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Study: Marijuana Could Increase Testicular Cancer By 70%
A new study conducted in the U.S. claims that pot use could increase the chances of developing testicular cancer by as much as 70%:
“In the absence of more certain information, a decision to smoke marijuana recreationally means that one is taking a chance on one’s future health,” said Dr Schwartz.
The team interviewed 369 men with testicular cancer, in the Seattle area – mostly in their 20s and 30s – about their history of marijuana use.
They then compared their responses with those from just under 1,000 men without the disease from a similar area and age group.
Even after other “lifestyle” factors such as smoking and drinking as well as risks such as a family history of the disease, cannabis use emerged as a significant possible cause, the study published in the journal Cancer concluded.
Regular or long-term cannabis smokers appeared twice as likely to develop the disease as those who had never used the drug.
Being a regular marijuana smoker at the time of diagnosis was associated with a 70% increased risk.
I don’t buy it. This is an attempt by the government to derail the growing support across America in favor of legalizing marijuana. “The man” figures a sure way to discourage men from smoking weed is to tell them they might get cancer in their nuts. I’m not buying into it — and neither is Michael Phelps.
-Chris Jones
Pew Survey: 92% Of Americans Believe in God Or Universal Spirit
It looks like yet another setback for America’s tiny minority of athiests. According to a new Pew survey, 92% of Americans believe in God or universal spirit. It also found that 58% of Americans say they pray privately every day, and California is the least religious state in America.
Arab Study: 55% Say Offensive Words Justify Violence
Via LGF:
The poll adds weight to the vote at a session of the Doha Debates held on March 3 in Doha, where the motion “This house believes that Muslims are failing to combat extremism”, was carried by more than 70% of the audience.
In the YouGov survey, nearly half of all Arabs in the Gulf, Levant and North Africa said they have met someone who holds extreme religious views.
Asked under what conditions violence is permissible, more than 60% cited Western interference in a Muslim country, while 55% said offensive words or behaviour was a trigger.
More than half the respondents also believed that poor religious leadership is to blame for today’s extremism – although seven out of 10 said the size of the problem had been exaggerated.
Eight out of 10 believed it provides an excuse for the West to interfere in Muslim countries.
In the poll, conducted between March 18 and 23, views of 940 people across the Arab world were surveyed.
At least they recognize their utter failure at combating extremism, unfortunately more than half believe words justify violence.
Everyone has punched someone in the face for saying something crappy at one time in their life, but the kind of violence radical Muslims resort to over offensive words is usually mass murder.
-Chris Jones
1 in 4 Teen Girls Has Sexual Disease
From the AP:
At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group.
A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls—nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens, the study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
About half of the girls acknowledged ever having sex; among them, the rate was 40 percent. While some teens define sex as only intercourse, other types of intimate behavior including oral sex can spread some infections.
What this really means is that parents need to quit kidding themselves about their kids. I don’t care how many “promise rings” you buy or what kind of promises of saving themselves for marriage are made, most likely your kids are having sex.
Encouraging abstinence is obviously a good thing, but acknowledging reality is also important. Parents need to quit being shy about discussing these issues openly. Teens should be taught about the importance of condom use and how sexually transmitted diseases are spread.
I understand that some parents are uncomfortable with their child’s school teaching them about sexual issues, but if that’s the case it’s extremely important that parents discuss these issues at home.
-Chris Jones
New Bogus Survey Claims 1 Million Dead In Iraq
Not another bogus study…
More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups.
It was only two weeks ago that another study citing 650,000 dead was debunked, now we’re supposed to believe it’s a million?
I fully expect to see a study at the end of Bush’s term that claims there are no longer any people still alive in Iraq. Every last Iraqi has in fact been killed and the only people left are U.S. soldiers.
IRAQ WAR = HOLOCAUST
The left-wing media has continued to cite the debunked 650,000 number, so I guess they can gleefully cite this new bogus number.
