Saturday, June 18, 2005
How honest should you be?
The sad truth is; not very.
I read an article today that claimed that people who sucked up at job interviews were far more likely to get hired than those who spoke, GASP, about their qualifications for the job; pretending that you think the company and/or the interviewer are wonderful wins over, not just being open and honest, but over what's supposed to be the procedure for being interviewed... and let's not forget that that procedure is itself often filled with gross distortions of the truth, with successful liars having a better chance at being hired than if they'd been honest.
A movie I saw a few days ago included women talking about how it was necessary to lie about how many men they'd had sex with to their current men, because no man wants a woman who's had too many partners, or more partners than he's had... and then went on to cover how men lie about THEIR # of sex partners to seem more studly.
These things made me remember something in Discover, from the R&D section of the October 2002 issue, called "Lies and Nothing but the Lies";
"Our penchant for bending truth is so pervasive that we delude even ourselves, says Robert S. Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He and his colleagues videotaped 121 pairs of unacquainted college students during 10-minute introductory conversations. The researchers then asked one student from each pair to watch the tape and report every instance in which he or she had lied. Before viewing the tapes, most of the subjects said they had been completely honest. But faced with the evidence, 60 percent realized they had fibbed at least once. Those who lied did so three times per conversation, on average, with one subject squeezing in 12. 'We were surprised that the level of lying was quite high-and so were the students,' Feldman says. He also found that men and women lied at roughly the same rate but apparently for different reasons. 'Women tended to lie in order to make the people they were talking to feel better about themselves. Men tended to lie to make themselves look better,' he says. One male student told a woman he was the lead singer in a rock band that had just signed a recording contract, although the band did not exist. The research has made Feldman wary of day-to-day conversation: 'I'm more skeptical about what I hear, and I'm much more sensitive to what I say.'"
So, even in casual conversation, lying is more likely to happen than not, even if we aren't aware of doing it... and when we do something automatically in social situations, it's usually a sign that it's what we as a culture subconsciously see as "correct" behavior.
Then, there are the endless lies that we ARE conscious of; if our opinion is sought about something personal to the questioner, we'll usually lie if we don't consider whatever it is to be genuinely praiseworthy, whether the subject is a new haircut or sexual technique. When we're trying to get people to like us, we pretend to agree with what they say and to enjoy what they enjoy. When we speak to people in authority, we tell them what we think they want to hear. When we're trying to get an ambivalent person into bed, we'll say ANYTHING.
We SAY we value honesty, but the truth is that if we were ACTUALLY honest with the people in our lives, I mean 100% honest, we'd be resented and disliked by everyone, including those who've said that "honesty is the best policy" all their lives, and if the people in our lives were 100% honest with US, we'd be devastated and outraged by what we'd learn, and shun them as a reward for their honesty.
People don't really want to hear the truth, they want to be told whatever will make them feel good... and that's exactly what you'll tell them, for the most part, if you want to get ahead at work, get along with your family, have friends, and have a romantic partner who's willing to sleep with you.
Is that why some of us, especially those who, like me, keep their identities a secret, have blogs... so that we have somewhere we can pass along our truth to other members of the human race without negative repercussions in our lives? Hmmmmmmmm...
I read an article today that claimed that people who sucked up at job interviews were far more likely to get hired than those who spoke, GASP, about their qualifications for the job; pretending that you think the company and/or the interviewer are wonderful wins over, not just being open and honest, but over what's supposed to be the procedure for being interviewed... and let's not forget that that procedure is itself often filled with gross distortions of the truth, with successful liars having a better chance at being hired than if they'd been honest.
A movie I saw a few days ago included women talking about how it was necessary to lie about how many men they'd had sex with to their current men, because no man wants a woman who's had too many partners, or more partners than he's had... and then went on to cover how men lie about THEIR # of sex partners to seem more studly.
These things made me remember something in Discover, from the R&D section of the October 2002 issue, called "Lies and Nothing but the Lies";
"Our penchant for bending truth is so pervasive that we delude even ourselves, says Robert S. Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He and his colleagues videotaped 121 pairs of unacquainted college students during 10-minute introductory conversations. The researchers then asked one student from each pair to watch the tape and report every instance in which he or she had lied. Before viewing the tapes, most of the subjects said they had been completely honest. But faced with the evidence, 60 percent realized they had fibbed at least once. Those who lied did so three times per conversation, on average, with one subject squeezing in 12. 'We were surprised that the level of lying was quite high-and so were the students,' Feldman says. He also found that men and women lied at roughly the same rate but apparently for different reasons. 'Women tended to lie in order to make the people they were talking to feel better about themselves. Men tended to lie to make themselves look better,' he says. One male student told a woman he was the lead singer in a rock band that had just signed a recording contract, although the band did not exist. The research has made Feldman wary of day-to-day conversation: 'I'm more skeptical about what I hear, and I'm much more sensitive to what I say.'"
