Things Ampersand is reading today

  • Body and Soul on the unfound WMDs. And, also, Body and Soul on why there isn’t a great left foreign policy columnist in the Times. And Body and Soul’s guest blogger Donald Johnson on how the Times will and won’t publish left voices.
  • A good Mark Kleiman post summarizing why Lott (the gun researcher, not the senator) should no longer be taken seriously by the right.
  • Calpundit points out the obvious: Social Security is not in “crisis.” (He doesn’t point out that the Democrats needlessly gave away ground on this issue for a short-term partisan gain.)
  • Mac Diva asks, “So, why are some liberals willing to believe that Winnie Mandela is a serial killer, but not that Bill Clinton is a rapist who had Vince Foster murdered?” Speaking for myself, I don’t think Winnie Mandela is a serial killer (if she were, it seems likely that the Truth and Reconciliation commission would have said so). On the other hand, although the Vince Foster accusation is nonsense, I do think Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation is pretty credible.
  • Big Fat Blog directs us to this editorial debunking the much-touted “fat causes cancer” study.

    In short, what this study actually found was a negative correlation between increasing weight and cancer mortality for the majority of the 135 million Americans who are currently categorized as overweight or obese, and only a small increase in risk for all but the very fattest people.[…]

    Just as in the war on drugs, the war on fat has reached the point where systematic distortion of the evidence has become the norm, rather than the exception. The strategies employed in these two wars are strikingly similar: Treat the most extreme cases as typical, ignore all contrary data (there are dozens of studies indicating cancer mortality decreases with increasing weight), and recommend “solutions” that actually cause the problems they supposedly address. And, as in all wars, truth ends up being the first casualty.


  • We all know that the official unemployment number leaves out many people – but what would a more truthful figure look like? Wampum has done the work and has the (depressing) answer.

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