-Chris Jones
World Health Organization Puts Iraq Death Toll At 151,000
A favorite liberal past time has been to cite the absurd study done by Johns Hopkins University and various anti-war groups that put the civilian death toll in Iraq at over 600,000.
Using only basic human logic it’s easy to see how massively inflated that number is, but logic doesn’t matter when it conflicts with the left-wing narrative that President Bush is the devil.
The World Health Organization has been conducting their own study, one grounded in some semblance of reality.
The results of the study have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and put the estimated civilian death toll in Iraq since the start of the war at 151,000.
-Chris Jones
Study: Democrats party of rich
Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts. John “Two Americas” Edwards likes to pretend that as the “son of a mill worker” that he somehow represents the working class.
In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.
He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.
“If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions,” Mr. Franc said.
Mr. Franc’s study also showed that contrary to the Democrats’ tendency to define Republicans as the party of the rich, “the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts.”
“I just found the pattern across the board to be very interesting. That pattern shows the likelihood of electing a Democrat to the House is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in that district,” Mr. Franc said in an interview with The Washington Times.
There’s nothing wrong with being rich, but Democrats like to make being “rich” a bad thing, and pretend that Republicans are hogging all the money. Liberal elitism is pretty much the norm now, and Democrats are as filthy rich if not more so than their Republican counterparts.
-Chris Jones
Study: Female U.S. Corporate Directors Out-Earn Men
They may be a small minority in corporate boardrooms, but women directors typically earn more than men, a new U.S. study has found.
Female directors in corporate America earned median compensation of $120,000, based on the most recently available pay data, compared with $104,375 for male board members, research group The Corporate Library said in its annual director pay report.
At the same time, the study said, women in corporate boardrooms are outnumbered eight to one.
Harvard Study Confirms Liberal Bias in Media
A joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy — found that in covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans.
Democrats are not only favored in the tone of the coverage. They get more coverage period. This is particularly evident on morning news shows, which “produced almost twice as many stories (51% to 27%) focused on Democratic candidates than on Republicans.”
The most flagrant bias, however, was found in newspapers. In reviewing front-page coverage in 11 newspapers, the study found the tone positive in nearly six times as many stories about Democrats as it was negative.
The gap between Democrats and Republicans narrows on cable TV, but it’s there nonetheless. Stories about Democrats were positive in more than a third of the cases, while Republicans were portrayed favorably in fewer than 29%. Republican led in unfriendly stories 30.4% to 25.5%.
Here’s what the study says about Fox News:
Fox News: The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).
When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.
But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.
Here’s what the study found about CNN:
CNN: The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain fairing the worst (63% negative) and Romney fairing a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral.
It’s not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator’s stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama.
Here’s what the study found about MSNBC:
MSNBC: On MSNBC, a positive tone pervaded coverage of candidates from both parties. Nearly half (47%) of the stories about Democratic candidates were positive, vs. 19% negative and 34% neutral. Coverage of Republican candidates was not quite as rosy but still more stories were positive (38%) than neutral (33%) or negative (30%).
But here as well, Senator McCain still came up short. Four-in-ten of his stories (39%) were negative in tone compared to only about two-in-ten (22%) that were positive.
25% of Germans See Good in Nazi Rule
A quarter of Germans believe there were some positive aspects to Nazi rule, according to a poll published Wednesday—a finding that comes after a popular talk show host was fired for praising Nazi Germany’s attitude toward motherhood.
Pollsters for the Forsa agency, commissioned by the weekly magazine Stern, asked whether National Socialism also had some “good sides (such as) the construction of the highway system, the elimination of unemployment, the low criminality rate (and) the encouragement of the family.”
Forsa said 25 percent responded “yes”—but 70 percent said “no.”
Praising the 1933-45 Nazi dictatorship is taboo in Germany. The Nazis were responsible for the murder of some 6 million Jews and for starting World War II—a conflict in which at least 60 million people died, including more than 7 million Germans.
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