So, even in casual conversation, lying is more likely to happen than not, even if we aren't aware of doing it... and when we do something automatically in social situations, it's usually a sign that it's what we as a culture subconsciously see as "correct" behavior.
Then, there are the endless lies that we ARE conscious of; if our opinion is sought about something personal to the questioner, we'll usually lie if we don't consider whatever it is to be genuinely praiseworthy, whether the subject is a new haircut or sexual technique. When we're trying to get people to like us, we pretend to agree with what they say and to enjoy what they enjoy. When we speak to people in authority, we tell them what we think they want to hear. When we're trying to get an ambivalent person into bed, we'll say ANYTHING.
We SAY we value honesty, but the truth is that if we were ACTUALLY honest with the people in our lives, I mean 100% honest, we'd be resented and disliked by everyone, including those who've said that "honesty is the best policy" all their lives, and if the people in our lives were 100% honest with US, we'd be devastated and outraged by what we'd learn, and shun them as a reward for their honesty.
People don't really want to hear the truth, they want to be told whatever will make them feel good... and that's exactly what you'll tell them, for the most part, if you want to get ahead at work, get along with your family, have friends, and have a romantic partner who's willing to sleep with you.
Is that why some of us, especially those who, like me, keep their identities a secret, have blogs... so that we have somewhere we can pass along our truth to other members of the human race without negative repercussions in our lives? Hmmmmmmmm...
Friday, June 17, 2005
Another way I differ; perceived value
One of the countless ways that my psychology differs from that of the rest of the human race (if this were a movie, that line would be moving you towards grasping that I'm actually an alien planted here on Earth for probably evil purposes, but that's not what it means here, honest) is the way any sacrifices I make to obtain something, whether object or goal, affect the value I place on whatever it is... and, as always, it greatly puzzled me when I discovered how everyone else looked at it.
If you're normal (and granted, the fact that you read my blog means you might not be, lol), if you purchase something with your own $, especially $ you worked for, you value it more than if it were given to you, and if you invest significant time and effort into achieving a goal, you value it more than if you just lucked into it.
I, on the other hand, was excited to learn the term "opportunity cost" in economics class in college, because it meant that one of my most basic principles had an actual name; the concept is that every choice you make means that you lose out on all the other choices you could have made, in other words all the other ways you could have spent your time, effort and $. I'm sure you've figured out how that applies to the topic; from my earliest childhood, if I had to pay my own $ for something, I suffered endless agony over all the things I COULD have had with that $ and never would, and so of course valued something given to me MORE than one I paid for, as the given thing meant that I still had that $, and I likewise valued things I got effortlessly more than those I had to work for, because the former meant that I hadn't given up any of my limited time and energy to get something, and the latter meant that I HAD.
But, didn't I FEEL anything, such as excitement or pride, when I'd earned $ or achieved a goal, to make me value the end results? I was brought up to believe that everything I did fell under the heading of the minimum that was expected of me, not as praiseworthy or even noteworthy, so I viewed anything produced by my toil about like a military trainee feels after digging a hole as punishment; worn out by the effort, not seeing anything to brag about, and probably got alot of abuse along the way. These days, I might feel a vague satisfaction when I accomplish something, and sometimes I'm briefly excited when something at the far edge of my abilities works out, but all of that pales beside how happy I WOULD have been if someone else had come along and done it all for me.
Now, if only someone could read my mind and type up my blog entries for me... ;-)
If you're normal (and granted, the fact that you read my blog means you might not be, lol), if you purchase something with your own $, especially $ you worked for, you value it more than if it were given to you, and if you invest significant time and effort into achieving a goal, you value it more than if you just lucked into it.
