By popular request.
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Egad. This news and the implosion of global warming alarmism makes me wonder if junk science expert technical witnesses will be unemployed soon?
This vaccine argument does far more harm in children not getting vaccinated against preventable disease. Autism is a problem, but it is higly unlikely that vaccines have anything to do with it.
This is like Nigerians rioting to stop polio vaccines because they thought it was a plan to make Muslims sterile.
That can’t be right. I read just the other day that vaccines cause autism.
Of course, I read it on a bumpersticker, so YMMV.
Does this mean that Amanda Peet is smarter than Jenny McCarthy?
More of the trial lawyer boogie man. Yeah there are scum bag trial lawyers, and there are scum bag defense lawyers too. And sometimes those defendant clients are scum bags. That is why they have trials to figure things out.
“The judges in the cases said the evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the parent’s claims  and backed years of science that found no risk.”
Sounds like the system worked, they found no cause and ruled in favor of the vaccination manufacturers. You can argue that there is too much litigation, we are not stoic enough as a people, and it has a negative impact on business, but does this mean the asbestos industry (where we now know asbestos causes cancer and those manufacturers knew before they stopped using it) should get a pass?
Talking about trial lawyers, here’s an account reported by Carl Sanburg about Abe Lincoln (whose 200th birthday is today).
…A rich newcomer to Springfield wanted Lincon to bring suit against an unlucky, crackbrained lawyer who owed him $2.50; Lincoln advised the man to hold off; he said he would go to some other lawyer who was more willing. So Lincoln took the case, collected a $10 fee in advance, entered suit, hunted up the defendant and handed him half of the $10 and told him to show up in court and pay the debt. Which was done. All litgants and the lawyer were satisfied…
You know what they say: it’s just 90% of lawyers that give the rest a bad name.
Putting aside that it was a joke, if the case had gone the other way, what pop-up ads would we be seeing on teh intarwebs today? Would it have helped if I had substituted John Edwards for trial lawyers?
Amanda Peet, what no Tara Reid?
Dan Collins, it is always a smart bet to bash John Edwards. Always.
What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?
One is a scum sucking bottom feeder.
The other is a fish.
Thank you for the picture of Amanda’s lovely … eyes. So blue. Plus, she has a great laugh.
An article on blue eyes made the rounds the other day. It’s here? Just wanna say, yay! Charles Darwin on his birthday. Oh and yay A. Lincoln too.
Quick comment- not all trial lawyers are scumbags, seriously. Unfortunately, the market is over saturated with lawyers and nowadays, plaintiff’s lawyers are the ones who end up rich, especially if they hit the “big ones”. The scumbags, imho, are the class actions lawyers, who really do nothing to serve the clients they are representing and primarily use those suits to pad their own pockets. My first job was working for a class action lawyer and he would make me read the daily paper every day, as well as numerous medical and financial journals, so I could suggest new class actions we could try to file. He made almost all his big money in asbestos and breast implant litigation in the early 90’s and when I went to work for him, he was involved in the alleged “credit fraud” going on around the turn of the century. Most boring work ever and he was a complete scumbag, who smoked 3 packs a day. He also required his employees to vote a straight democratic ticket every election, as in that state, the judges were elected and poltical affiliations were advertised.
I considered trying to get into law school. I thought I had a fair shot at it. In the end, though, I didn’t see the point of selling my soul to enter an overpopulated profession.
So I became a blogger instead. My overdeveloped sense of irony has been the greatest compensation.
Oh, a COURT said so? Then I believe with all my heart. All that science and stuff never convinced me, but now that a JUDGE has weighed in, get the chisel and put it on stone.
Now all we need to do is get some court to rule against some AGW-based lawsuit so the leftards will accept all that science, too.
Definitely.
You could warn a person, Pablo.
Nice clavicles.
That’s really not a good angle for her.
I didnt sell my soul McGhee, but based on my student loan amounts, I’ve mortgaged my future. One of the fallacies in law school is all you have to do is graduate and you’re guaranteed a comfortable lifestyle.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. If I had it to do all over again, I’d learn computers or IT or something.
What I would like to understand is why it has to take a court to decide scientific fact. To guess an answer to my own question: I suppose a population of incurious minds that will believe anything they hear from anywhere would need the Authority of a Court to do the thinking for them.
Did the court happen to mention, even if only in passing, that failure to inoculate children with a given vaccine correlates quite highly with a rise in incidence of the targeted disease?
Ya’ll are mean.
That Amanda Peet dude seemed pretty smart.
Amanda Peet has pretty eyes I think. I don’t get the hair really though. Maybe she’s still getting ready in that picture.
happyfeet, can’t you see that she’s been dancing, and now she’s talking to you as though there were nobody else in the world? Sheesh. Men are idiots.
I’m not sure I get what hair is for in general. At least the head hair and how come it grows and grows. Or falls out in weird patterns. Or turns grey or white, even almost overnight sometimes, or for that matter comes in so many starter colors like black and brown and blonde and so many different reds, but not green yet.
oh. I didn’t know about the dancing. She’s gonna be in that movie this summer about an academic researcher what leads a group of people in a fight to counteract the apocalyptic events that were predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar. I got that from the IMDB. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess she doesn’t play the academic researcher.
Too late.
Geez Tara. That is one massive areola! Buffalo Bill could make a relaxed-fit yamulke for Andre the Giant with that.
“Buffalo Bill could make a relaxed-fit yamulke for Andre the Giant with that.”
Was she a great big fat person?
IT RUBS THE LOTION ON IT’S SKIN!
Toughened your nipples, didnit?
It’s comments like that why you have to wear that muzzle/mask alppuccino.
Now pass the Chianti and fava beans.
