Not a bad job by AI-imagebot given my lengthy prompt
I. A PostScript on Medical Diagnosticism and Math-Mal.1
My favorite story that encapsulates what’s wrong with modern medical diagnosticism comes from a friend’s childhood, circa the mid-1960s. Evidently the family dog was getting on in years and had something wrong with him. No one in the family was quite certain exactly what ailed the dog, so my friend – being like most young boys who love their dogs – finally prevailed upon his dad to incur the certain costs and take the dog to the veterinarian. After the vet’s examination, he didn’t really have any answers beyond ruling out some obvious things. The vet began to go through a list of diagnostic tests he could run to look for this or that disease… and my friend’s clearly skeptical father waited for the doctor to finish and then asked (and I’m paraphrasing badly): “How about tests for conditions that you have a treatment for?” There was a long pause and then the doctor said something to the effect, “I think we’re done here.”2
In other words, a big chunk of the vet’s practice was charging people to do tests that might tell you what was wrong with your dog – or, as we learned in the last chapter, might not, or might give you a false positive or false negative – but in any case, the test wouldn’t change a thing for the poor doggoe because the vet had no treatment for the many diseases for which he had tests.
I humbly submit that this constitutes a big chunk of modern medical practice for both humans and pets. Go back and look at the list of 110 medical diagnostic tests from Harvard health’s website: the claim is not about cure, but about saving one from the “anxiety” of “uncertainty.” Western medicine has diagnostics for all manner of things that it can’t even treat, while knowing full well that (a) no diagnostic test has 100% sensitivity or specificity and will therefore produce some number of false positives and false negatives, and (b) 3 out of 4 Haahvaahd doctors can’t even do the math necessary to tell you what the probability is that a positive test means you actually have the disease.
None of this addresses the fact that roughly 80% of the medical problems AND costs currently crushing the US and western health systems is a result of all of the downstream harms that result from chronic disease, specifically from people’s overconsumption of refined carbohydrates – particularly the liquid ones – and a dearth of vigorous exercise. Diet and exercise is what needs to be fixed, but that don’t sell no pharmakoeia, nor make the stock price go up, nor pay back medical school debt, so… here we are.3 We have unsustainable rates of: obesity in children, Type 2 diabetes in children, autism in children, and (not coincidentally) a “study” system of “science” based upon frequentist statistics that hides and obfuscates all of it. As CrossFit, Inc.’s second CEO, Jeff Cain, once quipped: “We don’t have a healthcare system, we have a disease economy… and an outbreak of fitness and wellness could collapse the whole thing.”
II. Sally Clark Meets “What-Are-the-Odds-ism” in Law.
Sally Clark (née Locker) was the only daughter of a distinguished police officer in the Wiltshire Constabulary. She married solicitor Steve Clark in 1990.4 After marriage to Steve, Sally took up the profession herself, completing law school and training at Macfarlanes, a firm in London. By 1994, the couple worked at a firm in Manchester and purchased a house in Wilmslow. They had a baby, Christopher, born on September 22, 1996.
Tragedy struck ~12 weeks later on December 13. Sally Clark noticed something wasn’t right after she put the baby to bed; Steve was at an office party at the time. The infant lost consciousness, prompting an hysterical Sally to call emergency services. The baby was rushed to the hospital via ambulance, but pronounced dead not long after arrival. A post-mortem examination deemed Christopher’s to be the result of a lower respiratory tract infection and likely “SIDS” (to Americans) – “cot death” to British.
Like many women and/or couples who either miscarry or lose an infant, the Clarks decided that “the best bereavement therapy was another baby.”5 Baby Harry was born several weeks premature. Eight weeks after his birth, he collapsed in his high chair and died.
In light of this second death, law enforcement and their associated medical experts conducted a “re-review” of their previous work on Christopher, decided that Harry’s death was the result of “shaken baby” syndrome, reinterpreted some of their prior findings, and then began criminal processes against the Clarks, focusing on Sally.
Some prefatory remarks regarding the case of Sally Clark and her two infant sons are in order.
III. If You Won’t Offer It to Your Enemy, It’s Not a Right.
What do I mean? Until you have been on the wrong end of a serious civil or criminal accusation and had to stand against all of the machinery that the State can bring to bear down upon you, any opinion on how guilt or innocence gets doled out is woefully under-informed. Notwithstanding how wonderfully DAs and cops are portrayed by Dick Wolfe in “Law and Order” spinoffs or other police procedural TV-shows, the criminal justice system is not, I am sorry to say, staffed by saintly public servants who care only for Justice, meted out free of any personal biases or political concerns. As I noted in a previous piece, government forensic labs alone are a never-ending source of later-overturned convictions because of all manner of scientific misconduct and fuckery,6 without even accounting for testilying by police or undercover informants, or simple human error in the acquisition, storage, processing, and analysis of evidence.
When I was a more senior, supervising attorney within the Marine Corps’ defense bar structure, and my daughters were old enough to ask pointed questions, the “how do you defend guilty people?” question got dropped while driving somewhere. The answer has not changed in 25 years: Defending guilty people is easy. You give them the best possible defense you can within the bounds of the law and, if at the end of the trial they’re convicted, you can sleep well knowing (a) that you’ve done your best for them, and (b) that the system worked as intended… i.e. a guilty person is going to jail. Defending innocent people, however, is really hard. What if it turns out you’re not even a good enough attorney to get an innocent man acquitted? And how do you sleep comfortably – or look yourself in the mirror each morning – knowing that an innocent person is now sitting in prison?
No society that wants to call itself Just can survive for long with a justice system that routinely and/or randomly convicts innocent people. If you can be snatched out of your bed on a whim and incarcerated with no opportunity to defend yourself then there is no security and we’re not far from “public safety committees” of masked vigilantes. The Anglo-American legal system is predicated upon the plausible reasoning mechanism baked into all of us, and the system sets the boundaries on some types evidence and what may be inferred from the evidence upon those same considerations (by other names). In the modern world, this includes scientific evidence, which brings us back around to Sally Clark’s case and how the doctors and lawyers walked right into the Prosecutor’s Fallacy.
IV. The Prosecutor’s Fallacy…?
In PR 8, we spent time going over conditional probability as it relates to medical diagnostic tests and what the results actually mean, using Bayes’ Theorem to ensure that our doctor isn’t telling us we’re going to die when, in fact, we have a very low probability of having the disease, even if we tested positive for it, because of the low prevalence of the disease in the population. At the heart of the Prosecutor’s Fallacy is the simple, yet utterly-seductive-because-it-is-sometimes-right-in-specific-classes serpent of errors known as the transposed conditional: it is confusing the Pr (A | B) with the Pr (B | A) and thinking they’re the same. This seems silly when written this way, but it is as simple as mistaking the values of these two statements: “The probability that it’s raining if there are clouds in the sky” for “The probability that there are clouds in the sky if it’s raining.” In the first statement, you get many cloudy days where it doesn’t actually rain, however, in the second statement statement, it’s a very different result: on days where it’s raining, you have clouds virtually every time (allowing for the odd sun shower where you can’t see the cloud that produces the moisture).7 The point here is that depending upon the relationship of the specific A and B, it can seem quite reasonable to treat one probability, Pr (A|B), like the other, Pr (B|A), or to confuse what each of these probabilities means – and how their probabilities are not absolute values, but always relative to other evidence present in the case.
V. Fallacies All the Way Down
A (seemingly) Bayesian analysis of the problems with the Crown’s statistics has already been done in many places on the internet, but I’m going to take the time to pick on one here from Cornell, not for any particular flaw, but because I think I think this kind of analysis, while seemingly well-intended, misses the point – and indeed even helps perpetuate a deeper error. The problem is that equations seem to exert a kind of magical thrall over the human mind and very quickly transform from being useful rubrics for understanding conditional probability into sacred oracles declaring innocence or guilt by percentage points.
Let me be clear up front: there is no such thing in the world as “the probability of [anyone’s] innocence.” That is a mental construct, a model, and it (perhaps unintentionally) buries reality by overgeneralizing what actually happened in the Sally Clark case, and actually happens in any case. Anyone thinking or purporting to be able to frame the complexities and interplay between the various pieces of evidence in a trial in an equation is engaged in criminal oversimplification or a bad case of reification – of thinking that probability is ontological – that it inheress in dice or coins or nature.
Let me explain: during any trial, some evidence is not disputed by either side. Events occurred in the past and are fixed – two infant boys roughly 10-12 weeks old died – and in many ways those agreed-upon evidentiary propositions set a baseline frame for all of the other evidence that comes in.8 This is the landscape upon which the competing sides will paint their additional propositions, we can call them A’, B’, C’, D’, etc., which will be contested by the other side and countered by their evidence and witnesses, A”, B”, C”, etc. All of this evidence – these propositions – will have various levels of credibility assigned to them by the jury, and there will be contingent relationships among these propositions. For example, A, A’, and A” may all have plausibility relationships to one another, as well as conditional relevance to other evidence, such as G”, K’, and M, and on and on in a complex web that is held together by all of the narrative rules that govern our experiences and evidentiary rules provided by Her Honor during instructions. Some pieces of evidence/propositions can only be used for certain purposes – impeachment – but not for their underlying ‘truth’. Other pieces include “expert opinion” or “scientific evidence,” which is usually regarding the state of other evidence, itself circumstantial to proving actual “guilt”.