I, on the other hand, was excited to learn the term "opportunity cost" in economics class in college, because it meant that one of my most basic principles had an actual name; the concept is that every choice you make means that you lose out on all the other choices you could have made, in other words all the other ways you could have spent your time, effort and $. I'm sure you've figured out how that applies to the topic; from my earliest childhood, if I had to pay my own $ for something, I suffered endless agony over all the things I COULD have had with that $ and never would, and so of course valued something given to me MORE than one I paid for, as the given thing meant that I still had that $, and I likewise valued things I got effortlessly more than those I had to work for, because the former meant that I hadn't given up any of my limited time and energy to get something, and the latter meant that I HAD.
But, didn't I FEEL anything, such as excitement or pride, when I'd earned $ or achieved a goal, to make me value the end results? I was brought up to believe that everything I did fell under the heading of the minimum that was expected of me, not as praiseworthy or even noteworthy, so I viewed anything produced by my toil about like a military trainee feels after digging a hole as punishment; worn out by the effort, not seeing anything to brag about, and probably got alot of abuse along the way. These days, I might feel a vague satisfaction when I accomplish something, and sometimes I'm briefly excited when something at the far edge of my abilities works out, but all of that pales beside how happy I WOULD have been if someone else had come along and done it all for me.
Now, if only someone could read my mind and type up my blog entries for me... ;-)
Thursday, June 16, 2005
A lesson in psychology from "Beauty and the Geek"
This series continues to be interesting. In tonight's episode, they showed another romantic attachment forming, just as I predicted; the guy used the massage techniques they'd been taught to relieve the tension and back pain of one of the girls, with them alone in a bedroom and her lying down on the bed, and what usually happens under those circumstances happened... they started sharing a sense of intimacy.
What was really exciting, though, was what I learned about human behavior; have you ever wondered why some people, especially men, with poor social skills seem to go out of their way to make matters worse by being loud, rude, pushy, bossy, or just plain manic, often done in a way that implies that they think they're doing a Robin Williams imitation, although they have only his freneticism, not his funniness? I've always seen a variety of possible reasons for this; desire for attention, immaturity, lack of understanding of what others find appealing, trying too hard and overshooting the mark, burning off nervous energy... and I still think that these sorts of things are probably present to some degree in most of these cases, but when one of the geeks explained why one of his fellow geeks was acting this way, I instantly understood that he'd nailed it, as only an "insider" could. He said something along the lines of:
"It's better to be a buffoon and think that people are disliking you because of that, than to be yourself and have to accept that people dislike you for who you actually are."
Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I used to feel somewhat impatient with this type of person, realizing that they'd be better liked and accepted if they made no effort than all that negative effort... but now, I feel really sorry for them.
If you, or someone you know, has adopted that method to shield yourself from the dislike of others, here's my advice; yes, if you're socially awkward, physically unattractive (it's hard for a good-looking person to NOT learn social skills, since they're in such high demand), and intelligent, yes, some people will automatically dislike you, and there's no point in telling you to not take it personally, because often it IS personal... but it's not going to kill you, and after a while you'll barely notice, so give up the used car salesman routine and just be yourself, and you'll be disliked overall by FAR fewer people than currently. Even better, if people like you, they'll be liking the REAL you, not the goofy persona... and isn't that what it's all about?
What was really exciting, though, was what I learned about human behavior; have you ever wondered why some people, especially men, with poor social skills seem to go out of their way to make matters worse by being loud, rude, pushy, bossy, or just plain manic, often done in a way that implies that they think they're doing a Robin Williams imitation, although they have only his freneticism, not his funniness? I've always seen a variety of possible reasons for this; desire for attention, immaturity, lack of understanding of what others find appealing, trying too hard and overshooting the mark, burning off nervous energy... and I still think that these sorts of things are probably present to some degree in most of these cases, but when one of the geeks explained why one of his fellow geeks was acting this way, I instantly understood that he'd nailed it, as only an "insider" could. He said something along the lines of:
"It's better to be a buffoon and think that people are disliking you because of that, than to be yourself and have to accept that people dislike you for who you actually are."
Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I used to feel somewhat impatient with this type of person, realizing that they'd be better liked and accepted if they made no effort than all that negative effort... but now, I feel really sorry for them.
If you, or someone you know, has adopted that method to shield yourself from the dislike of others, here's my advice; yes, if you're socially awkward, physically unattractive (it's hard for a good-looking person to NOT learn social skills, since they're in such high demand), and intelligent, yes, some people will automatically dislike you, and there's no point in telling you to not take it personally, because often it IS personal... but it's not going to kill you, and after a while you'll barely notice, so give up the used car salesman routine and just be yourself, and you'll be disliked overall by FAR fewer people than currently. Even better, if people like you, they'll be liking the REAL you, not the goofy persona... and isn't that what it's all about?
