The World Cup Contest: where you stand

Reader George is kindly totting up the results of the WEIT 2018 World Cup Contest and scratching off the many who have lost. But some are still in the running! Here’s his latest report to me:

The Second Quadrennial WEIT World Cup Contest is not doing well.  It will probably suffer an untimely death.  There were 95 entries.  After the group stage, only 25 were still alive.  After the round of 16, we are down to four.  By comparison, in the Inaugural WEIT World Cup contest in 2014, there were 91 entries, 42 still alive after the group stage, 39 alive after the round of 16 and eight entries competing in the final (Argentina vs Germany). The big difference was that in 2014, the favorites won. The semifinals were Germany vs Brazil and Argentina vs Netherlands.  In 2018, carnage.  Germany getting knocked out took out 42 entries. It has been downhill from there.

After the quarterfinals there will be zero, one or two entries still alive. The scores no longer matter – just the winner and loser.

If Brazil beat Belgium and –

1)      Croatia beat Russia, contest is over
2)      Russia beat Croatia – FB still alive. He/she picked Brazil 2 Russia 1.

If Belgium beat Brazil and –

1)      Croatia beat Russia – deacjack still alive. He/she picked Belgium 3 Croatia 1
2)      Russia beat Croatia – robkraft still alive. He picked Belgium 3 Russia 1.

If Belgium beat Brazil and England beat Sweden – Martin C. still alive.  He picked Belgium 2 England 1.

NYT op-ed endorses amulets and other woo for disease

As part of the continuing decline of the New York Times, we have this new op-ed by Steve Petrow, a writer from North Carolina who, the paper says, “is a regular contributor to Well” (the paper’s health column). But this is more about woo than about health. Click the link below to read the piece.

Petrow’s point is apparently twofold: curative “placebo” effects can result from the use of talismans, amulets, or comforting objects like plush rabbit toys. Further, he says, these objects can soothe one and even make one optimistic. I’m prepared to accept the second claim but not fully the first.

Petrow was apparently cured of testicular cancer when, 34 years ago, he was diagnosed and also given a “velvety rabbit with big floppy ears” named “Fairy God Bunny”. He brought the rabbit to all his appointments and, sure enough, has been cancer-free for decades. Of course, testicular cancer is one of the most curable forms of the disease, and I doubt that a fluffy bunny could have helped him with mesothelioma or pancreatic cancer. Still, to be fair, Petrow adds that conventional medicine is also responsible for his cure, but the rabbit played a substantial role:

You’d expect me to be skeptical. I’d grown up in an age of science, when facts and data reigned supreme. I’d excelled at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, famous for its geek curriculum. As a three-time visitor to the nearby 1964 World’s Fair, a paean to new technology, I’d drunk DuPont’s Kool-Aid: Better living through chemistry.

When I first got sick, I read every evidence-based, peer-reviewed study I could get my hands on, so I could make the best-informed treatment decisions. My odds of survival were actually pretty decent, but I found that data wasn’t enough. As a twentysomething, I simply couldn’t accept any chance of not making it to 30. Put simply: Science could not guarantee me a 100 percent successful outcome.

Enter the bunny. I needed another tool in my tool belt to improve my chances.

And I was not alone. Stuart Vyse, a psychologist and author of “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition,” told me that many people turn to “irrational beliefs” in times of dire need. Whenever medical science does not provide a cure, there’s going to be a “psychological gap, the need of something better,” he said. Enter superstition, magic, paranormal beliefs and religion.

“It’s not uncommon to be of two minds and to say, ‘I know this is crazy, but I’ll feel better if I do it anyway,’” Dr. Vyse said.

This bit is confusing at best. Was the effect purely psychological, making Petrow feel better, or did it help cure the cancer? Both are implied.

Five years after my diagnosis, my oncologist said I was cured. I believe science played the key role in that. But I also think the hope embodied in the bunny made a difference to my well-being, reducing anxiety and giving me more good days than bad.

