There Is No Such Thing As Alternative Medicine

Witch Doctor by Felix42 contra la censura @ Flickr

There is no such thing as alternative medicine. Test it against a placebo. If it works better than the placebo, it’s not alternative – if it doesn’t, it’s not medicine.

At its most basic, the heart of the matter really is that simple.

Think your herb tea cures your cold?

Test it against a placebo. If it works better than the placebo, it’s not alternative – if it doesn’t, it’s not medicine.

The United States federal government has spent $2.5 billion testing alternative medicines.

Ginko biloba helps your memory?

There is no such thing as alternative medicine. Test it against a placebo. If it works better than the placebo, it’s not alternative – if it doesn’t, it’s not medicine.

“Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.”

Shark cartilage cures cancer?

There is no such thing as alternative medicine. Test it against a placebo. If it works better than the placebo, it’s not alternative – if it doesn’t, it’s not medicine.

The board in charge of the testing was artificially loaded with proponents of “alternative medicine”, and still FAILed to find any evidence that these treatments worked any better than placebo.

“The bottom line is that NCCAM is an ideological, not a scientific organization. It exists to validate CAM, not to test whether it works or not. And when it doesn’t produce the results its boosters in the legislature, like Tom Harkin, want to see, there’s serious trouble.”

Guess what? There is no such thing as alternative medicine. Test it against a placebo. If it works better than the placebo, it’s not alternative – if it doesn’t, it’s not medicine.

Storm Clouds

Storm Clouds, by LouFCD

I guess I prefer photographic drama over blog drama, so I’m skipping commentary on being misrepresented and lied about. I’m not going to say I enjoy being dishonestly set up for a good old fashioned bashing on the blogs of people I called friends, but I’d really rather talk about the cool storm rolling in here to Jacksonville yesterday evening. Because really, the irony of getting pissed off over being called a douche about all that is pretty thick all things considered, “and when the core of the argument goes a bit over your head or turns out to be something that you didn’t think it was (egg on your face) you focus on spelling and word meaning and other stupid ass shit” as someone once said.

So this storm rolled in yesterday afternoon, and Jane summoned me out front to see it. I walked out, mesmerized by the clouds. They were really low and really fast, rolling and roiling like in some mega-disaster movie. I sent my son back inside to fetch the camera equipment, so I could share this on the blog.

It’s funny how those clouds, the turbulence of them really, is sort of a metaphor for the relationships in our lives. Doubly so for the relationships we build and forge and release online. I was talking to a friend (one that hasn’t kicked me in the ‘nads) yesterday about why I don’t write as much as I used to.

Storm Clouds continues below the fold.

A Minor Thing

Douche by Mike Schmid

I would just like to point out from my humble little corner of the blogosphere that if you start your discussion of the causes of war-time rape with, “You are a rapist, even though you’ve never raped anyone”, it isn’t really me who has made it all about me, is it?

That’s all.

From whence came the art:

That image is titled Douche, by Mike Schmid, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Shorter

Friend 1: Hey, this is an interesting thought. *kicks me in the ‘nads*

Me: Hey, could be, but I’d be a little more willing to listen if you hadn’t kicked me in the ‘nads.

Friend 2: Hey, stop making it all about you! *kicks me in the ‘nads*

Me: Well, you guys could stop kicking me in the ‘nads and I might consider that.

Friend 2: See? You’re making it all about you again! You’re ignoring my pain!

Me: Ok, it’s not about me. Help me understand your pain.

Friend 1: You’re really starting to annoy me with this. *kicks me in the ‘nads*

Friend 2: Thanks for finally listening. *kicks me in the ‘nads*

Me: Y’know, kicking me in the ‘nads isn’t helping me understand here.

Asshole stranger attempts to kick Friends 1 and 2 in the ‘nads.

Me: Hey! Don’t kick my friends in the ‘nads!

Friend 2: Way to bring the attention away from me again! *kicks me in the ‘nads*

Me: fml. *kicks self in the ‘nads*

ourtroom no 4

ourtroom No 4

Originally uploaded by Lou FCD

ourtroom no 4

Do not feed birds & ducks

Do Not Feed Birds & Ducks

Originally uploaded by Lou FCD

Do not feed birds & ducks

Jane Disrobes

Jane Disrobes, by me @ Flickr

I’m really enjoying the new camera. It’s a Canon EOS Rebel XS (AKA the 1000D), an entry-level digital SLR. One of the smartest things I did was to pick up an 8 GB SD card when I bought it. That sucker will hold a ton of pictures before it’s full. A few days ago I went out and about and took 664 RAW format photos, and had plenty of room to spare. I <3 that.