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
A different life
Is it human nature to wish we had totally different lives... at least some of the time? I don't suppose a dog wishes he lived in some other house, or a bear wishes he lived in some other forest, but we humans seem perpetually dissatisfied with our lives, even though in America nearly every one of us has a life that 99% of the people who've ever lived would do ANYTHING to have.
We all fantasize about being rich, famous, sexually irresistible, etc, but that's not what I mean about different lives; I mean when we think about having a realistic life, just not the one we have. It seems like everyone I know periodically says something about wishing they had a life that bears little resemblance to the one they're blessed with; they might keep their same loved ones in this other life, but they'd work less, play more, have less stress, more $, live in the country rather than the city, or the city rather than the country, be running marathons instead of being coach potatoes... all stuff that's possible, but that they don't think they can get from where they are.
My husband, for example, has dreams of living out in the country, despite the fact that the 1st time he realized that it'd take a 2-hour round-trip drive to get to an electronics store, a Thai restaurant, or a supermarket that sells blue corn tortilla chips, not to mention that we probably couldn't have DSL or digital cable, he'd be scrambling back to the city... and more to the point, he's far too lazy to do the upkeep work on the acres of land he envisions our home being on, or to care for the farm animals he imagines having.
I'm sure that some people's other-life dreams are similarly bad fits for their personalities, but I'm curious about the rest; if there's another way to live that's attainable by you, or at least mostly so, why not go for it? And; if you had that life, would you be fantasizing about the one you have now? Is it just that humans always think the grass is greener, that we're never satisfied?
All of this came into my mind today while watching an episode of "Twilight Zone," the one where the actor believes himself to be the man whose life he's portraying in a movie; dissatisfied with wealth, fame and a glamorous ex-wife, he longs to be a simple businessman with a regular family, and wills the movie set to become real... and when the wife from the movie shows up, he hustles her out of his "office" before it can change back into a set, vanishing from our reality into the one he's created with his thoughts.
There are several other episodes of "Twilight Zone" that deal with being able to get a very different life; a bored millionaire goes back a few decades to the time of his youth with the help of the devil (played by Julie Newmar!!), a time-travel helmet takes men between a recent time and a while ago, with dissatisfaction all around, and a harassed man dreams of a simpler time and a town called Willoughby that doesn't actually exist, but that he reaches anyways when... well, I won't give it away, as that one's too good to not see it without knowing the kicker. Interesting, isn't it, how the earlier, simpler time seems to be the goal more often than not? Is there something in us that rebels against our ever more complicated, mechanized, computerized lives, which we're not remotely biologically programmed to live, or is it just that life in the past was different than life now?
Are we too far from our true nature... or just a contrary species... or both?
We all fantasize about being rich, famous, sexually irresistible, etc, but that's not what I mean about different lives; I mean when we think about having a realistic life, just not the one we have. It seems like everyone I know periodically says something about wishing they had a life that bears little resemblance to the one they're blessed with; they might keep their same loved ones in this other life, but they'd work less, play more, have less stress, more $, live in the country rather than the city, or the city rather than the country, be running marathons instead of being coach potatoes... all stuff that's possible, but that they don't think they can get from where they are.
My husband, for example, has dreams of living out in the country, despite the fact that the 1st time he realized that it'd take a 2-hour round-trip drive to get to an electronics store, a Thai restaurant, or a supermarket that sells blue corn tortilla chips, not to mention that we probably couldn't have DSL or digital cable, he'd be scrambling back to the city... and more to the point, he's far too lazy to do the upkeep work on the acres of land he envisions our home being on, or to care for the farm animals he imagines having.
I'm sure that some people's other-life dreams are similarly bad fits for their personalities, but I'm curious about the rest; if there's another way to live that's attainable by you, or at least mostly so, why not go for it? And; if you had that life, would you be fantasizing about the one you have now? Is it just that humans always think the grass is greener, that we're never satisfied?
