Last week (2/28), JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a hit piece on antioxidant vitamins.  JAMA's Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E concluded that taking supplements of them increases one's chances of death by 5%.

The lamestream media gleefully ran stories on the study, with headlines like "Vitamins Can Kill You."

It's the whores of JAMA and their media shills who can kill you, not vitamins.

Note the "Meta" in the study's title.  That means it's an analysis of other studies, not research itself.  What these folks did is, out of the close to a thousand clinical antioxidant studies, they cherry picked 68 that showed what JAMA wanted.  

And they had to lie about many of those in order to force the data to fit their pre-ordained conclusion.

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith.

Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What's worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticize the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

This past week has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation last week that scientists appeared to scheme with environmental activists to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence.

Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 - with an error range of one tenth of a degree.

In any case, the year is not over with 16% of the 2014 data not yet recorded, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there's a political climate summit in Lima this week.

You may have noticed gasoline prices are rising. If the Middle East situation gets much worse, gasoline prices will rise even more. The good news is that we are likely to avoid long gas lines as we had in the late 1970s under President Carter, because fracking and other new technologies have lessened our dependence on foreign oil and gas. The bad news is that a major rise in oil prices could easily tilt Europe and other places back into a recession, which could kill the little growth the United States is now experiencing.

The tragedy is all of this was unnecessary, but brought about by the Obama administration, letting short-term political considerations and ideology override good economics and global security.

When the DOW tanked on Tuesday (2/27), losing over 400 points, the comparison du jour was to the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987 - which was of course silly, as the former was only a 3.3% loss in value, while the latter was 22.6%.

Nonetheless, it prompts me to tell you a story, which starts in the Chang Tang Plateau of northern Tibet.  That's where I was at the time of '87 crash, leading an overland expedition from Beijing to Kathmandu across Tibet north to south. 

We heard about the crash from BBC broadcasts on my short wave radio.  One expedition member, Big John Perrott, had a panic attack.  Having no way to reach his broker - northern Tibet is about as remote as you get - he thought he was bankrupt.

By the time we got to Lhasa by the end of the month, and John could call his broker, the market - and his portfolio - were well into recovery.  He said he'll be forever grateful for being in the Chang Tang on Black Monday.

But while I was in Tibet on Black Monday, a good friend of mine was in a meeting at the White House.

China's stock market boom has reached outright mania, with equities galloping higher at a parabolic rate, despite threats of a crackdown by regulators and the continued slowdown of the national economy.

The Shanghai Composite Index has risen 32% in the past six weeks, blowing through 3,000 to a three-and-a-half-year high even though corporate earnings are declining steeply.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission said late last week that it would "increase market supervision, resolutely crack down and earnestly safeguard normal market order." It warned that stock manipulators had been "raising their head" and would be dealt with.

The cautionary words have been ignored by retail investors as they throng brokerage offices, lured by momentum trades. For the stock boom comes as Chinese industry battles with massive overcapacity in everything from steel to shipbuilding, coal output, cement and solar panels.

The bottom line is that it may be impossible for China to deflate its epic bubble painlessly.

Would you have traded five terrorists for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl?

The decision may have been wrong or right, but what is striking is that President Obama seems to have made this decision, and all too many others, in an ad hoc way, rather than using decision theory.

Decision theory is an orderly way of thinking and choosing among alternatives when there is a number of variables for which the probabilities of each may or may not be known to the decision-maker. It's the opposite of Mr. Obama's thought process.

Politicians and criminals both have a tendency to underestimate the probability of getting caught in bad acts. Is it because few studied decision theory or because there is a certain recklessness in the nature of those who follow such pursuits?

Obviously it's the latter in Mr. Obama's case, who suffers from what is known as The Fatal Conceit.