All of THAT can absolutely NOT be reduced to a single-variable equation.
Watch how the Cornell paper’s author – in attempting to use Bayes’ Theorem to “debunk” the Crown’s statistician – becomes increasingly consumed by the equation, and stuffing numbers into it, convinced he’s calculating Sally Clark’s “chances of innocence.”
According to the Confidential Enquiry for Stillbirths and Deaths in Infancy (CESDI, an authoritative and detailed study of deaths of babies in five regions of England between 1993 and 1996), there is about 1 in 1303 [chance of a] baby dying a cot death. The chance is reduced to 1/8500 if the baby lives in a relatively wealthy, nonsmoking family and with a mother over 26, which fits the Clark’s case. The “expert” at the court against Clark assumed there is no link between cot death of siblings by squaring 1/8500. However, the siblings of children died cot death is 10 and 22 times more likely to die in similar way than average kids. The chances of a second cot death in the same family could be between 1 in 60 and 1 in 130.
Therefore, how to calculate the chance that Clark was innocent, which in other words the chance her children died of cot death. The equation is written as the following:
H refers to cot death, and D means the baby death.
As we mentioned, the chance two babied died of cot death could be high as 1/130, and the number 1/73 million the testimony given was impossible. In this case we lower 1/130 to 1/100,000, still a very rare chance that essentially no much different from the impossible 1/73 million. P (D|H), chance of baby died given cot death is 1. A, referring to the alternate hypothesis that the children did not die of cot death (all other possibilities: for example someone else murdered both children, or Sally Clark murdered one of them etc., is equal to . The Home Office statistic gives that fewer than 30 children are murdered by their mother each year in England and Wales where 650,000 are born each year. 30/650,000=0.000046. Since the chance two siblings are murdered is much more rare than single murder, we should use number much smaller than 0.000046, but in this case, we would just overestimate, using 0.0000046—number 10 times smaller. So, the chance Clark is innocent is that
I’m not trying to pick on the author, but he seems to seriously believe that he can calculate the “odds” are that she’s innocent with a formula – this one, specifically.
I’ll say it again for those in the back: there is no “probability of innocence.” This is something that exists entirely in the head of whoever wrote it.
The mistake in reasoning and understanding of the debunker is that notwithstanding his use of Bayes’ equation, he’s still a frequentist philosophically, even while using Bayes’ Theorem. He begins his analysis by citation to an official “enquiry” into cot deaths – “an authoritative and detailed study” – and then asserts that “there is about 1 in 1303 [chance of a] baby dying a cot death. The chance is reduced to 1/8500 if the baby lives in a relatively wealthy, nonsmoking family and with a mother over 26, which fits the Clark’s case.”
It is not “chance” that is causing 1 in 1303 babies to die. The “1 in 1303 babies dies of cot death” is an incidence rate, a frequency is what Jaynes would call it. It is not a causal relationship. Likewise, the fact that the frequency is lower for “relatively wealthy, nonsmoking family with a mother over 26” (the 1/8500 number) is also not acausal relationship. “Chance” isn’t magically “reduced” when women have their 26th birthday, nor when a family’s income reaches a certain median income level. In the same way that die don’t acquire 1-in-6-ness by virtue of a statistician using a limit equation to show that the die will likely asymptote to 1-in-6 over an infinite number of roles under certain assumed conditions.
What the incidence rate suggests scientifically – by inverse correlation – is that there is something about that “> 26 rich family mommy” cohort that is different than (presumably) general populace and that different thing – whatever it is – causes the >26 cohort to have a much lower incidence (or frequency, or prevalence)… but the numbers alone prove nothing at all. You can draw no causal connection, which makes the entire calculation – using prevalence rates to determine Pr (Innocence | Evidence) or Pr (Guilt | Evidence) worse than useless: because the person using these numbers actually believes they’re proving something about the guilt or innocence of the person being considered.
To make this more stark: if being over 26 and wealthy leads to lower frequency of cot death, let us suppose that the same “authoritative study” data also showed the mirror image: being a young (m < 21), poor mother, of certain dark-skinned minority was correlated with much higher incidences of “cot death” – say 1/400, 3 times more likely than the average. Under the Cornell author’s logic and analysis this would necessarily make those mothers… ahem… lessmathematically innocent. But contrariwise, if left-handed, blue-eyed mothers had a much, much lower incidence of cot death – 1 in 30,000, well, I mean, practically a lock to be innocent, right?
X % of those people are correlated with Y% of [bad thing] and are therefore responsible for Y% of [bad thing]. So… if we just got rid of those X% that would remove Y%.
Do you see how seductive frequentists statistics can be, and why frequentist statistics were so closely associated with, and used by, eugenicists like Fisher?
These are all from the “Spurious Correlation Department” or the “Correlation ≠ Causation Department” and that is the sub silentio siren’s song of frequentist statistics and “significance” testing. Sally Clark’s guilt or innocence had – and has – nothing at all to do with the incidence rates of cot deaths among the British public between 1993-1996, nor does her guilt or innocence depend upon her being > 26 and relatively well off. She doesn’t magically become more or less likely to have committed the crime because of patterns that we can see in a dataset, of which she happens to possess some of the same characteristics of the people in that prior “study.”
I’ve been raving throughout these pieces about Polya’s work in helping to provide such a thorough qualitative analysis of various forms of human pattern recognition, but here is where it runs into problems: our pattern recognition systems are so good, but so obscured from our conscious thought processes, that we find correlations even where there are none. We find signal even in noise. Not me, you say?
How long while you’re staring at the floor tile or wallpaper in someone else’s bathroom before you find a human face or other pattern in the splatter?
And that’s why DNA evidence about “1 in many millions chance of the blood type matching some random person” kinds of evidence can be useful, but has not been the boon for prosecutor’s that was envisioned when it first began appearing. DNA testing is much better at ruling out suspects than it is at conclusively proving someone committed a particular crime… but sometimes it does.
Evidence isn’t more or less plausible or persuasive because it comes from an expert or has numbers attached to it; it’s more or less plausible only in the context of all of the other evidence surrounding it. I previously used the example of having “a dead body in your living room” and how the propositions that follow give it context that makes the difference between a grieving family and a murder scene. DNA evidence isn’t a special or magical detection technology and using Bayes’ Theorem doesn’t cure all logical fallacies.
All of which is another way of saying something that Professor Briggs suggested I emphasize and here is a great place for it: all probability is conditional on the evidence used to form it. All propositions and probabilities, A, have some given X, upon which they are contingent and based. Pr (A | X) – always. There is simply no Pr (A | ) with nothing after the | – something is always there.
Final related note: “cot death” or SIDS is the name we give to our ignorance about the cause of some number of otherwise (seemingly) healthy babies being reported tragically dead by their parents soon after death (typically). In Sally Clark’s case, and in others like it, one might wonder if we should consider all possible causes. Sally Clark’s father has the following on the front of the website for his daughter:
The only common factor, which may or may not be relevant, is that both deaths followed shortly after vaccination. [There is research into the possibility that these vaccinations can cause death within a few days if infants have certain genetic defects.]
Huh. Interesting that vaccines are known to have adverse effects on some portion of recipients. Indeed, the entire vaccine injury compensation program in the United States is premised on the manufacturers needing to be afforded special liability protection because of the known adverse effects that will occur as a result of mass inoculation. And yet none of that has ever been mentioned in the context of “Cot death” or SIDS. But of course, the most expertists of experts assure us that SIDS couldn’t possibly be caused by vaccines because… frequentist statistics say so.