All of this came into my mind today while watching an episode of "Twilight Zone," the one where the actor believes himself to be the man whose life he's portraying in a movie; dissatisfied with wealth, fame and a glamorous ex-wife, he longs to be a simple businessman with a regular family, and wills the movie set to become real... and when the wife from the movie shows up, he hustles her out of his "office" before it can change back into a set, vanishing from our reality into the one he's created with his thoughts.
There are several other episodes of "Twilight Zone" that deal with being able to get a very different life; a bored millionaire goes back a few decades to the time of his youth with the help of the devil (played by Julie Newmar!!), a time-travel helmet takes men between a recent time and a while ago, with dissatisfaction all around, and a harassed man dreams of a simpler time and a town called Willoughby that doesn't actually exist, but that he reaches anyways when... well, I won't give it away, as that one's too good to not see it without knowing the kicker. Interesting, isn't it, how the earlier, simpler time seems to be the goal more often than not? Is there something in us that rebels against our ever more complicated, mechanized, computerized lives, which we're not remotely biologically programmed to live, or is it just that life in the past was different than life now?
Are we too far from our true nature... or just a contrary species... or both?
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Medical surprises from Discover
You've probably read many times that there's no such thing as an aphrodisiac, that people who think that consuming a given thing boosts their libidos are just experiencing the placebo effect or wishful thinking, that all the things that people have believed for centuries were having an effect were just the result of thousands of people fooling themselves... and now, from the June 2005 issue of Discover, page 11, comes the following:
"Oysters do boost the libido, say U.S. and Italian chemists. They find the shellfish are rich in rare amino acids that, especially when eaten raw, trigger an increase in sex hormones."
Just watch, it's only a matter of time before other supposed aphrodisiacs are also found to contain something that boosts libido; this is yet another case of the arrogance of scientists who figure that if they haven't found proof that something works yet, it in fact doesn't work, no matter how many people say otherwise from personal experience.
The BIG surprise in this issue was from an article entitled "Discover Dialogue: Physician Nortin Hadler, The Doctor Who Doesn't Check His Cholesterol":
"For three decades Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been rigorously examining statistics generated by his medical colleagues' practices and arriving at startling conclusions about their effectiveness... He has also taken on heart treatment, testifying before Congress and the Social Security Advisory Board and publishing papers arguing that very little data back up the value of modern treatments like bypass surgery and angioplasty."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! These VERY serious medical procedures, which we've been led to believe are not only beneficial but necessary, are being done withOUT there being all sorts of proof that they do what we think they do? :-O
When the interviewer asks him, "Under what circumstances do you think bypass surgery is appropriate?," his reply is:
"None... there's only one subset of the population that's been proved to derive a meaningful benefit from the surgery, and that's people with a critical defect of the left main coronary artery who also have angina. If you take 100 60-year-old men with angina, only 3 of them will have that defect."
Alot more than 3% of those men are being given the surgery, though... major, MAJOR surgery, when there's almost no chance of it helping them. That's absolutely terrifying.
What about the many people who've had the surgery who claim it's helped them? Hold onto your hats:
"In one controlled trial of surgery for angina, half the people with the condition underwent an operation in which doctors merely made a skin incision and closed it up; in the other half, the patients had a particular kind of bypass. The numbers from each group whose symptoms were significantly alleviated were about the same. Angina is particularly susceptible to the placebo effect because the anticipation of pain adds to the intermittency of it."
Is it just me, or does this seem INSANE? Why have I never heard this before, why didn't they scream loud enough for every one of us to hear that the surgery didn't do any more than a placebo? And it gets worse:
"Even if surgery could be proved to alleviate the discomfort, you'd have to consider if that offsets the risks of bypass surgery-about half the patients suffer severe depression after the surgery, a third suffer measurable memory loss, and many never go back to work again. Then there are the added risks of any major surgery."
Given all of this, why are they still doing these surgeries at all, much less as a standard treatment? WHY?
And guess what else is apparently a waste of time? When asked, "why do you object to the widespread prescription of statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs?," he replied:
"In men with normal cholesterol levels, the risk of death for those between ages 45 and 65 over the course of the next five years is only a fraction of 1 percent lower than it is for men with high serum cholesterol in the same category. The most thorough study to date had some 3,000 men with 'high' cholesterol levels take a statin every day for five years, while 3,000 similar men took a placebo. When all was said and done, there was no difference in cardiovascular deaths between the two groups."
No difference. We've been whipped into a frenzy about our cholesterol levels, good cholesterol, bad, HDL, LDL, the whole 9 yards, for many years now, and... no difference. This ties in with something I've read several times; that high cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease, that there's never been any actual proof that it does.