Joe, there is more than one kind of asbestos. Only the red asbesots (IIRC) is really dangerous, and that was something like less than 1% of commercially-used asbestos. The rest of it is harmful the same amount and in exactly the same way as fiberglass. The fibers can get embedded in the lung, which can cause little growths, which can become cancerous or cause other lung problems like pneumonia. But asbestos in adn of itself really isn’t that bad. It is a great flame retardant, though, and was very cheap to build with and the industry employed thousands of people. So, I’m all for throwing people out of work and then letting them burn to death because of inferior quality, but environmentally safe!, building materials that they had to pay more to use.
And asbestos was used for well-over a century. Any links to cancer were not well-known back then. I’m sure all those manufacturing tycoons hunched over their piles of gold and rubbed their hands in glee at a new way to make people die.
I’m glad the trial lawyers were there to defend me from those manufacturing tycoons.
Now pass the Chianti and fava beans.
Put the dog in the basket first.
Ella: I am familiar with different asbestos types and you are right, it is fiber size that determines cancer risk. But asbestos is asbestos. Trouble is even so called safe asbestos, such as asbestos fibers added to tar mastic or vinyl composition tiles can become friable and dangerous if some team of Mexican laborers start running belt sanders on it years later.
The only reason manufacturers cannot fight these suits is mesothemioma is almost always caused by asbestos, it is an exceedingly rare cancer otherwise, so it is provable statistically.
Here are the rough risks–long term exposure to asbestos increases your chance of lung cancer x6. Long term smoking tobacco increases your chance of lung cancer x6. Exposure to both increases your chance of cancer x36.
Joe runs a company. A customer claims that he has been injured by the product that Joe manufactures. The product is not defective but the company is sued by an ambulance chasing shyster who figures that the company (or its insurer) will cough up rather than defend. Joe’s company refuses to cough and it takes three years and $300,000 in fees to win a defense verdict. The plaintiff is of course judgment proof and Joe’s company has no way to recover the fees (or the $50,000 deductible if there was insurance.
But Joe has no problems with the entire experience because the system worked and asbestos is bad.
The problem is that companies don’t pay. Consumers and taxpayers pay for everything. Lawyers do some good, but they aren’t worth the harm they cause. Nice try, though.
MarkD – Correct, and the way that consumers and taxpayers pay for it is not limited to higher prices and taxes. They also pay because desirable conduct is discouraged, products are removed from or never reach the market, services are discontinued or never offered, etc. The American legal system (not justice system) and the people who particpate in it are so focused on compensation in a particular case that consideration of the impact of a decision/verdict on society as a whole is ignored or minimized.
I think if a company is sued and the defendant wins, and if the defendant’s legal fees can’t be reimbursed, the winning defendant should be allowed to whack the plaintiff and his lawyer.
The federal vaccine court ruled well in Cedillo v. HHS by finding MMR vaccine to not cause autism. I have used MMR repeatedly over the past4 years for alleviating autoimmune disease. It is safe and effective. What more does a pharmaceutical product have to be? MMR helps without hurting, and in my experience works best when injected daily for weeks at a time. MMR can be enhanced by the addition of varicella and yellow fever vaccines. Even when mercurics are added, e.g. tetanus-diphtheria vaccine, MMR shots are harmless. Randy Crawford, Coralville, Iowa
Thanks, Randy, but this is the kind of site where you’re supposed to work in a salacious observation about Amanda Peet if at all possible.
Maybe I’d prefer to work something salacious into Amanda Peet.
Anh-haha, nicely done, Randy.
Thanks, Randy. Now you’re living up to your billing.
How’s Coralville? I did my PhD work at Iowa.
Let’s get back to that other Amanda Peet. The smart one. Give me a couple of days and ten per cent of the film star’s cosmetics budget, and I’ll show you a world-class beauty. Good lines in that face. Those eyes…like two…black holes.
Yes, I’m a huge fan of ‘Vertigo.’ Why do you ask?
How’s Coralville? Like it says on W.C. Field’s tombstone “I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.”
What was your thesis project and major? Is IC more or less sane than it was when you were here?
I did Renaissance Italian and English lit, and it was about language, poetics and punning during that period. I don’t know whether it’s more or less crazy. I do know that the building was flooded away.
Fortunately, we’re about to slide into the biggest financial catastrophe since the “Great” Depression, or maybe worse, so the munchkins of Ioway will have extra fun coughing up a billion dollars or so to re-build University buildings that will be washed away all over again in another few years. That doesn’t seem crazy at all to a guy like me. Meanwhile, I have spent the last 4 years getting dozens and dozens of MMR shots, along with varicella shots, yellow fever, tetanus-diphtheria shots with thimerosal, etc. etc. It’s all been to alleviate autoimmune disease, and MMR in particular works great. When you give your immune system something else to do other than attack the self, like go after the viruses for instance, the distracted leukocytes attack the true invader more and attack the self less. This use of the hygiene hypothesis works better than using Trichuris suis eggs to immunodistract white blood cells to alleviate Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis (and better than what David Pritchard has been doing with worms at the Univ. Nottingham) because viruses are a lot cheaper, and they work in days rather than weeks. Most doctors are too paranoid to use MMR repeatedly, but the holy water and blessings from the Vaccine Court Feb. 12, 2009 will probably settle down the ones who are less intellectually constipated. Back in the good old days, before the Middle Ages came along and modernized everything, our ancestors lived in filth and squalor and disease and pestilence, and were infected/infested by the same viruses, bacteria, and worms continually for years, so it’s bizarre 21st-century doctors would be so morbidly afraid of the harmless attentuated viruses that are used in vaccines. I guess we can thank the greedy cutthroat pinheaded conniving swindling cheating lawyers, since it’s only the 99% that give the rest a bad name.