Because the last Chapter was running up against the e-mail newsletter publishing limits, I had to leave off a few points that I wanted to close with on medical diagnostics. Instead I’ll append them here and then we’ll continue on with another sample case that I’ve referred to previously – this time we’ll have a go at both the doctors and the lawyers in Sally Clark’s case. ↩︎
The good news is that notwithstanding that the vet had no treatment, the dog fared better a few days after returning home. There’s another lesson in that, too. ↩︎
There are also significant systems of payola entrenched within our government’s functioning that depend upon poisoning the populace, written about in more detail here. ↩︎
In British parlance and practice, a solicitor is a trial attorney, as distinct from a (mere) barrister, which is probably best described as a transactional attorney. ↩︎
This comes from a wonderfully thorough website maintained by Sally and Steve Clark’s family and friends that I highly recommend if anyone wants a deep dive into the case. https://www.inference.org.uk/sallyclark/lockyer.html ↩︎
I hate Google as a source for anything, but just for giggles (especially now with the generative AI results), if you type “state forensic lab overturn convictions” what comes up is at least 3 famous state forensic lab investigations. In Massachusetts, 21,000 convictions were overturned as the result of misconduct – i.e. criminal acts – by 2 female forensic chemists. In Oklahoma, the misconduct and false testimony of a female chemist led to a man being freed from death row. In Colorado, same exact thing. ↩︎
Clouds are a “necessary” but not “sufficient” condition for rain is sometimes the way it is phrased. ↩︎
A mathematician might want to call all of these original uncontested evidentiary propositions by capital letters: A, B, C, D, etc, and, as it turns out, this is a commonly used convention for keeping track of exhibits in courts in various jurisdictions. ↩︎
Born poor, but raised well. Marine, helo pilot, judge advocate, lawyer, tech startup guy... wannabe writer. Lucky in love, laughing 'til the end.
105 Comments
Derpetologist
on June 17, 2025 at 7:32 pm
I saw an interesting video by a guy who quit neurosurgery for reasons similar to what you wrote about above.
Heh, I just ended a sentence with *two* prepositions; take that, grammarians!
Anyway, the guy studied neurosurgery at MIT because he wanted to heal paralyzed people with implants and do brain surgery. When he found out that neurosurgeons mostly deal with neck and back problems, he slowly lost his enthusiasm, because such problems are mainly the result of lifestyle factors and surgery for such things has a low success rate.
My brother had every bone in his ear replaced by this guy and I find that absolutely amazing. On both; they did it in the 80s and he is still alive.
The Gunslinger
on June 17, 2025 at 8:40 pm
I’m pretty sure I came across Dr. Brackmann’s name when I was researching doctor’s. He may not have been doing many surgeries anymore when I had my tumor removed. I sent my MRI scan to the House Ear Institute and Dr. Friedman called me and did a free phone consultation. My tumor was 5cm in the long direction which is why I decided to fly to LA for surgery.
Ownbestenemy
on June 17, 2025 at 8:44 pm
The guy is a legend in the field. Ya, obviously not slicing, but still teaching and that is rare on a couple accounts. Staying relevant and abreast to new technology and still holding onto the old school ways.
House Institute is what gave my brother hearing for decades to come
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 8:47 pm
Staying relevant and abreast to new technology
I want to do that in my field but scammy AI is sucking all the air out of the room. At this point I’m ready to retire early and be done with it.
The Gunslinger
on June 17, 2025 at 8:54 pm
OBE, if I may ask, what was the reason for your brother’s surgery?
The Gunslinger
on June 17, 2025 at 8:57 pm
The Brackmann scale is probably another reason his name seems familiar. I’m sure I came across mention of this when I was researching.
I believe total ossicular chain reconstruction due to I think extreme infection, as it wasn’t congenital.
Evan from Evansville
on June 17, 2025 at 9:36 pm
My Sept 22, 2019 craniectomy remains remarkable. I (believe I) was told my skull shards were wired together upon reattachment, but I can’t feel any bits and none show up on an x-ray, unlike my titanium hips, which vividly appear. Likely with magic putty, my skull kinda fused itself back together. Atta boy, skull. (The *definition* of taking one for the team. Ya got designed well.)
Big plus-everything to those hip surgeons in prior replacements. They held up, with zero issues, to getting popped by a car at whatever-mph it was. Well-done, docs.
I have several reasons for my own (understandable) ‘phobia’ of hospitals. I see them as palaces of death and damnation, but fuck. They do good work. I’m a very patient patient. (Ya get better food, for one.)
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 9:50 pm
They do good work.
Yeah, I’ve spent considerable time there in recent years and I can’t complain too much. I mean, beyond the obvious fact that being there sucks balls.
A friend had a young daughter fall off of a deck onto concrete below as a very young child; it broke her orbital bone and did considerable (lilfe-theatening) damage to her skull. She had to be flown to some center in Utah where everything is paid for because no one can afford it.
Two separate teams manage hours-long surgeries where one team opened her skull and lifted the brain up so the other team could work on reconstructing her face from the inside. The doctor(s) who did the surgery said their busy season is when schools get out – he does a lot of cases for kids going through windshields from the back seat – similar kinds of injuries.
There are some miracles in medicine, but I promise you that those people care fuck-all about p-values.
Ownbestenemy
on June 17, 2025 at 9:09 pm
Some doctors actually give a shit Ozy. Some actually practice medicine and don’t look at the statistics or probability and more at “We can do this”. Im glad my brother had one of them.
You’re right, ted. Thanks. When I was there years ago setting up an insurance entity and we had a discussion with some of our Brit compatriots and I thought that’s how they explained it, but I got it precisely backwards.
“If You Won’t Offer It to Your Enemy, It’s Not a Right.”
I have the hardest time explaining this to people, and it’s usually the “USA!USA!” crowd that is least amenable to the argument. Some how “Fuck them forineers’, trumps “due process is the best way to insure the correct outcome.”
R C Dean
on June 17, 2025 at 8:45 pm
The trick, of course, is that due process is a purely civil right, defined by the society (read: legislature/courts/government) where you live. If their due process is, say, 5 minutes in front of a guy who gets paid a bonus for everyone he deports, that’s your due process. Ultimately, the real protection is cultural – what is the society at large willing to tolerate. If their due process society at large decides X is plenty of due process for Y, that’s what you get, no matter what X is.
Civil rights should be distinguished from human rights, which have more of a moral (universal?) basis.
tests that might tell you what was wrong with your dog
Or cat, in my case.
Yeah, I definitely got the sense the whole thing was a scam.
They basically admitted they had no idea WTF was wrong with Maggie and a few months later she keeled over and they still had no idea.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 8:22 pm
scientific misconduct and fuckery
George Floyd and the political pressure put on the medical examiner to change his conclusion to the “right” one come to mind.
Ownbestenemy
on June 17, 2025 at 8:33 pm
So we gonna do the stupid and stick our dick in Iran? I mean, at least give it the Abe Lincoln treatment or a donkey punch for the laughs I guess.
Stinky Wizzleteats
on June 17, 2025 at 8:45 pm
Yes, yes we are and say bye bye to Trump’s political capital which may actually be a good thing considering how stupid his instincts are proving to be.
R C Dean
on June 17, 2025 at 8:48 pm
My rule is simple – no US forces directly attack Iran without a Congressional declaration of war.
It’s amazing how many internetians who are generally “muh Constitution!”, well, want to bomb Iran.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 8:56 pm
It feels like “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb Iran” has been a ditty much of my life.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 8:57 pm
Ugh insert another “bomb”. 🎶
Ownbestenemy
on June 17, 2025 at 8:59 pm
Vance’s “Its his decision” made me throw up a bit in my mouth. Massie though came out swinging and of course, Right Wing news is crying foul. Fuck em, want to bomb Iran, bring it to Congress.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 8:56 pm
[Mute]
[Nuke]
If you’re a leader of a nonnuclear country that doesn’t want to get assraped to death with a knife in the desert then nuking up is the safest course of action. If that lesson wasn’t learned yet it’s surely been learned now.
Not to hijack the thread upon which I’ll will comment further, because it’s good shit as always, but there’s a caveat to this.
You could just mind your fucking business and regime change probably wouldn’t be a major concern for the world players. But that’s probably even naive. If you want to be a sovereign state that sets its own policies and agenda, you kind of do need the nukes. It’s a sad indictment of our imperial power. Iran is too valuable to not fuck with in some capacity.
I still argue as I did last night that Israel has nothing to do with Iran and that their fetish for the Jews is not helping them any.
The argument over nukes is just the scaled up argument for gun control. If you don’t think someone has the legitimate basis to tell you you can’t own X gun, then where does the legitimate basis come from for USA to decide Iran don’t get a nuke?
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:47 pm
I agree with what you said below. The timing is relatively perfect for Israel to get away with this attack on Iran regardless of the state of their nuclear program and Trump may very well be their very strong, very dangerous puppet here.
But as libertarian as I consider myself, I struggle applying my personal morality to geopolitics. My analysis (if I can be bold enough to call me talking out of my ass an analysis) is based on my knowledge of history and current events. It’s based on a sense of realism in how nation states behave today and historically.
Trying to pigeon hole my personal morality onto this mess would be naive and pointless.
In a bubble, Iran is a sovereign state that has ever right to defend itself and arm accordingly. In reality, it’s neighbors and the global powers are never going to accept that. So I just start my breakdown of this all from there.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 9:54 pm
In reality, it’s neighbors and the global powers are never going to accept that.
And the reason for that is that Iran has been sponsoring terrorism for decades. There is something going on there that is not just some average country interested in protecting its own and shit.
I’m conflicted on all of it. On the one hand – not our circus, not our monkeys. OTOH, given a choice between apocalyptic Islamic fundamentalists with nukes and just about anything else, you probably take “anything else.” Especially if what precedes it is “complete annihilation of nuclear capability.