I’ve been clicking away at anything that catches my eye. I’ve got a couple shots around town that I’d like to think are pretty decent. A handful of my shots of birds and other critters are pretty good, but birds seem to be my toughest targets. I’m working on it.

Mostly though, I’m enjoying taking photos of my favorite subject: Jane. I’ve easily taken a thousand photos of her in the couple weeks we’ve had the camera. Some of them she lets me share on my Facebook page. There are more … grown up… shots on my Flickr page. There are some really beautiful nudes on my hard drive. She’s not ready to let me share those with the world, though. Sorry. (I’ll let you know when she gets a little more comfortable with that!)

This morning some really bright morning sun was being reflected off the neighbor’s car window and through our bedroom window, onto the wall. It inspired me to wake up my sleeping bride, and take a mess of photos as her eyes opened. Some of them came out ok, and they’re on my Flickr page. They start with the morning light on the wall that awakened me (and hence the set is named Morning Light).

Later I talked her into, and then out of, a bathrobe. Jane Disrobes follows the Morning Light shots.

Pop on over for the two sets I took so far today, Morning Light and Jane Disrobes, and leave a comment if you see something you like, or if you have a suggestion on how to improve my pichertakin skilz. Feel free to browse around the rest of my photostream, as well. There might be something half-way decent there that catches your eye. If so, I’d love to hear about it.

Updated: This post has been very kindly featured in Diva’s Friday Foto Fiesta at Best Sex Bloggers. Thank you, Diva.

From whence came the art:

That image is part of the set I took today called Jane Disrobes, and can be found at my Flickr page. The ghostly groper in the image was a happy accident.

After Bob

After Bob

Originally uploaded by Lou FCD

My cousin Bob takes the most beautiful black and white photos of old tobacco barns. He’s had his own shows where they were displayed, in fact.

This one is about a block from my house, and while I was out walking this beautiful Sunday morning I was inspired by his work to pull the trigger button on it. I’m sure he has dozens of shots of this barn, having grown up across the street from it, but this one is from me to him.

Peace cousin.

JP Straight Up

JP Straight Up

Originally uploaded by Lou FCD

James and I had meant to get up early and head for Emerald Isle this morning, to shoot the sunrise. We overslept, messed around all day, and late in the afternoon we were bored. The car’s tail lights had mysteriously remained on all night and day and the battery was dead, so I couldn’t take him over to the skating rink.

We decided to take a few shots on the front lawn instead.

The results are on my Flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/loufcd/

Shakespeare Looks Innocent

Shakespeare Looks Innocent

Originally uploaded by Lou FCD

What?

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Carnival of the Liberals, Number 91 – Eine kleine Nachtlesung

Carnival of the Liberals, Thinking Liberally

Following Quiche Moraine is a monumental and intimidating task. The collaboration of writers they have over there is a top notch, first rate bunch of folks. I’ll do the best I can to fill their shoes, rather than wind up the mess on the bottom.

Let’s start with a little humor, move through some more serious stuff, and see if I can send you off to your bed with a liberal dose of sex that will have the NeoCons pulling out their hair, and you pulling out… something more interesting.

Pointing out the bizarre nature of Republican logic is often an excursion into the ridiculous, but it’s rarely been as toe tappingly funny as The “We Did Nothing Wrong & Nancy Should Have Stopped Us” song. Now you see why Kane is quite Mad.

And Kilroy_60 seems to have discovered an important clue as to why. Send in the Clowns? They’re Already Here. Boy, does that explain a lot.

Johnny Pez has uncovered the Secret Hope In Time that the Republicans have been waiting for. Turns out they have an ace in the hole. Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, they’re going to get direction from their glorious past, and all they have to do is wait Inside the Time Vault.

(The rest of this edition of CotL lies below the fold.)