Can I prove it? No. Does that mean it’s not true? No. As Dr. Kaptchuk told The New Yorker, “We need to stop pretending that it’s all about molecular biology. Serious illnesses are affected by aesthetics, by art, and by the moral questions that are negotiated by practitioners and patients.” All ways of saying, by luck or magic.

Sorry, but these things are neither luck nor magic: they are the effect of brain functions and their attendant physiological changes, on one’s feeling of well being or even on the progress of a disease. Using “luck” or “magic” implies that the numinous was involved.

Now I doubt that the plush bunny “improved his chances” (how could he tell?), but it could surely have made him feel better, as Stuart Vyse notes. But feeling more positive and having a higher rate of cure are two different things (though well being might affect disease). Petrow sort of recognizes the distinction, but the two effects are not the same, and are conflated in the article. After all, it is one thing to document the effect of amulets and other placebo objects on feelings of well being, another altogether to show that they increase cure rates. Petrow cites a physician who claims the latter (my emphasis):

Do I sound like a kook? I don’t think so, but no kook ever does.

Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, a Harvard physician, told a New Yorker writer several years ago that he’s always “believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual and belief.” He added: “All ideas that make scientists scream.”

Dr. Kaptchuk is the chief of Harvard’s program in placebo studies and the therapeutic encounter, which is focused on studying the power of the mind to influence health outcomes. In that same interview, he noted that medicine has known for centuries that some people respond to the power of suggestion — but not why or how.

During his tenure at Harvard, Dr. Kaptchuk wrote in an email, “I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs.” He sent along a list of the more than a dozen studies he’s either led or participated in that show how placebos, rituals, beliefs and talismans play a role, albeit “modest,” when compared with surgery and medication.

When you’re in a fight for your life, “modest” is something to hang on to.

I’ll leave it to the readers to check out the list of Kaptchuk’s studies to show if they’re sound and, if so, how big that “modest” effect is. I’m prepared to believe that placebo effects can also increase cure rate, as we simply don’t understand the interaction between mind and body, and some experiments I know of show they can work. For example, a 2013 article in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that  “sham surgery” for a meniscus tear in the knee, in which patients were not really operated on but thought they were, had the same outcome as real knee surgery. That’s remarkable.  Here’s how the sham surgery proceeded:

For the sham surgery, a standard arthroscopic partial meniscectomy was simulated. To mimic the sensations and sounds of a true arthroscopic partial meniscectomy, the surgeon asked for all instruments, manipulated the knee as if an arthroscopic partial meniscectomy was being performed, pushed a mechanized shaver (without the blade) firmly against the patella (outside the knee), and used suction. The patient was also kept in the operating room for the amount of time required to perform an actual arthroscopic partial meniscectomy.

So there’s no harm in patients using amulets or plush bunnies to supplement their therapy. What is harmful is when these items are thought to be curative as well, especially if there are no controlled trials to show it. Remember that a Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer on the outcomes of heart surgery, which surely involves a placebo effect since patients either knew they were prayed for or might be prayed for, showed no difference between those patients and those not prayed for. In that case, prayer was useless, though harmless (actually, prayer had a slight negative effect).

The downside of the Times article is that it doesn’t point out the many failed experiments in which even placebo effects were not useful, and it implies that there is “magic”, which is not really what is going on here. If there is any psychological or even curative effect of amulets and lucky objects, it it purely natural, not “magic.” In fact, I’m not sure why the Times published this rather than a more sober and less personal analysis of what we know about placebo effects, which would have been far more interesting. And shame on them for implying that anything beyond natural phenomena were involved.

h/t: Michael

England beats Colombia on penalty kicks

After tying 1-1 after regular time, England beat Colombia 4-3 on penalty kicks. Farewell Colombia and good-o on England, though I hate seeing matches decided by penalty kicks.

Here’s the schedule for the quarter finals. Not many people who entered our World Cup contest are still eligible to win:

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ taxes

It’s Wednesday, and that means Jesus and Mo Day, the strip that got this site banned in Pakistan. (I’m still fuming about that one.) Today’s strip, called “taxes,” refers to the UK, where “faith schools” are indeed supported by the taxpayer. It’s absolutely on the mark as Mo reveals the scam:

Readers’ wildlife photos

Today’s photos are a batch from Colin Franks, whose infrequent but wonderful contributions are much appreciated. (His website is here, his Instagram site here, and Facebook page here). The IDs, indented, are his; click photos to enlarge. The fourth picture from the bottom asks you to identify a species of scaup.