The other thing to consider is that no one in the Islamic world really gives AF about Iran or its proxies. They’re a shia country long at war with Sunni neighbors and Hezbollah managed to completely destroy Beirut.
At the same time, the west (like Britain) are being overrun by Islamist importation – how TF long before we have to completely scratch the Five Eyes thing and re-organize our intel, foreign policy, and diplomacy around preservation of western civ?
But again – no one here is really surprised by any of this, I don’t think.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:16 pm
It’s hard to escape this subject right now.
For my money, Iran’s nuclear program has not made any real strides and Israel’s attack is more about opportunity and their war with Palestine. Iran is the main funder of its enemies. Probably the main supplier of arms, as well, I’d guess. What better way to get them to back off then to distract them with an incredibly dangerous bombardment on the home front and threaten potential regime change with American involvement on the table?
I think Israel is trying to play the US.
For our part, it wasn’t that long ago that Tulsi Gabbard said Iran wasn’t close to getting nukes.
creech
on June 17, 2025 at 9:28 pm
I’m betting Israel knows a little more about the situation than Tulsi does. Even if she’s right, maybe it’s better to kill it in its crib than let it grow up and then try to kill it?
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:32 pm
Israel has a number of motives to attack Iran besides their nuclear program. Which I mentioned already.
Yea, Israel may know more about the state of Iran’s nuclear program. And I’d assume much of that has been shared with us, the guy with the biggest stick or bomb to do the job here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran has been furiously working to get nukes, but I’m in no rush to believe that Israel’s public proclamations of it should be taken at face value. Also, it was just the other day that Israel was claiming they launched this attack because Iran was plotting to surround and destroy Israel through conventional warfare.
Isreali’s government is no more trustworthy than our own, and you know full well you wouldn’t take a claim of WMD’s at face value again after Iraq. Not to play mind reader, I’d just wager based on you posting here.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm
For me it comes down to whether Iran is a death cult or not.
Would they really risk throwing nukes at Israel? I can’t answer that.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm
Also can’t rule out that Israel is acting for multiple reasons to include nukes. Likely are. Even if Iran isn’t close, what better opportunity to target their program than now with Trump newly elected and in their corner?
Ownbestenemy
on June 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm
Double edged sword of intelligence right? I mean, we burned our bridges with claims Saddam was close.
So what is to be believed? An intelligence community that is predicated and built on “providing actionable intelligence” or other State actors saying something else?
Last time we were told to trust the government, we played footsie with the Taliban and other forces for nearly 14 years/
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:37 pm
Would they really risk throwing nukes at Israel? I can’t answer that.
It’s a risk Israel can’t take, but which the US…kind of can? It’s not an existential threat to us. It is to them. It wouldn’t take many nukes to wipe Israel off the map and there’s plenty of delivery methods that Israel would struggle to stop. It’s a risk they can’t tolerate.
But everyone is making this about nukes when there’s entirely plausible motives for Israel to be acting right now besides the nukes. I’m sorry. I don’t trust the Israelis. They aren’t looking out for America’s interests anymore than the Iranians are. That’s not a condemnation of Israel, but they are using. It’s like the kid brother of the local bully picking fights not because he’s the toughest, but because he knows he can call in reinforcements if need be.
Iran also has a very weakened and pre-occupied sponsor – Russia. Situationally, this makes sense, at least for Israel and the Sunni world. Strange bedfellows there.
ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!
on June 17, 2025 at 11:12 pm
I trust Israel to think about Israel, which they hadn’t done for a while. The whole 10/7 thing brought all of that home quite quickly, whether they knew about it or not (if they did have an inkling, I would bet that they didn’t know it was going to be all that and a box of chocolates.) You can only play along with the intelligence games for so long before push comes to shove and it isn’t about trading a couple has-been’s for a set of wannabes, war still rears its ugly head. Iran has been a thorn in their side for a long time, and they thought they could contain it, but life has its way of getting around things like that. So, we get what we have today.
In the end, if you have a population like the Palestinians in Israel, you have two possible solutions: assimilate or annihilate. And they tried the former for a long time.
Still, not our horse, not our race.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:14 pm
Still processing the article, but I just read a story on Richard Sherman being just now charged for DUI on an arrest that took place in Feb of 2024. Because the lab was so backed up. He was obviously drunk and driving, but that’s not the point.
As I noted in a previous piece, government forensic labs alone are a never-ending source of later-overturned convictions because of all manner of scientific misconduct and fuckery,6 without even accounting for testilying by police or undercover informants, or simple human error in the acquisition, storage, processing, and analysis of evidence.
They kept this sample for over a year and just now processed it. What kind of fuckery could have taken place in that time frame?
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:43 pm
My favorite shit is in movies when AI calculates the odds of things that can’t possibly be reduced to math and it’s passed off as if the computer can actually output objective reality into numbers. Only a god could do that and god would have no need to do so because he’d just know the truth.
It’s kind of how a lot of people use stats. Best example is in sports and with the various analytics they’re developing which don’t really tell us shit.
Like for edge rushers, PFF has developed a system that invariably is going to favor DE’s over OLB’s who rush the passer. Like this guy is doubled more (as a DE) and this guy is chipped more and we arbitrarily decided that being doubled is more valuable than being chipped. Of course the DE is more likely to be doubled on a play. They’re producing a result based on what they’re measuring and not some objective measure of talent or ability let alone actual production. They’re also prioritizing guys who get close to making a play over the guy who actually makes the play at a higher rate because of these statistics.
Some shit is nuanced. Guilt and innocence is nuanced. Every situation is unique and needs to be approached as such, but that’s scary to people so they try to reduce it to numbers.
Statistics are not a substitute for judgement.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 10:03 pm
Should also add, sort of like your analogy to clouds on a rainy day versus rain on a cloudy day, that stats in sports don’t exist in a vacuum. People act like individual stats are purely the result of ability and not influenced heavily by circumstance. At least when it’s convenient.
Take Patrick Mahomes. Some people argue he’s regressed because he’s not putting up the pinball numbers he did early in his career. But if you watch him, he hasn’t declined physically. He is more experienced than as a rookie. What’s changed? Sure, defenses have adjusted, but it’s not like playing a cover 2 shell is some novel complicated schematic shift. I’d argue it’s the talent around him.
It all reminds me of what I learned reading about military history. Specifically, a quote on how Alexander the Great approached every battle, skirmish, siege etc. Every situation is unique. There often isn’t a cookie cutter answer or solution to problems.
Evan from Evansville
on June 17, 2025 at 11:48 pm
Deus ex machina = Poor writing creating a ‘solution’ to a specific problem the author seeks to ‘solve.’
Stats in sports, specifically baseball, IMO, are discrete events. Those *are* the pitches he throws, and perhaps when and where. Countered w info showing where the hitter thrives and fails.
The rest of human activity is far-less regimented. Hubris is the fundamental, fatal conceit prosperity brings. The gall to believe one has knowledge over the basics of all humanity is a sadly common sin. It irks us, especially, as ‘we’ kinda pride ourselves on refusing the authority (and duty) over our (relative) kindred nation-kind.
I s’pose I need another onion or dozen ’til the sun rises. It needs good shakin’ to.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 9:48 pm
These are my hamfisted comparisons, at least. I talk less pretty than you, but I think I get my point across well enough.
PutridMeat
on June 17, 2025 at 10:14 pm
Do you see how seductive frequentists statistics can be, and why frequentist statistics were so closely associated with, and used by, eugenicists like Fisher?
Any mathmatical tool can be misused, and yes that includes Bayesian analysis. The Holy War between “Bayesians” and “Frequentists” – which in all honesty seems largely driven by Bayesians – is just fucking silly. Use the tool; it *is* useful. It does provide insight in certain problems. Try not to abuse it, misuse is, or only apply it in such a way so as to produce a result you want. That’s what it means to be a scientist. Whether your wielding frequentist statistical tools or bayesian matters not if you are not going to be rigorous and honest with yourself.
Brochettaward
on June 17, 2025 at 10:19 pm
Asking scientists not to abuse statistics to prove their pet theory is like asking a teenage boy not to beat his meat.
Shit is going to be abused and hoping against all hope that scientists don’t engage in basic human behavior is a fools errand. Science progresses through a messy series of conflicts and resolutions and generally only advances or changes when the old guard dies off. It’s the same as any other realm of human endeavors. It’s petty and political. We’re all kind of just bystanders or better yet the jury in all of this shit so it’s best to be informed on the sorts of chicanery they play.
PutridMeat
on June 17, 2025 at 10:26 pm
Shit is going to be abused and hoping against all hope that scientists don’t engage in basic human behavior is a fools errand.
I agree – Eternal Vigilance doesn’t just apply to liberty.
