhaps that’s presumptuous. Perhaps I should just shut it and say “it’s none of my business.”

I could argue that it’s my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows. We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.

But forget that. I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

America Cannot Be America At Perpetual War

I think that the best way to remember what has made America great, and what's really worth fighting for, is to learn what foreigners say about what America means to them. What makes us great isn't baseball, Disneyland, or our military, it's that tradition of citizens being involved in their country, and having a framework that allows them to do so without fear. We're losing that, and with it we're losing the only thing that makes us special.

So if you want to get fighting mad, go read.

Finally, Dana Hunter wrote yesterday about her trip to Lincoln Park:

Like many parks around these parts, it has interesting rocks. I encountered one almost immediately upon hitting the beach, which meant the beach got neglected[.]

Lincoln Park

So here you are, some Lincoln Park beach:
Image credit: Cujo359

Click to enlarge. I know sometimes it's hard to see the beach for the driftwood, and the rocks.

Have a good Sunday. If you're anywhere near America, enjoy the fireworks.

Sunday Photo(s)

These are screenshots from movies I took of Fourth of July fireworks at Three Tree Point in Burien, Washington last year.
Image credit: All images by Cujo359


Believe it or not, these next two are successive frames:




Have a good Fourth, or a good Sunday, whichever applies.

Wall Of Sleep

I just found this video today at YouTube. It's a tale of obsessive infatuation by a group called The Smithereens:
Image credit: Screenshot of this YouTube video by Cujo359

Click on the image to be taken to the page. For some reason, this is one of those music videos you can't embed.

It was a video that played on MTV back in the '80s, of course, but I hadn't seen it in forever. The Smithereens had a precise style of playing that made it seem like they'd figured out how to play a song with the least motion possible. They even looked kinda nerdy - it was like watching engineers play rock and roll.

Quote Of The Day

Decisions, decisions. I can't decide between these two quotes, so, like any good opinion-spouting lunatic, I'll have it both ways. The first is from Ed Brayton, reacting to some moron's assertion that America is "biased toward atheism":

This American culture, the one I've lived in my whole life? If America is biased toward atheism, so is Saudi Arabia.

From the "What Universe Do You Live In" Department

The title contains a question I ask quite frequently of such people. The second is the title of this blog entry from Paul Krugman, because, hey, it's Krugman writing this:

I’m Gonna Haul Out The Next Guy Who Calls Me “Crude” And Punch Him In The Kisser

Don't lose yourself in the part, Perfessor.

Both articles are worth checking out, I think. So, there, from my indecisiveness comes a bonus - more stuff to read.

You're welcome.

Medical Quackery Meets Legal Quackery

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's lawsuits that are only filed to intimidate people into silence. Well, there are lots of things that I can't stand, actually, but this one sucks because, not only does it inconvenience the people who run web sites and news businesses, but it often deprives us, the readers, of useful information. Hiring lawyers is expensive, even when all you have to do is show up and ask the legal equivalent of "why are they wasting our time by filing this suit?"

A case in point is a suit recently filed by a medical laboratory that was accused of fulfilling requests for tests of dubious medical value. The lab, Doctor's Data, Inc. (DDI), was identified as having performed such a test by Steven Barrett, a retired psychiatrist according to his web bio, who runs a website named Quackwatch. The article begins:

Many patients are falsely told that their body has dangerously high levels of lead, mercury, or other heavy metals and should be "detoxified" to reduce these levels. This article explains how a urine test is used to defraud patients.

The report pictured to the right is a "urine toxic metals" test from Doctor's Data, a Chicago-based laboratory that caters to chelation therapists and other offbeat practitioners. The patient who gave it to me was told that his mercury and lead levels were high and should be reduced with EDTA chelation therapy.

How the "Urine Toxic Metals" Test Is Used to Defraud Patients

Chelation, incidentally, is a treatment where chemicals are introduced into a patient for the purpose of removing metals from his body. What that does is raise the level of mercury detected in the subject's urine:

In contrast, Doctor's Data uses reference values of less than 3 ug/g for mercury and 5 ug/g for lead. Standard laboratories that process non-provoked samples use much higher reference ranges [4,5], which means that if all other things were equal, Doctor's Data is far more likely than standard labs to report "elevated" levels. But that's not all. A disclaimer at the bottom of the above lab report states—in boldfaced type!—that "reference ranges are representative of a healthy population under non-challenge or nonprovoked conditions." In other words, they should not be applied to specimens that were obtained after provocation. Also note that the specimen was obtained over a 6-hour period, not the standard 24-hour period, which raised the reported level even higher.


How the "Urine Toxic Metals" Test Is Used to Defraud Patients

As befits a medical site, it goes on for some length about why this isn't a valid test. The upshot is that a patient who was given this test would assume he had unhealthy levels of mercury or other heavy metals in his body, when that was not really the case. Several states, according to Dr. Barrett, have found that using this form of test was worthy of censure or suspension of a doctor's license.

To make matters worse, one of the cures for excess heavy metal toxicity is chelation, which has some dangerous potential side effects:

Absolutely! All chelating agents have both minor and potentially life threatening side effects. They must be used under the supervision of a physician in a hospital setting.

Side effects of CaNa2-EDTA include: [kidney damage, loss of nutrient metals like iron and zinc, skin peeling]

Your Doctor: Chelation Therapy

It's not something you want to go through if you don't have to.