Western Grebe, Aechmophorus occidentalis:

Yellow-headed Blackbird, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus:

Tree Swallow, Tachycineta bicolor:

Chukar, Alectoris chukar:

 

Red-necked Grebe, Podiceps grisegena:

 

Great Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa:

 

Scaup (Quiz: Lesser or Greater?)  Aythya affinis or marila?


Horned GrebesPodiceps auritus:

 


Ruddy Duck, Oxyura jamaicensis:

Common LoonGavia immer [JAC: note the chicks!]

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

It’s Independence Day: Wednesday, July 4, 2018: the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress approved the wording of the Declaration of Independence, whose issuance had been approved on July 2. It’s also National Barbecue Day as well. It’s also the birthday of Queen Sonja of Norway (see below). But let us Americans celebrate our holiday, including me. That means posting will be light today, and Yanks should enjoy their barbecue and fireworks instead of reading this site.

Today’s news, courtesy of Kevin and the BBC:  There are only two early parchment copies of the American Declaration of Independence: the “original” document that rests in the National Archives, and another, just recently rediscovered in—of all places—the archives of the West Sussex County Council in Chichester, England. The British copy dates to a few years later than the American one. Click on the screenshot to go to the story.

Heather Hastie found a modern version of the Declaration: a text dialogue between the U.S. and Britain discussing their breakup:

On July 4, 1802, the United States Military Academy opened at West Point, New York. Exactly one year later, the Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people.  On this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin in Concord, Massachusetts situated by Walden Pond. This, of course, led to his account of two years in that cabin in Walden, an iconic book for environmentalists and hippies.  On July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman’s book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was published in Brooklyn. Exactly 7 years later, Lewis Carroll told 10-year-old Alice Liddell the story that would inspire Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels. Here’s Alice at seven:

On July 4, 1910, the black boxer Jack Johnson knocked out the white boxer Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match in Reno, Nevada. It was called “The Match of the Century”, and Jeffries, a representative of the “superior race” was supposed to win. He withdrew after 15 rounds. Angry whites attacked jubilant blacks in 50 cities and 25 states: a scattering of race riots.

On this day in 1939, baseball great Lou Gehrig, forced to retire from the New York Yankees at age 36 after a diagnosis of ALS, gave a famous farewell talk at Yankee Stadium in which he said he considered himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Here’s that speech, and it still brings tears to my eyes. He was both a great player and a great man—a modest man who didn’t want to be honored. He died two years after he uttered these words:

Notables born on this day include George Everest (1790, the mountain is named after him), Calvin Coolidge (1872), Ulysses S. Grant (1881), Rube Goldberg (1883), Lionel Trilling (1905), Eppie Lederer (aka “Ann Landers”, 1918) and Queen Sonja of Norway (1937; see above). Those who died on this day included both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (both 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of the Independence), Marie Curie (1934), and Barry White (2003).

Have a walk down memory lane with Barry White performing his most famous song. What a mellow voice he had; I wonder how many babies were conceived to it!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a snooze:

Hili: Something is chirping in the grass.
A: Do you know what it is?
Hili: No, but now is my siesta time.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś piszczy w trawie.
Ja: Już wiesz co?
Hili: Nie, ale teraz mam sjestę.

Some tweets from Grania. She says the first one is “strangely appropriate”:

Mark Hamill has a good tweet:

Yes, a cat wrote a message on a computer. What does it mean??

Some jaw-dropping biology:

xx

 

 

A kitten and its toy:

Tweets from Matthew. This baby bird already shows its sex:

An example of a type of cryptic painting that I didn’t know existed (be sure to watch the video):

A bizarre but nice interspecies friendship:

Bees hatching!