Placing too much trust in science and scientists with examining their priors (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) is the path to the kind of problems that have been rightfully pointed out in this whole series. And that’s true of Bayesian or ‘frequentist’ practitioners (or people who look at p-values – which do have their use, even if easily abused or mined). It’s not the tool it’s the wielder of the tool.
Not Adahn
on June 18, 2025 at 6:55 am
This. All of the anti-Frequentist complaints are either complete strawman or Humpty-Dumpty definition games.
Timeloose
on June 17, 2025 at 10:38 pm
Ozy,
Great series so far. I have read and learned a great deal so far. I’m also pretty sure that being an engineer is keeping me from being picked for jury duty.
rhywun
on June 17, 2025 at 10:49 pm
The one time I came close to being picked I told them I work in insurance and I was out the door ten minutes later.
Even though it’s IT but I’m still saving that for next time.
Akira
on June 18, 2025 at 12:58 am
I got a letter saying I got “selected” for jury duty or something and that they might tell me if I need to show up. I actually wanted to go for 3 reasons:
1) Curiosity about what it’s like
2) Opportunity to nullify it if it was a victimless crime
3) Getting out of going to work
I never heard anything more about it though.
dbleagle
on June 17, 2025 at 11:02 pm
I have no issues with Israel going after Iran for their two big strategic reasons: preclude Iran from getting a nuke and cutting off Iranian arms to their proxies. After the first Iranian missile barrage Israel went after a few precise targets related to, but not part of, the Mullah’s nuclear program. After the second barrage they went after Iran’s air defense system. In these two incidences they told Iran look what we can do, and you can’t stop us from doing something else. Iran didn’t listen.
What is often lost in the noise of last week is that the IAEA, for the first time, issued a report that declared that Iran was in violation of their responsibilities as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty and had conducted prohibited activities. Then Iran goes over OMB’s 60-day deadline for negotiations. And to cap it off the same day Israel starts the strikes the UNGA votes for a resolution condemning Israel and calling for an immediate permanent end to the fighting in Gaza. This was the time to strike and the Israeli government knew it. That is why when Bibi asked for a vote before the strikes, he got an overwhelming mandate.
Iran’s leadership and military capacity is being systematically destroyed. Iran has to seek a 3rd head of the military in a week. Multiple top Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers are no longer making CO2. The IRGC is taking a beating. Bibi tells a news conference that the death of Khameni will bring an end to the crisis. (This is from a country that has shown you better take their threats to take out individuals seriously.) And yet, despite all the previous bluster from the Iranian regime for years, they have not attacked any US bases or facilities in the area. The Iranians are hoping OMB calls off Israel. But Bibi is in no mood to be restrained by OMB. I just hope that OMB does keep us out of it, even though it is likely that some hothead in a man dress will take a potshot at a US base with a rocket or mortar. He needs to respond proportionally to that attack, like we have been doing for years. I fear that OMB will start channeling BrigGen Jack D Ripper and not keep his cool like President Merkin Muffley.
I saw a small news report today that Iranian social media was reporting that many ATMs and card readers were not working and now Iranian civilians are beginning to worry that their life savings might just disappear is a random cluster of 0s and 1s. We should be learning a bunch of lessons from Israel (and Ukraine) about asymmetric warfare since you know damn well others are studying the lessons closely.
it is likely that some hothead in a man dress will take a potshot
I misread this as “a man in a dress” and thought of a leftist transactivist attack rather than a middle easterner, despite context.
dbleagle
on June 17, 2025 at 11:33 pm
@ UCS That got a sensible chuckle out of me…mahalo.
@TOK The Nimitz has all those ships around it with the entire mission of protecting the carrier and being a missile magnet in defense of the carrier if it is required. No American carrier, without John McCain aboard, has been struck and damaged since 1945. Your son in law is enjoying some tax-free income and may get a nifty “I was there” medal. My money is on he will be fine and get an invite to join the VFW for a year for free.
Stinky Wizzleteats
on June 18, 2025 at 5:00 am
Good to see the people here swallowing the totally correct and true Israeli intelligence assessment of the situation. They wouldn’t lie or slant the information like we would, no sir.
Derpetologist
on June 18, 2025 at 12:17 am
Change the names, and the story is about you. Or it will be soon.
Iran and their proxies have cyber ops too. They have been restrained so far.
Derpetologist
on June 18, 2025 at 1:08 am
Oh, how I just *hate* this ignorant loudmouth. Even Irish solidarity is not enough to stop me from wanting to punch him the face and drown him in a peat bog.
Hey everybody! Missus is now at hospital#2 undergoing vacuum assisted wound closure for several days before getting a skin graft. Making progress, but definitely sucking right now.
Stupidly a booked a hotel about a 1/4 mile from the local ICE facility (conveniently kitty corner from a Tesla dealership!). No CS smell, but pretty sure I can hear bullhorns. Yay!
Yeah, the local weatherpriests are urging us all to be “weather aware” this evening. Probably going to have to skedaddle straight to the grocery after work to try to get done ahead of the thunderstorms. 😑
So far, so good. I may take the pot of colorful coleus I just bought and move it from the hole in the stump of the late tulip poplar to the relative safety of the covered back patio in case of hail. I think the hanging fuchsia will be okay, as it’s already under the patio roof. I just hope we don’t have to move ourselves and the cats to the basement at any point. 😟
How are you?
Gender Traitor
on June 18, 2025 at 5:50 am
Oh, yeah – and this is my last day of work for a while. I’ll be off tomorrow for Juneteenth, and I decided to take Friday and all of next week as my policy-required at-least-five-days-in-a-row vacation. May go to a state park lodge for a couple of nights, but otherwise mainly having a “staycation” to relax and get some things done.
I realized I need to get the oil changed in my car, but that requires a sunny day so I can at least clean it out. (and I’m not about to change it myself on a rainy day either).
Tomorrow I’ve got a lunch with former coworkers and one or two +1s (wife of one is certain, daughter of another is possible).
Have to get to a post box today to drop a cookie recipe in the mail to my mom. (It’s the family recipe, but due to circumstances, she lost her copy)
I’ve had decent workouts for a while now – alternating from day to day – although I’ve had to drop certain exercises periodically due to joint pain (shoulders/elbows) and include alternates. I’m back on some of them now given the combination of factors from losing so much weight by just walking almost every day…
I agree about free weights vs machines, but for some exercises, machines just make things so much smoother – mainly for protecting some of my other joints or parts of my back/shoulders/etc. Most of my workouts have a pretty good mix – but for some particular muscles or exercises, it can be harder to find a good alternative to some machines – at least if you want to work out by yourself without a spotter.
I will be meeting with a trainer from my local gym next week to evaluate my current workouts and see about suggestions for alternate exercises or ones to add to my routines.
With my work schedule last month (and my annual fitness assessment), I went nearly 2 months without deadlifts – so I’m down about 10kg from what I was lifting before – slowly working back up to it – but I only go to the gym on weekdays when I don’t have work due to their hours (no 24 hour gyms unless you’re on base).
Grosspatzer
on June 18, 2025 at 5:54 am
Mornin’, reprobates! And UCS.
Thanks to Ozy for the best morning read I’ve had in ages. I’ll read the rest of the series whilst lounging by the pool. If the weather ever breaks.
Gender Traitor
on June 18, 2025 at 5:58 am
Good morning, ‘patzie! I’m really glad you’re back among us! 🙂 Hope you get plenty of sunshine today!
Grosspatzer
on June 18, 2025 at 6:00 am
Thanks, but sunshine is not in the forecast. But then there is Mrs. Patzer…
Gender Traitor
on June 18, 2025 at 6:04 am
“…When it’s cold outside, I got the month of May…” 😉
I’ll take that as a compliment to my writing, rather than a self-immiserating statement about your reading, Patz!
I’m moving PR number 10 into the queue right now for Glibs Editors. I’ll try to finish 11 by the end of the weekend.
My pepper plant got so leafy it fell over. I have to stake it. I got some plant velcro (a big spool of velcro branded plant restraint material) and the bamboo stakes are arriving today.
On one hand, I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep this one thriving, given my track record.
On the other, I wish I’d checked whether it would need staking before and had the stake in place already.
Gender Traitor
on June 18, 2025 at 6:30 am
Hope those do the trick and it keeps growing well! 😬🤞
Well the WSJ managed to find just about the least sympathetic couple it could for it’s lede paragraph.
When Shay Bialik and her husband, Ido Dembin, left their nine-month-old baby to attend an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Paris, they thought surely they would be back in time for a meeting with doctors to discuss a surgery that could give their deaf daughter a chance to hear. But a few hours after they landed, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. Its skies are now closed indefinitely.
With Israel’s Major Airport Shut Down, Citizens and Tourists Scramble to Get Home
Mornin’ all!
GT, enjoy your well-deserved vacation!
