"of course I condemn....yada yada yada, la la la, look over there......oh yeah, war is bad kumbahyah...

For the umpteenth time, yes, he did.

ummm

Yes, but fat people are ugly. Smokers look cool.

At least for the first ten to fifteen years they smoke, and then not so cool.

Against my better judgment, sanity, and the interests of my billable hours, I went and read the link.

Ty -- while I may agree with you about the Repub penchant for attacking and blaming and finger-pointing -- essentially, fighting their political opponents rather than fighting the country's military opponents -- I cannot agree with you on Dingell. His statement was anemic, to say the least. I confess to having skimmed over the loooooong part, but if there is something in there that identifies Hezbollah as the terrorist, the aggressor, the bastards who use Lebanese as human shields, you haven't identified it. The rest of his statement did cast Israel and Hezbollah as equally at fault, and equally bad actors.

One reason I've been so acid-filled in these Israel discussions is my concern that my brethren on the left do just this. Let us never forget who the terrorists here are.

And, let us never forget that our country suffers when people refuse to criticize members of their own party. See, e.g., Iraq.

Yes, but old people are ugly anyway, so who cares?

Damn you! Or damn the fact I wasn't on here for like a whole 5 min and didn't beat you to it.

Went for a snack?

I nominate Sidd for most improved player of the year. Seconds?

No. Did that earlier. Didn't miss much. Had an Actual Work-Related Discussion with someone.

Second, subject to striking the last paragraph.

Also, you're confusing medicine with public health. Public health is about treating populations and finding out what causes disease so it can be avoided. Epidemeology, the field of study that you've ranted the most against, is a public health discipline. It's the reason we drink clean water. It's the reason we pinpointed the HIV virus as a sexually transmitted disease. It's the way we track Avian flu.

Medicine is about treating individuals. It is completely anecdotal in nature, and it depends almost entirely on the individual patient. If you flip through a medical journal, say JAMA or the New England Journal, you'll find a lot of case studies and randomized trials. (This week, it's all HIV all the time, because of the AIDS conference.) If you show up at grand rounds in any teaching hosptial, usually the presentations are on various individual cases. Drug and other interventional trails are also based on randomized reports of individual cases. When the results of an intervention start to a) be beneficial and b) generate the same results in different patients with the same disease, the intervention is adopted as the standard treatment.

In some respects, public health is an attempt to avoid having to resort to medicine. The goal of public health is to keep the population healthy so that medicine is not needed. Once you get sick, the public health part is irrelevant (except, of course, you're now a data point for future public health research) and the medicine part kicks in. Your doctor isn't worried about what got you there; they're worried about how to fix you. He or she is going to tell you about what's going on with you personally and he or she is going to make treatment and diagnosis decisions based on your individual history (including family history, social history, lifestyle and your physical condition (height, weight, blood tests, x-rays, CT scans, and any other diagostic tools that he or she uses in his or her practice)).

So your rant is against public health, not medicine. I, for one, am a fan of John Snow, and I vaguely subscribe to the germ theory of disease. Your milage may differ.

Just for Fun
 

For all of my leftwing liberal secular humanist morally relativistic G-d hating pals here, I have a neat worktime diversion:


Atheist Hangman

Enjoy, and don't say I never gave you anything.

http://www.atheistsunited.org/multim.../hangman_6.gif

Bullshit he did.

"Dingell's full statement: "No, I happen to be -- I happen to be against violence, I think the United States has to bring resolution to this matter. Now, I condemn Hezbollah as does everybody else, for the violence."

Dingell said he was pointing out that if the United States is to be an honest broker in the Middle East, it must talk to both sides."

Why do you conservatives hate Democrats? When we're trying to fight a war on terrorists, why do you keep trying to divide us?

United we stand.

Then they stop smoking and get fat.