Real Women

Reaching, by me ©2009, all rights reserved

I never cared for Loni. While every boy I knew went on and on about Jennifer’s tits, I was dreaming about Bailey. I did fall for Farrah, but it was a passing fancy. Pam was ok before the mega surgery I guess, and I never thought much of Dolly at all. Diana Prince had a neat secret outfit, but I lusted for Jaime Sommers. More recently, Six was nice to look at but nothing like Boomer or Starbuck. Truth is, all I needed to know about Barbie was that “Math is hard!!” She was plastic, fake, and not very bright.

These days, Carrie Prejean exemplifies everything that turns me off in a woman. Just like Barbie, she’s plastic, fake, and not very bright. I don’t find her attractive at all: not her fake smile, fake beauty-pageant breasts, fake walk, fake hand wave, or fake holiness. Not even if she keeps her idiotic, homophobic mouth shut. I’m just not interested. She’s not pretty. She’s not pretty at all.

I love real women.

(Continue reading, below the fold.)

Jane in Gray

Jane in Gray, by me ©2009, all rights reserved

From whence came the art:

That image is titled Jane in Gray by me ©2009, all rights reserved.

Summer Update

Turkey Vulture in the Clouds

So the semester is over and summer is officially here for me, solstice be damned. I’ll probably be able to blog a bit more, and vent some of the accumulated thoughts jumbled up in my brain.

For now, a few bits of updates.

I’ll be reading and reviewing The Unlikely Disciple, by Kevin Roose, for Carnal Nation. I’ll post a link for you when it’s up.

I’ll be hosting the next Carnival of the Liberals here on May 20th. I’ve been receiving submissions and should be getting to those by tomorrow. To this point, they’ve been shunted into a folder in my mailbox just because they started coming in during the lead up to finals week.

Speaking of finals, I think our team project for English 113 (our final was a presentation on one of Hamlet’s soliloquys) went OK, and I expect an A on that and in the class.

I bumped into my Bio 112 prof in a store here in town a few hours after the Bio final. He stopped to say hello and told me I got an A on the final, and complimented my answer regarding The Tragedy of the Commons. I don’t think I did well on the previous exam, so I’m thinking I’m in A/B borderland. Hopefully the final will pull me above the line.

I’ve been doing a lot of photography, uploading pics to my Facebook albums and to Twitpic. Kay is prepping to graduate high school next month, and since the ceremony will be in the football stadium, we needed a decent camera. I had been scrounging to find some cash for summer tuition, but we diverted those funds (and then a little) into getting a Canon EOS Rebel xs a few days ago since I won’t be going to school this summer anyway, and I’ve been using the heck out of it and trying to figure out all those knobs and buttons.

And that’s a bit of a story, too. UNCW Center for Marine Science gives two paid internships per year to Coastal Biology students, and I was nominated by the department for one of them. That was awesome and I was very excited. But then Dub emailed The Chair to tell her that the economy tanked those two internships. That was not awesome and I was bummed. Then Dub emailed The Chair again, and offered one internship on a volunteer basis, and I was offered that. So I guess now I’m quasi-excited. I said from the beginning that I would have done it for free, and in fact assumed it was volunteer at first and was happy to do it, but then I found out I was going to be paid, and now that I’m not going to be paid… well, y’know. I’m excited, but feel a bit like a kid teased with a lolipop. Oh well, I’m looking forward to it. Dub is where I intend to finish my bachelors degree and they have a ton of interesting research projects going, so it’s still a great opportunity. I’m really proud of being nominated for that one slot.

Easy Cool

And JP. James tried pole vaulting this year for the first time. It’s interesting in that he had no idea that my Pop was a pole vaulter in high school. He seems to love it, finished fifth in the conference, and even went to Regionals. He lettered, and he’s got three more years of vaulting ahead of him. How freaking cool is that?

Oh, and he’s fifteen today. Happy Birthday, son.

From whence came the art:

I took both of those images with my new Canon EOS Rebel xs, and they are each licensed by me under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- Share Alike 3.0 License.

Enter the Queen

Queen Gertrude, by Jim Carson @ Flickr

One of the prompts for my last paper in English 113 was to write a soliloquy for Gertrude. The following essay was an eleventh hour idea that was instantly one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written.

I put it at the beginning of the play, as a prologue to the play itself. As such, I thought I’d give iambic pentameter a go, which sort of separates it from the main play.

(Note that Aros is an archaic alternate spelling of Eros.)