Quick update — after too many circumstantial delays, I go in for out-patient hernia surgery tomorrow. Whee ;-\ I have very high confidence in the surgeon and high confidence in the hospital, so I’m not really expecting any problems. Still, fingers crossed, etc. More updates as recovery commences.
🙂
ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!
on June 18, 2025 at 6:44 am
Good luck, BK!
Grosspatzer
on June 18, 2025 at 6:56 am
Good luck with that. I’ve had three of those, still alive and well. Most recent was laproscopic, much more pleasant recovery.
Sean
on June 18, 2025 at 7:01 am
Good luck!
mindyourbusiness
on June 18, 2025 at 7:29 am
Been there, done that, recovery took very little time. Good luck on yours.
I saw an interesting video by a guy who quit neurosurgery for reasons similar to what you wrote about above.
Heh, I just ended a sentence with *two* prepositions; take that, grammarians!
Anyway, the guy studied neurosurgery at MIT because he wanted to heal paralyzed people with implants and do brain surgery. When he found out that neurosurgeons mostly deal with neck and back problems, he slowly lost his enthusiasm, because such problems are mainly the result of lifestyle factors and surgery for such things has a low success rate.
original video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25LUF8GmbFU
reaction video from another neurosurgeon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQj1NxvQGgw
This is the team that removed my skull base tumor back in 2011 at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
https://surgery.ucsd.edu/news-events/rick-friedman-and-marc-schwartz-to-lead-acoustic-neuroma-center.html
I am very grateful for their skills.
My brother had every bone in his ear replaced by this guy and I find that absolutely amazing. On both; they did it in the 80s and he is still alive.
I’m pretty sure I came across Dr. Brackmann’s name when I was researching doctor’s. He may not have been doing many surgeries anymore when I had my tumor removed. I sent my MRI scan to the House Ear Institute and Dr. Friedman called me and did a free phone consultation. My tumor was 5cm in the long direction which is why I decided to fly to LA for surgery.
The guy is a legend in the field. Ya, obviously not slicing, but still teaching and that is rare on a couple accounts. Staying relevant and abreast to new technology and still holding onto the old school ways.
House Institute is what gave my brother hearing for decades to come
I want to do that in my field but scammy AI is sucking all the air out of the room. At this point I’m ready to retire early and be done with it.
OBE, if I may ask, what was the reason for your brother’s surgery?
The Brackmann scale is probably another reason his name seems familiar. I’m sure I came across mention of this when I was researching.
https://facialparalysisinstitute.com/conditions/house-brackmann-grading-system/
I believe total ossicular chain reconstruction due to I think extreme infection, as it wasn’t congenital.
My Sept 22, 2019 craniectomy remains remarkable. I (believe I) was told my skull shards were wired together upon reattachment, but I can’t feel any bits and none show up on an x-ray, unlike my titanium hips, which vividly appear. Likely with magic putty, my skull kinda fused itself back together. Atta boy, skull. (The *definition* of taking one for the team. Ya got designed well.)
Big plus-everything to those hip surgeons in prior replacements. They held up, with zero issues, to getting popped by a car at whatever-mph it was. Well-done, docs.
I have several reasons for my own (understandable) ‘phobia’ of hospitals. I see them as palaces of death and damnation, but fuck. They do good work. I’m a very patient patient. (Ya get better food, for one.)
Yeah, I’ve spent considerable time there in recent years and I can’t complain too much. I mean, beyond the obvious fact that being there sucks balls.
A friend had a young daughter fall off of a deck onto concrete below as a very young child; it broke her orbital bone and did considerable (lilfe-theatening) damage to her skull. She had to be flown to some center in Utah where everything is paid for because no one can afford it.
Two separate teams manage hours-long surgeries where one team opened her skull and lifted the brain up so the other team could work on reconstructing her face from the inside. The doctor(s) who did the surgery said their busy season is when schools get out – he does a lot of cases for kids going through windshields from the back seat – similar kinds of injuries.
There are some miracles in medicine, but I promise you that those people care fuck-all about p-values.
Some doctors actually give a shit Ozy. Some actually practice medicine and don’t look at the statistics or probability and more at “We can do this”. Im glad my brother had one of them.
Nitpick: I think you reversed “solicitor” and “barrister”.
See also A Fish Called Wanda.
They still wear those wigs?
You’re right, ted. Thanks. When I was there years ago setting up an insurance entity and we had a discussion with some of our Brit compatriots and I thought that’s how they explained it, but I got it precisely backwards.
“If You Won’t Offer It to Your Enemy, It’s Not a Right.”
I have the hardest time explaining this to people, and it’s usually the “USA!USA!” crowd that is least amenable to the argument. Some how “Fuck them forineers’, trumps “due process is the best way to insure the correct outcome.”
The trick, of course, is that due process is a purely civil right, defined by the society (read: legislature/courts/government) where you live. If their due process is, say, 5 minutes in front of a guy who gets paid a bonus for everyone he deports, that’s your due process. Ultimately, the real protection is cultural – what is the society at large willing to tolerate. If their due process society at large decides X is plenty of due process for Y, that’s what you get, no matter what X is.
Civil rights should be distinguished from human rights, which have more of a moral (universal?) basis.
Obligatory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROxvT8KKdFw
Another Tuesday. Another headache.
Thanks anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Toyota/s/jteW2gXZJO
That’s a proper Camry advert.
Or cat, in my case.
Yeah, I definitely got the sense the whole thing was a scam.
They basically admitted they had no idea WTF was wrong with Maggie and a few months later she keeled over and they still had no idea.
George Floyd and the political pressure put on the medical examiner to change his conclusion to the “right” one come to mind.
So we gonna do the stupid and stick our dick in Iran? I mean, at least give it the Abe Lincoln treatment or a donkey punch for the laughs I guess.
Yes, yes we are and say bye bye to Trump’s political capital which may actually be a good thing considering how stupid his instincts are proving to be.
My rule is simple – no US forces directly attack Iran without a Congressional declaration of war.
It’s amazing how many internetians who are generally “muh Constitution!”, well, want to bomb Iran.
It feels like “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb Iran” has been a ditty much of my life.
Ugh insert another “bomb”. 🎶
Vance’s “Its his decision” made me throw up a bit in my mouth. Massie though came out swinging and of course, Right Wing news is crying foul. Fuck em, want to bomb Iran, bring it to Congress.
Not to hijack the thread upon which I’ll will comment further, because it’s good shit as always, but there’s a caveat to this.
You could just mind your fucking business and regime change probably wouldn’t be a major concern for the world players. But that’s probably even naive. If you want to be a sovereign state that sets its own policies and agenda, you kind of do need the nukes. It’s a sad indictment of our imperial power. Iran is too valuable to not fuck with in some capacity.
I still argue as I did last night that Israel has nothing to do with Iran and that their fetish for the Jews is not helping them any.
The argument over nukes is just the scaled up argument for gun control. If you don’t think someone has the legitimate basis to tell you you can’t own X gun, then where does the legitimate basis come from for USA to decide Iran don’t get a nuke?
I agree with what you said below. The timing is relatively perfect for Israel to get away with this attack on Iran regardless of the state of their nuclear program and Trump may very well be their very strong, very dangerous puppet here.
But as libertarian as I consider myself, I struggle applying my personal morality to geopolitics. My analysis (if I can be bold enough to call me talking out of my ass an analysis) is based on my knowledge of history and current events. It’s based on a sense of realism in how nation states behave today and historically.
Trying to pigeon hole my personal morality onto this mess would be naive and pointless.
In a bubble, Iran is a sovereign state that has ever right to defend itself and arm accordingly. In reality, it’s neighbors and the global powers are never going to accept that. So I just start my breakdown of this all from there.
And the reason for that is that Iran has been sponsoring terrorism for decades. There is something going on there that is not just some average country interested in protecting its own and shit.
I’m conflicted on all of it. On the one hand – not our circus, not our monkeys. OTOH, given a choice between apocalyptic Islamic fundamentalists with nukes and just about anything else, you probably take “anything else.” Especially if what precedes it is “complete annihilation of nuclear capability.
The other thing to consider is that no one in the Islamic world really gives AF about Iran or its proxies. They’re a shia country long at war with Sunni neighbors and Hezbollah managed to completely destroy Beirut.
At the same time, the west (like Britain) are being overrun by Islamist importation – how TF long before we have to completely scratch the Five Eyes thing and re-organize our intel, foreign policy, and diplomacy around preservation of western civ?
But again – no one here is really surprised by any of this, I don’t think.
It’s hard to escape this subject right now.
For my money, Iran’s nuclear program has not made any real strides and Israel’s attack is more about opportunity and their war with Palestine. Iran is the main funder of its enemies. Probably the main supplier of arms, as well, I’d guess. What better way to get them to back off then to distract them with an incredibly dangerous bombardment on the home front and threaten potential regime change with American involvement on the table?
I think Israel is trying to play the US.
For our part, it wasn’t that long ago that Tulsi Gabbard said Iran wasn’t close to getting nukes.
