Flaming Chords

Dear Prudie,
My husband and I have always attended Thanksgiving at his sister's house since we married seven years ago. During these gatherings, the TV is on full-blast, and the children are told to play in one bedroom. We eat at 2 p.m. sharp, and my sister-in-law is right behind the last one in line, packing up stuff and putting it away. She won't accept any help, and when I bring food, it gets handed back to me when I leave. I understand that the holidays are when you get to see family members whom you wouldn't ordinarily see, but all of his family gets together at least once a month. I come from a large family, and I'm used to kids running around, board games, music, and a table covered in food. We always had an open house, and friends came by for a great meal and good company. My family is now scattered all over the globe, but my husband and I have friends we'd love to see on Thanksgiving, and I want to have an open house myself. I would invite everyone from my husband's family, but I fear it's going to be seen as an affront to my in-laws. Should I just plan our own gathering and deal with his family's wrath? Or is what I want to do just not that important?

—Holiday Hell

( Read more... )

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

I couldn't take it sitting at home staring at the walls (ceiling, floor, television, books, magazines) any more.

I'm in the office for a few hours so I can actually engage my brain at something useful.

Expecting to run down around 2:30.

Any thoughts about the whole "zomg atheist billboards" thing that has been going on?

I feel really ambivalent about all this kind of crap. I honestly think putting more open atheists out in the community (volunteers in particular) would be a lot more productive to raise awareness and would frankly cause less of a counter-productive shit storm. Any thoughts?

Странный день был сегодня, длинный и бестолковый. И прошел бы совсем безрадостно, если бы под вечер не пришло предложение о сотрудничестве от одной конторки за подписью их директора по связям, а зовут того директора Ebbat Lopato. И так его имя всех впечатлило, что взялись мы вспоминать других коллег, сотрудников и клиентов с "русскоговорящими" именами. Как-то само собой все организовалось в три номинации:
Имя + фамилия: Kira Sinn, Ben Zin, Kiera Pitch, Maria Semmena, Josh Snovo (что лучше читается как Snovo Josh)
Имена: Popendos, Govinda, Chechen.
Фамилии: Padla, Stupor, Tsukho, Telco, Sivka.
Правда, подозреваю, над нашими именами тоже кто-то где-то посмеивается.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Dictionary.com defines "terrorism" as: 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. 2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. 3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

On the news, over the last few days, I've been seeing people, mostly on the Right, trying to claim that this is some kind of terrorist plot. That it is a tragedy is understood, but a terrorist act? While John McCain, other politicians, and the pundits on Fox News might be certain, I'm not.

Let us look at the definition of terrorism above in regards to this event. Did Maj. Nidal Hasan use violence? Yes, that's obvious, but was it for political purposes? While many are claiming that he did the shooting because of his Muslim beliefs and his deep discomfort with the fact that our nation has been fighting Muslim nations and groups for years, I don't know if this would count. To argue that he shot up soldiers in order to try and convince the army to let Muslims bow out of possibly fighting other Muslims seems weak and nothing I've read has said that he admitted to performing the shootings in order to try and change military policy surrounding Muslims in service specifically (he did, at one point, give a lecture that concluded with the recommendation that Muslims be allowed to opt-out of fighting that might include combat against other Muslims).

Did he successfully cause a state of fear or submission? Certainly fear in the short term but for any lasting impact? No. Trying to claim that because he shot his fellow soldiers, in that essence, was a terrorist act would also lead to school shootings and other such gun rampages to also being considered "terrorism"because they caused fear, when they clearly weren't caused for terrorism-related reasons.

Did he try to resist the government by this act? Unknown, although I'd assume not. Hasan was a military psychologist, not a serviceman about to be sent overseas, so it wasn't as if his crime was committed because he was resisting orders.

That Maj. Nidal Hasan is a Muslim is true, and by all accounts he had a personal religious and moral conflict with the fact that our military has been fighting Muslim countries and groups for years. According to investigators, Hasan's mother died in 2001 and personal acquaintances of his said that he became much more withdrawn when she passed away. Are these possibly mitigating factors? Certainly, but I don't think that they would lead to this being called a "terrorist" act.

And what do we get now? We get crazy Christians trying to claim we should remove all Muslims from service or require them to sign some kind of special loyalty oath (yet Christians, who have their own terrorists and violent fundamentalists, get a pass presumably). We have people on ABC trying to claim that he "reached out to Al Queda" despite the fact that the FBI, who investigated e-mails sent to an iman in Yemen, ruled that the e-mails were innocent and in line with Hasan's personal religious studies. We have people trying to beat the very worn out drum of fear to the tune of "Terrorism!" and multiple people framing the idea of terrorists as Muslims despite the fact that the FBI has so far ruled that Hasan was a lone individual and not part of any kind of terrorist plot or conspiracy.