Still, they prescribe like mad, and again we have to ask; why? Heinlein used to say that the answer to "Why do they?" is almost always "Money"; when Dr. Hadler was asked, "If the data are not prompting so much interventional cardiology, what is?," he answered:
"Money. Interventional cardiology is what supports almost every hospital in America-it's an enormous part of our gross domestic product. Every year in this country we do about half a million bypass grafts and 650,000 coronary angioplasties, with the mean cost of the procedures ranging from $28,000 to $60,000. There are a lot of people involved in this transfer of wealth. But no Western European nation has such a high rate of those procedures-and their longevity is higher than ours."
Greedy doctors, greedy hospitals... that's the one thing about all this that's NOT a surprise.
"Oysters do boost the libido, say U.S. and Italian chemists. They find the shellfish are rich in rare amino acids that, especially when eaten raw, trigger an increase in sex hormones."
Just watch, it's only a matter of time before other supposed aphrodisiacs are also found to contain something that boosts libido; this is yet another case of the arrogance of scientists who figure that if they haven't found proof that something works yet, it in fact doesn't work, no matter how many people say otherwise from personal experience.
The BIG surprise in this issue was from an article entitled "Discover Dialogue: Physician Nortin Hadler, The Doctor Who Doesn't Check His Cholesterol":
"For three decades Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been rigorously examining statistics generated by his medical colleagues' practices and arriving at startling conclusions about their effectiveness... He has also taken on heart treatment, testifying before Congress and the Social Security Advisory Board and publishing papers arguing that very little data back up the value of modern treatments like bypass surgery and angioplasty."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! These VERY serious medical procedures, which we've been led to believe are not only beneficial but necessary, are being done withOUT there being all sorts of proof that they do what we think they do? :-O
When the interviewer asks him, "Under what circumstances do you think bypass surgery is appropriate?," his reply is:
"None... there's only one subset of the population that's been proved to derive a meaningful benefit from the surgery, and that's people with a critical defect of the left main coronary artery who also have angina. If you take 100 60-year-old men with angina, only 3 of them will have that defect."
Alot more than 3% of those men are being given the surgery, though... major, MAJOR surgery, when there's almost no chance of it helping them. That's absolutely terrifying.
What about the many people who've had the surgery who claim it's helped them? Hold onto your hats:
"In one controlled trial of surgery for angina, half the people with the condition underwent an operation in which doctors merely made a skin incision and closed it up; in the other half, the patients had a particular kind of bypass. The numbers from each group whose symptoms were significantly alleviated were about the same. Angina is particularly susceptible to the placebo effect because the anticipation of pain adds to the intermittency of it."
Is it just me, or does this seem INSANE? Why have I never heard this before, why didn't they scream loud enough for every one of us to hear that the surgery didn't do any more than a placebo? And it gets worse:
"Even if surgery could be proved to alleviate the discomfort, you'd have to consider if that offsets the risks of bypass surgery-about half the patients suffer severe depression after the surgery, a third suffer measurable memory loss, and many never go back to work again. Then there are the added risks of any major surgery."
Given all of this, why are they still doing these surgeries at all, much less as a standard treatment? WHY?
And guess what else is apparently a waste of time? When asked, "why do you object to the widespread prescription of statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs?," he replied:
"In men with normal cholesterol levels, the risk of death for those between ages 45 and 65 over the course of the next five years is only a fraction of 1 percent lower than it is for men with high serum cholesterol in the same category. The most thorough study to date had some 3,000 men with 'high' cholesterol levels take a statin every day for five years, while 3,000 similar men took a placebo. When all was said and done, there was no difference in cardiovascular deaths between the two groups."
No difference. We've been whipped into a frenzy about our cholesterol levels, good cholesterol, bad, HDL, LDL, the whole 9 yards, for many years now, and... no difference. This ties in with something I've read several times; that high cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease, that there's never been any actual proof that it does.
Still, they prescribe like mad, and again we have to ask; why? Heinlein used to say that the answer to "Why do they?" is almost always "Money"; when Dr. Hadler was asked, "If the data are not prompting so much interventional cardiology, what is?," he answered:
"Money. Interventional cardiology is what supports almost every hospital in America-it's an enormous part of our gross domestic product. Every year in this country we do about half a million bypass grafts and 650,000 coronary angioplasties, with the mean cost of the procedures ranging from $28,000 to $60,000. There are a lot of people involved in this transfer of wealth. But no Western European nation has such a high rate of those procedures-and their longevity is higher than ours."