I’m betting Israel knows a little more about the situation than Tulsi does. Even if she’s right, maybe it’s better to kill it in its crib than let it grow up and then try to kill it?
Israel has a number of motives to attack Iran besides their nuclear program. Which I mentioned already.
Yea, Israel may know more about the state of Iran’s nuclear program. And I’d assume much of that has been shared with us, the guy with the biggest stick or bomb to do the job here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran has been furiously working to get nukes, but I’m in no rush to believe that Israel’s public proclamations of it should be taken at face value. Also, it was just the other day that Israel was claiming they launched this attack because Iran was plotting to surround and destroy Israel through conventional warfare.
Isreali’s government is no more trustworthy than our own, and you know full well you wouldn’t take a claim of WMD’s at face value again after Iraq. Not to play mind reader, I’d just wager based on you posting here.
For me it comes down to whether Iran is a death cult or not.
Would they really risk throwing nukes at Israel? I can’t answer that.
Also can’t rule out that Israel is acting for multiple reasons to include nukes. Likely are. Even if Iran isn’t close, what better opportunity to target their program than now with Trump newly elected and in their corner?
Double edged sword of intelligence right? I mean, we burned our bridges with claims Saddam was close.
So what is to be believed? An intelligence community that is predicated and built on “providing actionable intelligence” or other State actors saying something else?
Last time we were told to trust the government, we played footsie with the Taliban and other forces for nearly 14 years/
It’s a risk Israel can’t take, but which the US…kind of can? It’s not an existential threat to us. It is to them. It wouldn’t take many nukes to wipe Israel off the map and there’s plenty of delivery methods that Israel would struggle to stop. It’s a risk they can’t tolerate.
But everyone is making this about nukes when there’s entirely plausible motives for Israel to be acting right now besides the nukes. I’m sorry. I don’t trust the Israelis. They aren’t looking out for America’s interests anymore than the Iranians are. That’s not a condemnation of Israel, but they are using. It’s like the kid brother of the local bully picking fights not because he’s the toughest, but because he knows he can call in reinforcements if need be.
Iran also has a very weakened and pre-occupied sponsor – Russia. Situationally, this makes sense, at least for Israel and the Sunni world. Strange bedfellows there.
I trust Israel to think about Israel, which they hadn’t done for a while. The whole 10/7 thing brought all of that home quite quickly, whether they knew about it or not (if they did have an inkling, I would bet that they didn’t know it was going to be all that and a box of chocolates.) You can only play along with the intelligence games for so long before push comes to shove and it isn’t about trading a couple has-been’s for a set of wannabes, war still rears its ugly head. Iran has been a thorn in their side for a long time, and they thought they could contain it, but life has its way of getting around things like that. So, we get what we have today.
In the end, if you have a population like the Palestinians in Israel, you have two possible solutions: assimilate or annihilate. And they tried the former for a long time.
Still, not our horse, not our race.
Still processing the article, but I just read a story on Richard Sherman being just now charged for DUI on an arrest that took place in Feb of 2024. Because the lab was so backed up. He was obviously drunk and driving, but that’s not the point.
They kept this sample for over a year and just now processed it. What kind of fuckery could have taken place in that time frame?
My favorite shit is in movies when AI calculates the odds of things that can’t possibly be reduced to math and it’s passed off as if the computer can actually output objective reality into numbers. Only a god could do that and god would have no need to do so because he’d just know the truth.
It’s kind of how a lot of people use stats. Best example is in sports and with the various analytics they’re developing which don’t really tell us shit.
Like for edge rushers, PFF has developed a system that invariably is going to favor DE’s over OLB’s who rush the passer. Like this guy is doubled more (as a DE) and this guy is chipped more and we arbitrarily decided that being doubled is more valuable than being chipped. Of course the DE is more likely to be doubled on a play. They’re producing a result based on what they’re measuring and not some objective measure of talent or ability let alone actual production. They’re also prioritizing guys who get close to making a play over the guy who actually makes the play at a higher rate because of these statistics.
Some shit is nuanced. Guilt and innocence is nuanced. Every situation is unique and needs to be approached as such, but that’s scary to people so they try to reduce it to numbers.
Statistics are not a substitute for judgement.
Should also add, sort of like your analogy to clouds on a rainy day versus rain on a cloudy day, that stats in sports don’t exist in a vacuum. People act like individual stats are purely the result of ability and not influenced heavily by circumstance. At least when it’s convenient.
Take Patrick Mahomes. Some people argue he’s regressed because he’s not putting up the pinball numbers he did early in his career. But if you watch him, he hasn’t declined physically. He is more experienced than as a rookie. What’s changed? Sure, defenses have adjusted, but it’s not like playing a cover 2 shell is some novel complicated schematic shift. I’d argue it’s the talent around him.
It all reminds me of what I learned reading about military history. Specifically, a quote on how Alexander the Great approached every battle, skirmish, siege etc. Every situation is unique. There often isn’t a cookie cutter answer or solution to problems.
Deus ex machina = Poor writing creating a ‘solution’ to a specific problem the author seeks to ‘solve.’
Stats in sports, specifically baseball, IMO, are discrete events. Those *are* the pitches he throws, and perhaps when and where. Countered w info showing where the hitter thrives and fails.
The rest of human activity is far-less regimented. Hubris is the fundamental, fatal conceit prosperity brings. The gall to believe one has knowledge over the basics of all humanity is a sadly common sin. It irks us, especially, as ‘we’ kinda pride ourselves on refusing the authority (and duty) over our (relative) kindred nation-kind.
I s’pose I need another onion or dozen ’til the sun rises. It needs good shakin’ to.
These are my hamfisted comparisons, at least. I talk less pretty than you, but I think I get my point across well enough.
Do you see how seductive frequentists statistics can be, and why frequentist statistics were so closely associated with, and used by, eugenicists like Fisher?
Any mathmatical tool can be misused, and yes that includes Bayesian analysis. The Holy War between “Bayesians” and “Frequentists” – which in all honesty seems largely driven by Bayesians – is just fucking silly. Use the tool; it *is* useful. It does provide insight in certain problems. Try not to abuse it, misuse is, or only apply it in such a way so as to produce a result you want. That’s what it means to be a scientist. Whether your wielding frequentist statistical tools or bayesian matters not if you are not going to be rigorous and honest with yourself.
Asking scientists not to abuse statistics to prove their pet theory is like asking a teenage boy not to beat his meat.
Shit is going to be abused and hoping against all hope that scientists don’t engage in basic human behavior is a fools errand. Science progresses through a messy series of conflicts and resolutions and generally only advances or changes when the old guard dies off. It’s the same as any other realm of human endeavors. It’s petty and political. We’re all kind of just bystanders or better yet the jury in all of this shit so it’s best to be informed on the sorts of chicanery they play.
Shit is going to be abused and hoping against all hope that scientists don’t engage in basic human behavior is a fools errand.
I agree – Eternal Vigilance doesn’t just apply to liberty.
Placing too much trust in science and scientists with examining their priors (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) is the path to the kind of problems that have been rightfully pointed out in this whole series. And that’s true of Bayesian or ‘frequentist’ practitioners (or people who look at p-values – which do have their use, even if easily abused or mined). It’s not the tool it’s the wielder of the tool.
This. All of the anti-Frequentist complaints are either complete strawman or Humpty-Dumpty definition games.
Ozy,
Great series so far. I have read and learned a great deal so far. I’m also pretty sure that being an engineer is keeping me from being picked for jury duty.
The one time I came close to being picked I told them I work in insurance and I was out the door ten minutes later.
Even though it’s IT but I’m still saving that for next time.
I got a letter saying I got “selected” for jury duty or something and that they might tell me if I need to show up. I actually wanted to go for 3 reasons:
1) Curiosity about what it’s like
2) Opportunity to nullify it if it was a victimless crime
3) Getting out of going to work
I never heard anything more about it though.
I have no issues with Israel going after Iran for their two big strategic reasons: preclude Iran from getting a nuke and cutting off Iranian arms to their proxies. After the first Iranian missile barrage Israel went after a few precise targets related to, but not part of, the Mullah’s nuclear program. After the second barrage they went after Iran’s air defense system. In these two incidences they told Iran look what we can do, and you can’t stop us from doing something else. Iran didn’t listen.
What is often lost in the noise of last week is that the IAEA, for the first time, issued a report that declared that Iran was in violation of their responsibilities as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty and had conducted prohibited activities. Then Iran goes over OMB’s 60-day deadline for negotiations. And to cap it off the same day Israel starts the strikes the UNGA votes for a resolution condemning Israel and calling for an immediate permanent end to the fighting in Gaza. This was the time to strike and the Israeli government knew it. That is why when Bibi asked for a vote before the strikes, he got an overwhelming mandate.
