• The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America By Richard C. Young
• Lipitor—Junk Science Math By Richard C. Young
• State of Your State Update By E.J. Smith
• Dave Hammer’s Rock Around the Clock By Richard C. Young
• Summer Reading: Winston Churchill and His Generals By Debbie Young
• Millennials’ Attitudes on War By Richard C. Young
• Military to use Hollow Points By E.J. Smith
• Blowhards Don’t Wear Well By Debbie Young
• A Voice from the Past By Richard C. Young

In 2006, Pat Buchanan cited researcher Heather Mac Donald of Manhattan Institute on fugitive felony warrants in Los Angeles. Here Pat writes about Donald Trump’s views on illegal immigration concluding, “Americans are fed up with words; they want action. Trump is moving in the polls because, whatever else he may be, he is a man of action.”

Pat writes:

What Trump has done, and Cruz sees it, is to have elevated the illegal immigration issue, taken a tough line, and is now attacking GOP rivals who have dithered or done nothing to deal with it.

Trump intends to exploit the illegal immigration issue, and the trade issue, where majorities of middle-class Americans oppose the elites. And he is going to ride them as far as he can in the Republican primaries.

In the coming debates, look for Trump to take the populist and popular side of them both. And for Cruz to stand by him on illegal immigration.

 

Shane Ellison, M.Sc., “The Peoples Chemist,” explains in an email (copied below) the difference between relative and absolute risk. As Shane writes, “Statistical contortionism is the art of converting healthy people into patients by using numbers to exaggerate drug benefits. Lipitor is a prime example.”

The message is simple. Never pay any attention to relative risk. You know, the sort of wording that tells you to lower your risk of heart attack by X percent. Instead you want to know the absolute number. You want to know from a specific study the number of patients that benefited as a percent of the total number in any test.

In Shane’s example the worthless and promoted relative number is 36%, while the vital absolute number is a tiny 1%.

When you are considering the value of any specific drug and drug study, ask your doctor to provide you with the number needed to treat (NNT). This will allow you to find out exactly how many patients must be given a specific drug to prevent a specific negative event (heart attack, etc.). By example, the NNT involved in prescribing aspirin to get rid of a headache is 1, meaning that every person given an aspirin to moderate a headache can expect to benefit. I see statin drug studies where the NNT is 100 or even 200 and higher. Here is a post I put up previously on the arithmetic of statin drugs. My original reference source was Business Week.

Shane writes:

Statistical contortionism is the art of converting healthy people into patients by using numbers to exaggerate drug benefits.  Lipitor is a prime example.  Drug companies and physicians use “relative risk reduction” while ignoring the “absolute risk reduction” in order to promote Lipitor use to a wider audience. This practice of statistical contortionism is akin to hiding evidence because it exaggerates benefits.  See for yourself.

Lipitor promoters insist that those with so-called high cholesterol can achieve a 36% “relative risk reduction” in heart attack by using the cholesterol-lowering drug.  The contortionists ignore that the same raw data can yield a more revealing “absolute risk reduction” of a paltry 1%.  Using absolute risk reduction is more accurate because it compares the actual difference between the treated and untreated groups.  Unfortunately, it is not good for increasing sales.

That Lipitor does not prevent heart attack is a death-blow to promoters.  It goes virtually unnoticed because they push the absolute risk reduction under the drug-rug while magnifying relative risk reduction.  This type of advertising disguised as science is the most dangerous trend in journalism today.  It promotes drug use among healthy populations who are needlessly putting themselves at risk for adverse effects of Lipitor like cancer and heart failure.

I’ve relied on the outstanding research of the Mercatus Center for my work on public pensions, especially Eileen Norcross. Here you get the Center’s latest work led by Eileen on the states. How does yours stack up?

Here my friend Dave Hammer calls out the name Danny Cedrone midway through Dave’s take on the song that kicked off Rock & Roll, Rock Around The Clock. July 9 will be the 60th anniversary of the wildly successful re-release of Rock Around The Clock. The re-release came after the song found an audience in the movie Blackboard Jungle.

Danny Cedrone previously worked as a session musician with Bill Haley and His Comets before he was called into a three-hour recording session on 12 April 1954. Late in the session, Haley and His Comets, with Cedrone on lead Gibson ES-300 guitar, knocked out the song that would change the American popular music landscape forever.

Cedrone’s memorable guitar solo was a retake of his lead in Rock the Joint recorded with Bill Haley back in 1952. Danny Cedrone died from a fall less than a month after he was paid just $21 to record one of the most memorable guitar solos in Rock & Roll history.

In a harrowing story describing the agonizing days of WWII, Martin Rubin writes that no matter how many books you’ve read on Winston Churchill and his relationship with his generals, you will want to read Churchill and The Generals: 1939-45. Well-known British historian Mike Lepine has written an informative, concise, lively account that make the characters “sparkle as they seem to leap off the pages.”

Mr. Churchill “emerges magnificent in his qualities and in his contradictions, a very human character who could also seem almost superhuman in his resilience, fortitude and indomitable courage.”

In thumbnail portraits of nine British and two American generals, Mr. Lepine gives “masterpieces of concision” and information. He also peppers the account with well-known Churchill quips. On Montgomery: “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.”

