I spent a lot of time sitting around yesterday night while my wife tried on clothes. (We went to the largest mall in the world.)
Anyway, while I was browsing I noticed something about the models chosen to display nursing bras. There's the usual smoldering sexiness of a lingerie model, sure, but there's something else. The canonical pose is to have one hand about to open the nursing panel, and a sort of a wispy smile which is more... well, more wholesome than you'd see in a Victoria's Secret model. (Say.)
This is a pretty good example of what I mean:
Worse, I feel like she's saying, "got milk?"
Two researchers report in this week's British Medical Journal that secondhand smoke does not significantly increase the risk of heart disease or lung cancer.
Anti-smoking groups attack the researchers for taking money from the tobacco industry. Smokers' rights groups attack the anti-smoking groups for, well, being anti-smoking.
Hey guys: anti-smoking does not mean anti-smoker. Duh.
Anyway, let's look at the paper.
Results ... For participants followed from 1960 until 1998 the age adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) for never smokers married to ever smokers compared with never smokers married to never smokers was 0.94 (0.85 to 1.05) for coronary heart disease, 0.75 (0.42 to 1.35) for lung cancer...
Conclusions The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect.
Anyway, let's see what the BMJ editors had to say about that:
It is not being married to a smoker—the indicator of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke used in the paper by Enstrom and Kabat—that leads to disease; rather, it is the inhalation of environmental tobacco smoke.
Oops! Enstrom and Kabat state in their conclusion that environmental tobacco smoke did not cause tobacco-related mortality even though they failed to show that. At best they showed that their proxy variable (marriage to a smoker) was not correlated with increased tobacco-related mortality.
I don't really see what the problem is with the Texas house. The Democratic members who fled to avoid a quorum call knew that house rules provided for their arrest and transport to the legislature. That's why they ran away to another state.
If they had wanted to make a political point, they could have resigned en masse. This would also prevent quorum. It would not be illegal. And it would allow the voters who elected them to express their opinions of legislators who refuse to do their jobs.
In any case, the Texas Democrats "won". The controversial redistricting measure will not be passed. Several other bills will also die, necessitating a special session of the legislature -- a somewhat costly measure -- during the summer to avoid a cash-flow problem in the state's treasury. I wonder how happy their constituents will be when that happens?
I can't help but contrast it to Berlin in 1933, when the Nazis were using every legal and illegal means available to prevent opposition deputies from coming to the Reichstag, so that the Nazis could elect Hitler Chancellor.
In this case, the opposition members are illegally fleeing the legislature to prevent a quorum, in opposition to the majority. The majority used only legal means to track them down and ultimately failed in the attempt to restore the legislature to functioning.
It's like 1933, sure, except this time the role of the Nazis is played by DEMOCRATS.