Iran’s leadership and military capacity is being systematically destroyed. Iran has to seek a 3rd head of the military in a week. Multiple top Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers are no longer making CO2. The IRGC is taking a beating. Bibi tells a news conference that the death of Khameni will bring an end to the crisis. (This is from a country that has shown you better take their threats to take out individuals seriously.) And yet, despite all the previous bluster from the Iranian regime for years, they have not attacked any US bases or facilities in the area. The Iranians are hoping OMB calls off Israel. But Bibi is in no mood to be restrained by OMB. I just hope that OMB does keep us out of it, even though it is likely that some hothead in a man dress will take a potshot at a US base with a rocket or mortar. He needs to respond proportionally to that attack, like we have been doing for years. I fear that OMB will start channeling BrigGen Jack D Ripper and not keep his cool like President Merkin Muffley.
I saw a small news report today that Iranian social media was reporting that many ATMs and card readers were not working and now Iranian civilians are beginning to worry that their life savings might just disappear is a random cluster of 0s and 1s. We should be learning a bunch of lessons from Israel (and Ukraine) about asymmetric warfare since you know damn well others are studying the lessons closely.
I misread this as “a man in a dress” and thought of a leftist transactivist attack rather than a middle easterner, despite context.
@ UCS That got a sensible chuckle out of me…mahalo.
@TOK The Nimitz has all those ships around it with the entire mission of protecting the carrier and being a missile magnet in defense of the carrier if it is required. No American carrier, without John McCain aboard, has been struck and damaged since 1945. Your son in law is enjoying some tax-free income and may get a nifty “I was there” medal. My money is on he will be fine and get an invite to join the VFW for a year for free.
Good to see the people here swallowing the totally correct and true Israeli intelligence assessment of the situation. They wouldn’t lie or slant the information like we would, no sir.
Change the names, and the story is about you. Or it will be soon.
Iran and their proxies have cyber ops too. They have been restrained so far.
Oh, how I just *hate* this ignorant loudmouth. Even Irish solidarity is not enough to stop me from wanting to punch him the face and drown him in a peat bog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QojJtsjsLfU
Bill, I’d tell you to eat a bag of dicks, but you’d probably enjoy it. May the road rise to meet you and kick you in the ass.
Hey everybody! Missus is now at hospital#2 undergoing vacuum assisted wound closure for several days before getting a skin graft. Making progress, but definitely sucking right now.
Stupidly a booked a hotel about a 1/4 mile from the local ICE facility (conveniently kitty corner from a Tesla dealership!). No CS smell, but pretty sure I can hear bullhorns. Yay!
Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Happy national go fishing day!
🎣🌦️☕️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXWrmQW-OE
🎶🎶
Strong storms forecasted for today, and 100+ degree heatwave in the forecast.
⚡️💨😳🌡️
What the hell?
I like not this news, bring me different news.
Yeah, the local weatherpriests are urging us all to be “weather aware” this evening. Probably going to have to skedaddle straight to the grocery after work to try to get done ahead of the thunderstorms. 😑
Good morning, Sean & U!
Morning.
How goes?
So far, so good. I may take the pot of colorful coleus I just bought and move it from the hole in the stump of the late tulip poplar to the relative safety of the covered back patio in case of hail. I think the hanging fuchsia will be okay, as it’s already under the patio roof. I just hope we don’t have to move ourselves and the cats to the basement at any point. 😟
How are you?
Oh, yeah – and this is my last day of work for a while. I’ll be off tomorrow for Juneteenth, and I decided to take Friday and all of next week as my policy-required at-least-five-days-in-a-row vacation. May go to a state park lodge for a couple of nights, but otherwise mainly having a “staycation” to relax and get some things done.
I realized I need to get the oil changed in my car, but that requires a sunny day so I can at least clean it out. (and I’m not about to change it myself on a rainy day either).
Tomorrow I’ve got a lunch with former coworkers and one or two +1s (wife of one is certain, daughter of another is possible).
Have to get to a post box today to drop a cookie recipe in the mail to my mom. (It’s the family recipe, but due to circumstances, she lost her copy)
🥳
I hate summer. Can we skip to autumn?
You need heat/energy get got a decently strong storm going.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2025/06/17/hochul-ill-work-with-trump-to-remove-criminals-not-employed-immigrants/
Dragging that Overton window back.
I don’t believe her.
That is the look of “my primary voters hate this, but everyone else is OK with the new normal”
Never fear!
Michael Goodwin: Cuomo should thank Mamdani for making him look like the safe, stable choice for NYC mayor
https://nypost.com/2025/06/17/opinion/cuomo-should-thank-mamdani-for-giving-him-the-pathway-to-become-the-next-mayor-of-nyc/
He should still be in prison on 15,000 counts of depraved indiference homicide.
You have choice – Stalin or Mao.
https://www.foxla.com/news/la-man-british-photojournalist-file-lawsuits-over-injuries-site-anti-ice-protests
Deport both of them. Don’t care.
Good article.
Also good article on exercise jarflax.
I’ve had decent workouts for a while now – alternating from day to day – although I’ve had to drop certain exercises periodically due to joint pain (shoulders/elbows) and include alternates. I’m back on some of them now given the combination of factors from losing so much weight by just walking almost every day…
I agree about free weights vs machines, but for some exercises, machines just make things so much smoother – mainly for protecting some of my other joints or parts of my back/shoulders/etc. Most of my workouts have a pretty good mix – but for some particular muscles or exercises, it can be harder to find a good alternative to some machines – at least if you want to work out by yourself without a spotter.
I will be meeting with a trainer from my local gym next week to evaluate my current workouts and see about suggestions for alternate exercises or ones to add to my routines.
With my work schedule last month (and my annual fitness assessment), I went nearly 2 months without deadlifts – so I’m down about 10kg from what I was lifting before – slowly working back up to it – but I only go to the gym on weekdays when I don’t have work due to their hours (no 24 hour gyms unless you’re on base).
Mornin’, reprobates! And UCS.
Thanks to Ozy for the best morning read I’ve had in ages. I’ll read the rest of the series whilst lounging by the pool. If the weather ever breaks.
Good morning, ‘patzie! I’m really glad you’re back among us! 🙂 Hope you get plenty of sunshine today!
Thanks, but sunshine is not in the forecast. But then there is Mrs. Patzer…
“…When it’s cold outside, I got the month of May…” 😉
Ah, sweet temptation…
Morning, sir.
I’ll take that as a compliment to my writing, rather than a self-immiserating statement about your reading, Patz!
I’m moving PR number 10 into the queue right now for Glibs Editors. I’ll try to finish 11 by the end of the weekend.
*resigned sigh*
My pepper plant got so leafy it fell over. I have to stake it. I got some plant velcro (a big spool of velcro branded plant restraint material) and the bamboo stakes are arriving today.
On one hand, I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep this one thriving, given my track record.
On the other, I wish I’d checked whether it would need staking before and had the stake in place already.
Hope those do the trick and it keeps growing well! 😬🤞
I might just end up with a coiled stem as it tries to figure out how to stand upright.
It happens.
You are feeding it, right?
…no?
I’m not sure whether the MiracleGro I used to fill the pot has fertilizer in it, hence the ‘?’
I’ve just been keeping it watered and making sure it had plenty of light.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073ZNW8MX?th=1
EZ mode food. Recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/FoxFarm-Liquid-Nutrient-Trio-Formula/dp/B07TH2FMP3?th=1
Advanced. Great stuff.
I use both. You can’t go wrong with the kelp.
🌱👍
suh’ fam
whats goody
Well the WSJ managed to find just about the least sympathetic couple it could for it’s lede paragraph.
When Shay Bialik and her husband, Ido Dembin, left their nine-month-old baby to attend an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Paris, they thought surely they would be back in time for a meeting with doctors to discuss a surgery that could give their deaf daughter a chance to hear. But a few hours after they landed, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. Its skies are now closed indefinitely.
With Israel’s Major Airport Shut Down, Citizens and Tourists Scramble to Get Home
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/with-israels-major-airport-shut-down-citizens-tourists-stuck-scramble-to-get-home-1b660d83?st=vJsxgh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Mornin’ all!
GT, enjoy your well-deserved vacation!
Quick update — after too many circumstantial delays, I go in for out-patient hernia surgery tomorrow. Whee ;-\ I have very high confidence in the surgeon and high confidence in the hospital, so I’m not really expecting any problems. Still, fingers crossed, etc. More updates as recovery commences.
🙂
Good luck, BK!
Good luck with that. I’ve had three of those, still alive and well. Most recent was laproscopic, much more pleasant recovery.
Good luck!
Been there, done that, recovery took very little time. Good luck on yours.
Meanwhile let me surprise you what the WSJ editorial team wants…
Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment
The President can reverse Biden’s Afghan legacy by helping Israel eliminate Tehran’s nuclear threat.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/iran-israel-donald-trump-deterrence-fordow-nuclear-d2ac6ef0?st=FjxEvt&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
test