According to Mr. Rubin’s review, the one thing missing from Mr. Lepine’s book is a portrait of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, which elicited one of Churchill’s perhaps most memorable and heartfelt quips: “The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine.”

Read more from Martin Rubin on Churchill and The Generals: 1939-45 here.

Related video:

The Cato Institute gives a good look to “The Next Generation’s Attitudes toward Foreign Policy And War.” A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner highlight the following:

The Millennial Generation, those roughly 87 million adult men and women born between 1980 and 1997, now represent one-quarter of the U.S. population, outnumbering the Greatest Generation (1913-1924), the Silent Generation (1925-1945), the Baby Boomers (1946- 1964), and Generation Xers (1965-1979).

The rise of the Millennial Generation portends significant changes in public expectations and increased support for a more restrained grand strategy.

Millennials liberalness may stem in large part from their coming of age under Bill Clinton (a popular Democratic president) and George W. Bush (an unpopular Republican president).

Millennials have set aside television and print media as news sources, increasingly looking to the Internet for their news.

Future wars that are judged to be “like Iraq” are likely to suffer lower levels of support, given the general consensus among Millennials that Iraq represents a mistake and was not worth fighting.

It’s about time.

Bob Owens writes at Bearingarms.com:

In a significant doctrinal shift, the U.S. military is relegating full metal jacketed (FMJ) pistol bullets to a training role, and will be adopting modern hollowpoint designs similar to those used by most domestic law enforcement agencies and citizens who carry handguns for self-defense.

The stunning announcement was made at the U.S Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey yesterday during the military’s two-day “industry day” for the Modular Handgun System (MHS), which will conclude today.

A military lawyer who made a presentation during the Industry Day noted that the United States is not a signatory to the Hague Conventions which outlawed the use of “dum-dum” and expanding bullets more than a century ago. It is the military’s position that the shift to jacketed hollowpoint (JHP) ammunition, which more efficiently transfers energy to the target and which presents much less of a risk of over-penetration, is more humane and less of a risk to innocent civilians downrange in modern combat where there are often no clear front lines.

“Does Donald Trump ruin the Republican brand,” asks Peggy Noonan in the WSJ. Well he certainly enjoys disparaging them and highlighting their weaknesses, while setting himself apart from Republican contenders.

But Donald does have a real following, and not just among Republicans. In what Ms. Noonan describes as “anecdotal,” here is what several people said to Peggy about why they like Trump:

They think he’s real, that he’s under nobody’s thumb, that maybe he’s a big-mouth but he’s a truth-teller. He’s afraid of no one, he’s not politically correct. He’s rich and can’t be bought by some billionaire, because he is the billionaire. He’s talking about what people are thinking and don’t feel free to say. He can turn the economy around because he made a lot of money, so he probably knows how to make jobs.

On Mexico and immigration, did Trump say, as crude as it was, what a lot of people are afraid to say, especially in the wake of the San Fran murder of a young women by an illegal-alien felon who had been deported five times? Illegal immigration is a calamity, says Ms. Noonan. “It is an admission by a nation that it has lost control not only of its borders but of itself. It is no longer functioning as a sovereign nation; it has lost its self-protectiveness and dignity.”

Dick and I just returned from a 10-day Harley trip through the Berkshires, into Vermont, New Hampshire, and over to the coast of Maine. Everywhere we go—whether driving 2,000 miles between Key West and Newport, or visiting tiny villages in New England on our motorcycles—immigrants from all over are working happily and efficiently in service jobs. To me, Ms. Noonan’s comments on NYC’s immigrants seem especially accurate:

We’re all limited by the facts of where we live and what we see, but I live in New York, surrounded by immigrants of all nations, many but by no means all from points south, and they are the hardest-working people in the city. They keep the place up and operating each day. Everyone thinks of them as the good guys—they make nothing worse and a lot of things better. Whether they are legal or illegal, I see how they work and what they do to educate their children and as human beings I honor them.

Peggy Noonan admonishes Mr. Trump, especially since he is a native New Yorker, for not remembering why paddy wagons are named that. “Think of how powerful he’d be if he had a longer memory, or could take tough stands without maligning people. That’s his weakness. Blowhards don’t wear well.” Read more of Ms. Noonan here.

Last night, Debbie and I were having dinner out at a local ocean-front hotel, following our 10-day Harley road trip, featuring several days of ducking nasty weather and one broken-down-bike mishap outside of Portland, ME. All in all, we covered 800 miles riding through five New England states. Near the end of the evening I heard a voice I had not heard in well over a decade. But after spending many years in the 1990s, when Debbie and I first moved to Key West, watching Imus in the Morning, I could not forget the distinctive gravely voice of former New York City Police Department detective Bo Dietl.

Bo had always been one my favorite Imus guests, in part because of Bo’s terrific stories about Rao’s restaurant in East Harlem, New York. You do not just walk into Rao’s or call for a Friday night reservation. You have to own the rights to a table. And Bo Dietel is, as he told us last evening, the proud owner of table number one.

Bo Dietl has served as Security Consultant to the Republican National Convention and as Director of the New York State Republican Convention. Today Bo is the owner of Beau Dietl & Associates Private Investigators in New York.