. . . and a giant milliped (watch the video):

Finally, a theft that must have confused some scientists:

A duck traffic jam (from a parody David Attenborough account) sent by reader Charleen:

From reader Amy, Happy Fourth of July!

Belgium, down two goals, gets three to beat Japan

This was a squeaker: after being down two goals against Japan, Belgium scored three—one in the four minutes of added 90+ time, to save a spot in the World Cup. Japan goes home, and now Belgium faces Brazil in the quarter finals on Friday. An exciting game, and my condolences to the Japanese, who played some game matches.

Tuesday: Duck report (with bonus video)

Well, the gang’s all here. This is the line for breakfast yesterday, with Honey, as usual, bringing up the rear. Comparing her photo to pictures from last year, she looks considerably slimmer this year and I need to feed her up. It’s hard, though, as she lets the ducklings eat first and then they all swim off to for bathtime. When they finally migrate away and she’s alone, I’m going to give her tons of good food.

Yep, the ducklings are very large now, and their wings are getting bigger (see pictures below):

Anna took a nice video of yesterday’s bathtime. Lots of ducking, preening, and splashing in the tub. At one point all of them manage to get into the small circular tub. Notice the “duckling race” at 46 seconds in, when one duck, and then the others, take off swimming as fast as they can. I have no idea why they do this!

Here are pictures from yesterday’s noon bathtime:

They do enjoy their splashing:

Big wings!

And. . . ladies and gentlemen, our first view of the speculum (blue/violet wing band) on a duckling!

Today’s bathtime, with more wing flapping:

Still more wing flapping. Soon they’ll be flying.

Their wings aren’t full-sized yet, but they’re getting there:

And my perennial girlfriend (with turtles):

 

Scott Pruitt publicly shamed at a restaurant

I despise Scott Pruitt, for as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he’s enacting odious policies that despoil the environment; he rejects the fact of anthropogenic climate change; and he’s been charged with misspending government money and other dereliction of duty. He’s about the worst possible person to hold his job. Under Pruitt, the agency should be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

Still, doesn’t the man have a right to eat in peace in a restaurant? In this video, a woman confronts Pruitt and his companion and reads out a laundry list of his misdeeds. As Politico reports:

Another member of President Trump’s administration was confronted by a member of the public, this time in a tea shop in Washington, D.C.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was having lunch at Teaism on Monday when a woman confronted him and urged him to resign.

In a video posted to Facebook Monday, Kristin Mink is seen introducing her toddler son to Pruitt and telling him to resign. Occasionally appearing to refer to notes and speaking calmly, she cites his actions on water and air quality protection and tells him his policies have benefitted corporations over the environment.

“This is my son. He loves animals, he loves clean air, he loves clean water,” Mink said in the video to Pruitt and his lunch companion.

“We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment. Somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children,” she said.

“I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out,” she says before the video ends.

Although the video does not show it, Mink said in her video that Pruitt quickly left the restaurant after she confronted him.

[JAC: Pruitt’s office says he listens respectfully, which seems to be the case, and that he left because he finished his meal.]

The thing is, I agree completely with her views—just not with her tactics. Again, while this woman has every right to write to Pruitt, engage in demonstrations, make appointments at the EPA, lobby them, and do everything she can to bring Pruitt down—and surely has the legal right to encounter him this way—I don’t think this tactic is useful. It won’t change his mind; it won’t change the mind of centrists, and it makes the Left look petty.  Can we just leave these people to go out in public in peace without harassing them?

Apparently not to some Control-Leftists. P. Z. Myers, for instance, posted that video and gleefully approved of the confrontation:

Polite, honest, and accurate. She didn’t punch him, throw his table over, or kick him in the balls, even though he deserves all of that. It was an effective protest.

If you see one of Trump’s lackeys in public, and you don’t lean over and tell them, “Resign!”, you aren’t as brave as Kristin Mink.

Make ’em cringe a bit when they’re out in public. It’s the least you can do.

Really? Now he deserves to be kicked in the balls, too? (That, of course, is illegal.)

