4-16-16 Hodgepodge

If You Disagree, You're a Racketeer

The Attorney General of an island possession we should have granted independence long ago has unjustly and improperly used its criminal code as an excuse to subpoena the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Claude Walker, the Blackstone of the Caribbean who leads the assault of the attorneys general, presented a subpoena this week to compel the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington skeptical of the climate scam, to turn over all its documents relating to the Institute's research.

His 14-page subpoena, issued through the District of Columbia's Superior Court, demands the Institute's documents, communications, emails, op-eds, speeches, advertisements, letters to the editor, research, reports, studies and memoranda of any kind -- including drafts -- that refer to climate change, greenhouse gases, carbon tax, climate science and the like that in any way are related to Exxon Mobil or the "products sold by, activities carried out by ExxonMobil that directly or indirectly impact climate change."

Walter is joined by the Attorneys General of a disturbing number of states. All are spurred on no doubt by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), whom Alex Epstein recently called upon to apologize or resign during his recent appearance before the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Weekend Reading

"Does separating finances make for more or less fighting over financial issues in a marriage?" -- Michael Hurd, in "Dividing Finances in a Marriage" at The Delaware Wave

"[It's] better to be psychologically aware of where you stand -- with yourself and with your partner -- than to live in evasion and denial while quietly wondering what could have been." -- Michael Hurd, in "Unhappy With Your Relationship? Try This" at The Delaware Coast Press

"I am reminded of a sign that probably hangs every time college buddies get together to play poker. 'If you can't spot the sucker, it's you.'" -- Keith Weiner, in "Who Lends to the Fed?" at SNB & CHF

"A moral energy policy is one that liberates all the energy technologies, including fossil fuels, nuclear, and large-scale hydro, and lets them compete to the utmost to provide the most affordable, reliable energy for the most people." -- Alex Epstein, in "A Moral Evaluation of the Obama Administration's Energy Policies" at Forbes

"It's obvious why the fixed pie and group pie assumptions about wealth would lead us to view economic inequality with a skeptical eye." -- Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, in "The Two Fundamentally Flawed Assumptions at the Heart of the Inequality Crusade" at Medium

Partial Results Lead to Poor Advice

The Washington Post reports that publication of the preliminary results of a dietary study forty years ago led many to believe that a low-fat diet aimed at cholesterol reduction would lead to fewer deaths due to heart disease. More complete results show otherwise:

Today, the principles of that special diet -- less saturated fat, more vegetable oils -- are recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the government's official diet advice book. Yet the fuller accounting of the Minnesota data indicates that the advice is, at best, unsupported by the massive trial. In fact, it appears to show just the opposite: Patients who lowered their cholesterol, presumably because of the special diet, actually suffered more heart-related deaths than those who did not.

This reminds me of a troubled line of research within the pharmaceutical industry, too.

Update: My unfamiliarity with this line of research is showing: The following, from a Derek Lowe post, both shows what I got wrong and sets the record straight.

... This was in over 9,000 subjects over five years, probably the largest study of its kind ever conducted, and it had only produced one (not very thorough) paper in 1989 that didn’t make much of an impression.

After all, Everyone Knew by that point that saturated fat was bad for you... [bold added]

For more, follow the link.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added correction to last section.