Greedy doctors, greedy hospitals... that's the one thing about all this that's NOT a surprise.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Odds and ends
And now we've reached the part of our program where I disgorge bits and pieces that are worth a mention but not complex enough to merit a full post:
First and foremost: my squirrel came back!!!! My husband spotted her and called me; by the time I got there, she'd scampered most of the way to a tree (she doesn't like him very much, and will sometimes run if she sees or hears him), but I saw enough to know it was her and not one of the babies (who are smaller and much slimmer), so I know she's alive and in good condition... she couldn't run and climb like that if she wasn't. I don't know if she's only going to visit sporadically, or if she's lost her tameness, or what else might be up, but as long as she's still here that's enough for now.
There's a show on Oxygen called "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson"; Ms. Johanson is a somewhat elderly woman... and isn't that what you expected? After all, what other kind of person could do a sex-talk show? An older MAN would be seen as a dirty old man. A younger man would put off men because of the idea of homosexuality, and put off women because of discomfort with sharing with a man, and suspicion of his motives. A younger woman would be someone that women feel competitive with and men want to impress rather than confide in. Is it a coincidence that the most famous sex therapist of all times, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a wizened little gnome of a woman?
And finally, a tidbit from Joel Osteen: In a past sermon, he talked about how God "can't" do good things for you if you're holding on to the hurt and pain of bad things that happened to you in the past (see my post of 8-16-04); tonight, he said that if you feel jealousy of, or even fail to feel happiness for, those people who seem to be getting all the goodies (even if undeservedly), God "can't" give you what you want... again, we have from him the karmic idea that radiating negative energy of ANY kind blocks good things from getting to you (and of course can bring the bad ones), and that radiating positive energy draws good stuff to you-kinda cool from a minister, don't you think?
First and foremost: my squirrel came back!!!! My husband spotted her and called me; by the time I got there, she'd scampered most of the way to a tree (she doesn't like him very much, and will sometimes run if she sees or hears him), but I saw enough to know it was her and not one of the babies (who are smaller and much slimmer), so I know she's alive and in good condition... she couldn't run and climb like that if she wasn't. I don't know if she's only going to visit sporadically, or if she's lost her tameness, or what else might be up, but as long as she's still here that's enough for now.
There's a show on Oxygen called "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson"; Ms. Johanson is a somewhat elderly woman... and isn't that what you expected? After all, what other kind of person could do a sex-talk show? An older MAN would be seen as a dirty old man. A younger man would put off men because of the idea of homosexuality, and put off women because of discomfort with sharing with a man, and suspicion of his motives. A younger woman would be someone that women feel competitive with and men want to impress rather than confide in. Is it a coincidence that the most famous sex therapist of all times, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, is a wizened little gnome of a woman?
And finally, a tidbit from Joel Osteen: In a past sermon, he talked about how God "can't" do good things for you if you're holding on to the hurt and pain of bad things that happened to you in the past (see my post of 8-16-04); tonight, he said that if you feel jealousy of, or even fail to feel happiness for, those people who seem to be getting all the goodies (even if undeservedly), God "can't" give you what you want... again, we have from him the karmic idea that radiating negative energy of ANY kind blocks good things from getting to you (and of course can bring the bad ones), and that radiating positive energy draws good stuff to you-kinda cool from a minister, don't you think?
Sunday, June 12, 2005
"Embrace Diversity"
You've probably noticed a little something new in my upper right corner; I saw one like it, but with a different message, on someone's blog, followed the link to where you can get the so-called "webbands" of different kinds
http://openmind.clemish.com/webbands.php
and chose the one that I thought both looked the best with my minimalist decor and had the message I liked the best. I enjoy the thought of such a positive message being one of the 1st things a visitor to my blog will notice, and it'll give people who're surfing via "Next Blog" a little pause... especially since it overlaps that button and keeps it from being usable, lol.