 

NYT legal columnist: Let’s rethink the First Amendment now that it’s being used by conservatives

My title may be exaggerated a tad, but not that much, for the point of Adam Liptak’s article (click on screenshot below) is that conservatives are starting to use the First Amendment to defend or buttress legal decisions that liberals don’t like, and therefore the First Amendment is outdated or should be reexamined. The title of the piece comes from Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal who decried her courts’ recent decisions against public unions and in favor of religious abortion “crisis centers” on freedom-of-speech grounds. Further, the Citizens United case, in which corporations were allowed unlimited spending on political campaigns, was also deemed by the Court to be a free speech issue. (Here I disagree on the grounds that corporations are not individuals.)

Liptak is a New York Times reporter whose beat is the US Supreme Court; he also writes the legal column “Sidebar” for the paper. Have a look at his piece.

Liptak is distraught that the free-speech issue, once used to defend liberal cases, is now being used to defend conservative cases. Some of his points (I use quotation marks for direct quotes):

  • Free speech was once used to protect the powerless and dispossessed, as in civil rights cases or protests against the Vietnam war. Liptak, using other people to justify his words, says “some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.”

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

“To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

  •  “A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras. . . As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.”

    “The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Here is an analysis of the data, showing that as courts became more conservative, the cases involving conservative speech have increased, the win rate hasn’t changed much, but the win rate for liberal speech cases has dropped. Well, what do you expect given that the Supremes are always ideological and now the Court is becoming increasingly (and to my mind, dangerously) conservative?

Seriously, “free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice”? It is used against the dispossessed? Excuse me, but we hear loudly and frequently from the dispossessed and minorities and the Left, especially in liberal newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, and in Control-Left publications like HuffPost.

The reason why free-speech considerations are increasingly used to buttress conservative decisions is, as I said, because the Supreme Court has always been politicized (as in the Burger and especially the Warren Courts), but now that conservatives are ascendant, they are using the same arguments to prop up their own ideologies. The problem is not with the First Amendment, or with free speech, but the fact that the country has become more conservative in recent years, and with it the justices on the Supreme Court.

In fact, as the article notes, Leftists and progressives like Ralph Nader used a free-speech defense to protect advertising and commercial “speech,” in a successful attempt to overturn state laws banning advertising or providing information about prescription drug prices. Now Nader and other say that they regret supporting that attempt, since such defenses are now being used (largely unsuccessfully) to attack cigarette-label warnings, prohibitions of giving alcohol content on beer cans, and so on.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While you may disagree with the courts’ arguments, liberals used the First Amendment to get their agenda passed, but now that conservatives have learned from that tactic, liberals are now saying that free speech is overrated, or is used to buttress the powerful against the oppressed. And it’s ironic that a free press, in the form of Liptak’s article, is being used to make this point. Liberals don’t like the results, but again—it’s not the fault of the First Amendment, the best tool we have to protect our democracy—but the American public, who elected conservatives to Congress and the Presidency.

I’m not sure how I feel about the recent conservative decisions overturning the requirement for abortion-opposing health clinics to tell their patients about alternatives like abortion, although I tend to think that the decision about unions had some justification. In effect, it forced people to join public unions that represented their group, and to pay dues to those unions, even if those forced to join disagreed with the unions’ aims and tactics. One can make a case that that is forcing people to espouse a certain point of view when they don’t want to—a free speech issue. An alternative and reasonable solution is to allow people to opt out of such unions, but then to prohibit them from getting any of the benefits that the union negotiates for their members.

In that case, I have to agree with Samuel Alito’s statement in the union case judgment:

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” he wrote. “Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues — say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.”

Justice Kagan’s response—that everything involves speech and thus could be decided on the basis of speech law—is not convincing.

I’m sorry, but jettisoning the most powerful buttress to American democracy, and a bedrock of the moral and legal progress we’ve made in the last century, just because conservatives use it, too, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For if the First Amendment is deemed useless, what protection does anyone have against government censorship?

This article is part of the Times’s new emphasis on Control-Leftism, as instantiated by the opprobrium leveled against Bari Weiss by her fellow reporters. It’s sad to see the good gray Times go this route, but I think it is. I have another wonky article they just published, and may discuss it in my next post.