I think the things here that are important to look at are varied:
1. I think an investigation into why Hasan committed the crime is important because getting the facts out and as public as possible will help remove the ability of individuals wanting to spin this for their own gain.
2. I think it's important that people should be critical of why politicians, any politicians on either side of the aisle, and pundits are trying to claim this is a "terrorist" attack. The whole purpose of terrorism if to dictate to others through the use of threats and fear. You should be critical of why anyone, even our own government, would tell you to be afraid.
3. I think it's important that people should consider the other Muslims in our armed forces, the hundreds, possibly thousands of individuals who will now possibly be negatively impacted by people's misplaced fear when they have done nothing wrong. I can't find the quote to attribute it to but someone, very shortly after the attack happened, said something along the lines of "One of our greatest strengths is our diversity. It would be a shame if that became a casualty of this as well." and I can't agree more.

-Ren

http://waytosuckthatdick.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/tattoo/

http://waytosuckthatdick.wordpress.com/?p=1328

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thisiswhyyourefat/PvLK/~3/Mn2-rV-DmtQ/241615839

http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/post/241615839

Chocolate Dipped Potato Chips

Evils of abortion and How

the Bible Proves the Teachings of the Catholic Church
www.mostholyfamilymonastery.


So...the Bible, which the Catholic Church gains its teachings from, is going to prove the teachings of the Catholic Church? Riiiiiight.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/11/12/massaging_the_data_for_neurontin.php

There's a disturbing article out at the New England Journal of Medicine on studies conducted on Neurontin (gabapentin) for various unapproved indications. Parke-Davis (and later Pfizer) looked at a wide range of possible indications for the drug - migraine, neuropathic pain, bipolar disorder, and more. That in itself isn't unusual, since CNS drugs often have rather broad and poorly defined mechanisms, and it's not like we understand any of them all that well.

What is unusual is the pattern found when comparing the internal reports with the published versions that showed up in the literature. The authors found that:

"More than half the clinical trials that we included in our analysis (11 of 20) were not published as full-length research articles. For 7 of the 9 trials that were published as full-length research articles, a statistically significant primary outcome was reported, and for more than half these trials, the outcome specified in the published report differed from the outcome originally described in the protocol. Three of the four trials with an unchanged primary outcome had statistically significant results for the protocol-specified primary outcome. Secondary outcomes also frequently differed between the protocol and the published report. Thus, trials with findings that were not statistically significant (P≥0.05) for the protocol-defined primary outcome, according to the internal documents, either were not published in full or were published with a changed primary outcome. . .all the changes that took place between what was specified in the protocol, what was known before publication (as presented in the internal company research reports), and what was reported to the public led to a more favorable presentation in the medical literature. . ."

The authors go on to point out that changing a primary outcome after you see the data is, in fact, a statistical sin (although that's not quite the phrase they use!) You really can't go around doing that, because you can end up chasing after random chance (and avoiding that is the whole point of running well-controlled trials). This does not cover Pfizer and Parke-Davis with glory, but it's worth noting that there's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to this practice:

"Our study is based on a relatively small number of trials undertaken to test a single drug manufactured by a single company and its successors. Furthermore, if a major purpose of the studies we examined was to promote off-label uses of gabapentin, the selective reporting we observed could be more extreme than that observed for studies conducted for other reasons. Previous studies in different settings have shown evidence of these same biases, however. Indeed, selective outcome reporting does not appear to be limited to studies funded by drug companies. Chan and colleagues examined published trials funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and found that 40% of stated primary outcomes differed between the protocol and the published report. In addition, we cannot be certain that selective reporting was a decision made by employees of Pfizer and Parke-Davis, since the authors of the published reports included nonemployees. We did not systematically assess the methodologic quality of the included trials as described in the publications we examined. Previous research has indicated that quality scores are higher for trials conducted by the pharmaceutical industry than for trials conducted by not-for-profit entities, although reports from industry-sponsored trials have potentially distorted the scientific record because of other, less easily measured study factors."

That doesn't get the folks who conducted these gabapentin studies off the hook, although I should note that Pfizer disputes the conclusions of this article (as you'd certainly think that they would). And it's also worth noting that some of its authors have done work for the plaintiffs in suits against Pfizer over gabapentin (thus all the familiarity with the internal company documents, which came to light during discovery proceedings). But again, I don't see how that negates the paper's conclusions, and if Pfizer has any hard data that would do so, I think they should produce it with all speed.

And no, it's just a coincidence that this post involve Pfizer, after I've been going on about their merger business all week. Unfortunately, I think that they're probably not the only company that could be pointed at. But we in the industry shouldn't have things like this for others to uncover in the first place. Should we?

Cool and a bit damp, although there's no rain and it's actually sunny. There are guys across the street doing some tree-trimming (or tree-cutting-down, I don't know) and they've been running a woodchipper all morning.

Read about 100 pages of Under the Dome yesterday -- lots of small-town mayhem, very much Stephen King's specialty.

More later ... in the meantime, here's a story about scientists analyzing the smell of old books. Also, Channel 4 in the UK sounds like my kind of TV station! They're planning on crashing a passenger plane and blowing up row houses. Heh.

Still coughing a lot. I hope I don't have bronchitis. I don't want to be forced to take antibiotics. I get really bad yeast infections if I'm in the same room as antibiotics. And Monistat is BULLSHIT. It does NOTHING and should be taken off the market.