Believe it or not, I don't have a story about how I struggled to get it to work; I copied the code as directed, and it worked perfectly the 1st time... who said miracles don't happen? ;-)
One of the greatest things about America is the access most of us have to diversity; it's also one of the best things about the internet. It's always amazed me when people fight AGAINST diversity; women who complain when men don't act according to female standards, men who do the same with women, people of every religion who can't stand it if someone worships a different deity (or none), or even worships the same deity in a different way, people who think that a trivial thing like skin color is so important that they'll hate people of a different color, people who think that anyone whose ancestors didn't live on the same patch of dirt that theirs did is to be disliked and distrusted, and, perhaps most astonishing, people who can't bear the thought that what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms might be different than what they do... what possible justification, moral, ethical or even intellectual, can there possibly be for having any of these attitudes?
Diversity doesn't just mean differences in big things like religion or race; it also means being different in the little details of our lives. I think one of the reasons that people from other countries see Americans as childish is that as a culture we're mired in the teenage idea that we're all supposed to be alike; if someone wears different clothes, or styles their hair a different way, than the current fashion, we gossip and snicker as much as any high school student ever did. Once a new gadget becomes popular, anyone who doesn't have it is looked at askance, as if they didn't really belong in our society; as someone who refuses to get a cell phone, I can tell you that people act as if their lives can't roll smoothly on if I don't do everything they're doing... again, a totally teenage attitude. Embracing diversity applies at this level, too; it means letting people live their own lives, without taking it personally if they make different choices, and, and here's the kicker, realizing that unless some people dare to be different, new ideas will have a hard time making it into the public consciousness... and every advance we make, whether in art, science, politics or whatever, starts with a new and different idea, put forth by someone who's a little different than the rest of us.
What a bland, boring world this would be if we were all alike, or even if we were significantly more alike than we currently are. Diversity gives us many kinds of food, art, dance, music and other products of different cultures and experiences. Diversity gives us more paths to science, philosophy and spirituality. Diversity gives us an infinite # of different ways to be beautiful. Diversity is absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly a GOOD thing, and therefore we SHOULD embrace it as the enhancement to our lives that it truly is.
http://openmind.clemish.com/webbands.php
and chose the one that I thought both looked the best with my minimalist decor and had the message I liked the best. I enjoy the thought of such a positive message being one of the 1st things a visitor to my blog will notice, and it'll give people who're surfing via "Next Blog" a little pause... especially since it overlaps that button and keeps it from being usable, lol.
Believe it or not, I don't have a story about how I struggled to get it to work; I copied the code as directed, and it worked perfectly the 1st time... who said miracles don't happen? ;-)
One of the greatest things about America is the access most of us have to diversity; it's also one of the best things about the internet. It's always amazed me when people fight AGAINST diversity; women who complain when men don't act according to female standards, men who do the same with women, people of every religion who can't stand it if someone worships a different deity (or none), or even worships the same deity in a different way, people who think that a trivial thing like skin color is so important that they'll hate people of a different color, people who think that anyone whose ancestors didn't live on the same patch of dirt that theirs did is to be disliked and distrusted, and, perhaps most astonishing, people who can't bear the thought that what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms might be different than what they do... what possible justification, moral, ethical or even intellectual, can there possibly be for having any of these attitudes?
Diversity doesn't just mean differences in big things like religion or race; it also means being different in the little details of our lives. I think one of the reasons that people from other countries see Americans as childish is that as a culture we're mired in the teenage idea that we're all supposed to be alike; if someone wears different clothes, or styles their hair a different way, than the current fashion, we gossip and snicker as much as any high school student ever did. Once a new gadget becomes popular, anyone who doesn't have it is looked at askance, as if they didn't really belong in our society; as someone who refuses to get a cell phone, I can tell you that people act as if their lives can't roll smoothly on if I don't do everything they're doing... again, a totally teenage attitude. Embracing diversity applies at this level, too; it means letting people live their own lives, without taking it personally if they make different choices, and, and here's the kicker, realizing that unless some people dare to be different, new ideas will have a hard time making it into the public consciousness... and every advance we make, whether in art, science, politics or whatever, starts with a new and different idea, put forth by someone who's a little different than the rest of us.
What a bland, boring world this would be if we were all alike, or even if we were significantly more alike than we currently are. Diversity gives us many kinds of food, art, dance, music and other products of different cultures and experiences. Diversity gives us more paths to science, philosophy and spirituality. Diversity gives us an infinite # of different ways to be beautiful. Diversity is absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly a GOOD thing, and therefore we SHOULD embrace it as the enhancement to our lives that it truly is.
