Keeping Up With The Journals...

I don't know if any of my readers keep abreast of The Journal of International Security Affairs, but the Fall 2008 issue (which is on news stands now) is completely devoted to Middle East policy and contains a pair of very interesting discussions on issues pertaining to Israel. Israel is a subject on which many Americans have very strong (and equally ill-informed) opinions, and these opinions tend to be polarized into stark black and white interpretations of the situation. In the U.S. at large Israel is considered to be an angelic, underdog state that's fighting to survive in a hostile "neighborhood", whereas when I was in university the opposite view prevailed - The vast majority of the Poli-Sci student body at U of L viewed Israel as something bordering on a terror state presiding over an ill-gotten territory and abusing the rights of the displaced Palestinians.

Reality, of course, is rather grayer than either of those views, and in the interest of that line of discussion I urge readers to have a look at these two articles by David Wurmser and Caroline Glick. Seriously, click those links - They're more than worth your time.

The stupidity is just pristine...

I don't mean to steal topics from PZ Myers, but his discussion today about the retroactive intercessory prayer study out of the Rabin Medical Center in Israel really got me thinking, and not just about how patently laughable that is. My question is this: How in the hell does someone work up the nerve to ask for funding for that sort of thing? I have trouble convincing myself to ask for petty cash at work to buy food for the cooking class, so it is beyond me how anyone could prepare themselves to go before a grant committee to pitch an expensive study on the retrocausal effects of petitions to Yahweh.

The methodology went a little something like this - They pulled a bunch of 6-10 year-old patient files out of the hospital records room, shuffled them up, divided them into piles, and prayed over one pile for a beneficial outcome to something that already happened 10 years ago. I would expect something like this out of a 5th grader or, I dunno, a crazy guy, but not a doctor. Surprise, surprise, the results were "inconclusive". Mortality rates were identical, but the prayer pile apparently had slightly shorter average hospital stays.

Amazingly, the Dr. Leibovici who ran the study had the cast iron sack to state in its conclusion that retrocausal prayer (he glosses this over by using the term "remote" to imply a spatial rather than temporal distance) "should be considered for use in clinical practice."

Simply. Freaking. Amazing.