Orac, who writes the medical blog Respectful Insolence, takes up the tale from there:

[P]rovoked urine testing is a bogus test. According to Dr. Barrett, only does DDI use reference ranges for unprovoked urine tests, values that are utterly meaningless for provoked urine testing, but it uses reference ranges that are lower than what is commonly accepted by reputable laboratories and academic medical centers. This combination of factors virtually guarantees that it will produce many "positive" results for "elevated" mercury and other heavy metals in the urine, which practitioners can then apply dubious therapies, such as chelation therapy, to treat. Obviously DDI disputes this, but it doesn't provide any quality scientific data to do so, in my opinion. Consequently, in my view, what DDI does in essence is to do a technically sound measurement of mercury and heavy metals in the urine but on urine specimens collected using a completely inappropriate methodology that is not scientifically or medically valid.

More Legal Thuggery

As you might expect, DDI took action, which was to sue Dr. Barrett. They sent a cease and desist letter to Dr. Barrett which did not identify the specific things they found wrong with his article. The letter is reprinted in that link, by the way. Barrett requested that they identify the portions of the article that they found objectionable, and he would try to correct it if possible. They did not. As Orac explains:

This is typical. Note that [DDI lawyer Algis] Augustine doesn't actually list which specific parts of Dr. Barrett's article are incorrect, false, fraudulent or otherwise not truthful in the view of his client. Doctor's Data doesn't appear to be interested in accuracy, at least not if the letter from its lawyer is any indication. It appears far more interested in shutting up the opposition, of purging the Internet of material that can be used against it in the lawsuit it is facing in Texas. The rest of the text of the letter comes close to actually admitting this.

More Legal Thuggery

Which is what honks me off. As I said, lawyers are expensive. This kind of lawsuit, commonly referred to as strategic lawsuits against public participation or SLAPP suits, are discouraged in some states by making the losing party in such suits pay all court costs. But that's not true everywhere. According to John Pieret, an attorney who runs the site Thoughts In A Haystack, DDI's case has little merit. In his first reaction, he wrote:

As I explained in my post about the the suit by the doyen of the anti-vaccination movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, against Dr. Paul Offit, under US libel law, specific words must be alleged that make a factual claim about a person. Complaining that you are described as part of a class of people who are irrational, uneducated, unscientific, controlled by fear and/or a danger to public health is not enough to allege defamation under US law.

So, saying that someone is "catering" to loonies "nonstandard practitioners" is not good enough. Not only is that not a factual claim, but no reasonable person could interpret that as anything other than a statement of opinion, which is fully protected speech under the First Amendment. As I pointed out before, even calling someone a "pathological liar" is protected speech, so it is hard to see how calling someone a 'caterer' could rise to the level of defamation.

This Could Take Awhile

In a later article, he added:

The Doctor's Data, Inc. (DDI) suit against Dr. Stephen J. Barrett and his excellent resources Quackwatch and The National Council Against Health Fraud is a piece of work. It's not loony-tunes, like the Institute for Creation Research's lawsuit against the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. In some ways, it is much worse. It is a professionally drafted complaint that throws plenty of s**t against the wall in hopes that something might stick. It is nothing but (a lot of) smoke and mirrors in furtherance of an obvious SLAPP suit.

The DDI DDIdn't

It appears that John hasn't quite gotten all the way through the complaint yet, so he may have additional thoughts. I doubt, though, that this basic opinion will change.

Which means that there's a website that needs help. Quackwatch provides a valuable service, which is to warn us against the sort of quackery that this lab seems to be enabling. Letting miscreants intimidate expert bloggers into silence will only make it that much harder to get honest information.

So, if you can, please drop a bit of change at Quackwatch's contributions page.

UPDATE: John Pieret was kind enough to add this in a comment:

Just so you know, I've been through all the allegations of fact and I don't see any viable actions for libel. But the plaintiff has included claims for "restraint of trade" under Federal law, "trademark dilution," "consumer fraud" and "deceptive trade practices" under Illinois law, "tortious interference with contracts," "fraud" and "civil conspiracy." None of those should survive a determination that Barrett was exercising his freedom of speech but they introduce nuances that I'm not yet willing to pontificate on.

Medical Quackery Meets Legal Quackery: Comment #1

Thanks for that update, John. As a non-lawyer, it's hard for me to believe they'd have much of a case with any of that, but the courts seem to make a habit of surprising me.

A Good Review For The iPhone 4

One thing I have to say about the iPhone 4, that bad boy blends like a sunnofabitch:



Do I need to add that you shouldn't try this at home?

(h/t Orac)

Oh Khaaaanada!

Image credit: screenshot of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan by Cujo359 (see NOTE)

To the land that gave us William Shatner I say, we forgive you. Actually, he's been fun to have around lately.

Yes, I know, how much do I really care if I can't come up with a better shtick than this one? I didn't even get you a new card this year. Well, you can go read the 2007 card again, or think up some TV program for us to watch now that Da Vinci's Inquest is in syndication for the second time.

Anyway, didn't want you to get the idea we weren't thinking about you.

Your Unruly Big Brother,
Sam

P.S. Hope Denmark doesn't get too much of your fish. The last ones were really good.