Enter the Queen

Prelude

GERTRUDE: Life was a field of hay when first we wed.

The joy and pain and lust and tame were mixed

within our bed. Where hath my lover gone?

Submissive colt, my sweet adoring man,

Hamlet my King, both Dane and thane. Secret

desires not known or feared among common

or high lay deep within the breast of him.

The rest of Gertrude’s soliloquy lies below the fold, click to read the rest.

Name that Flu

Vote early, vote often! Or write in your own answer!

The Writing is on the Wife

Sexy Hand

I love my wife.

That is all.

For the Love of Frost

An essay I turned in this morning for English 113.

For the Love of Frost

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of doom. (Frost, “Into My Own”)

With these words in 1913, an awkward, gangling farm boy inexpertly expressed his interest in the most popular girl in school, the one all the poets wanted. Robert Frost had made written acquaintance with the American public some years prior but it was not until he moved to England that we took notice of our would-be suitor. His adolescent flirting would rapidly mature to the lingering kisses of a timeless affaire d’amour. Though there were some lovers’ quarrels through the years, his voice still whispers the little nothings we love to hear as we think back on relaxing in those peaceful moments of intimate connection. Our relationship with Frost began as an awkward courtship, tarried in sensual consummation, and now drifts restfully in the memories of half-conscious pillow talk.

Though his initial overture was unpolished and inelegant, our débutante’s attention was captured and our interest piqued. We had previously been courted by a boy named Edgar, but he was a bit too brooding for our collective taste. Edgar was fine enough to sigh over but not much fun to date, and we were looking for someone new with whom to share our evenings. We commented in our diary about our new beau, “Mr. Frost’s [A Boy's Will] is a little raw, and has in it a number of infelicities; underneath them it has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity” (Pound – emphasis in the original). Ezra Pound perfectly captured the country’s enchantment with Robert Frost. What set Frost apart from other poets was his skillful use of modest language to talk about everyday life. Grand pronouncements on cosmic-scale themes he left for other poets, and it was exactly those sincere infelicities that won America’s heart and soul.

(Continues below the fold)

A Brief History of Moonbats

Lou FCD headshot by Ben Zvan

Last Thursday evening was a pleasant one. It was mild and welcoming, a good night for a drive to Wilmington. I had been by the University of North Carolina campus there, but hadn’t yet been to visit. I’ve been meaning to head down there to look around for a while now, as that’s where I intend to finish my Bachelor’s degree in Biology. The reason for this trip was mildly ironic given my intentions, as my son James and I were headed there to hear an anti-science advocate speak.

Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He’s also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a well known creationist think tank whose purpose is to disguise religious doctrine as science in order to avoid the Constitutional ban on promoting religion in public schools. It was Behe that we were heading down to see.

Along the hour and a half drive, I gave my son the highlights of the full history of the Intelligent Design Creationism Hoax, parts of which he’s heard before. (Bear in mind here that I was driving, and not working from notes. I’ll be filling in details as I go that he didn’t get during our conversation.) I began with some background on the history of scientific discoveries in biology since Linnaeus. Carolus Linnaeus was Swedish doctor, a botanist, and a zoologist, who set about categorizing life’s varied forms in his long-evolving work, “Systema Naturae”, first published in 1735.

I touched on William Paley’s rehashing of Cicero’s water clock, and the the obvious logical flaw contained therein. In On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero’s character Balbus, a fictional follower of Plato, posited that because a sundial or a water clock has an obvious purpose, we can then infer that it was designed by some intelligence. Balbus went on to argue that because of the complexity of nature, we can therefore infer that the universe is also designed by some intelligence. Balbus concluded that the universe itself was divine, or possibly that the universe had a divine spirit, a sort of mono/pantheism (Collins 187 – 193). Paley bastardized the assertion in 1802, altering the water clock to a watch, and the deity in question to the Christian god (Paley 5 – 13). He failed however to remove the glaring logical flaw that we only perceive complexity in contrast to simplicity, the watch on the background of the heath. One cannot then use the complexity of the watch to argue for the complexity of the heath without undermining the original argument that the watch is itself complex and inherently different from the heath. This was important for what was to come, and I was later quite glad I had taken the time (we had plenty on the ride) to discuss it with James.

(continue reading below the fold)