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ГУЛаг Палестины
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Текст книги "ГУЛаг Палестины"


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outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all

that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.

Such an experiment has never been conducted

And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an

experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the

literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it

because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to

comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned

them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass

condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There

is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would

tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of

their lives. The same at the other end of the scale – most people requested to drink

large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had

no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.

And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects

that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen – and no

experimenter has such resources – then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would

cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many

in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who

found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects

quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it

transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every

conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be

assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) – a conclusion that I

will not pause to explain in detail.

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know

that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct

it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical

in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most

specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink

substantial amounts of alcohol every day for several decades. The potential harm is

readily evident.

For example, drinking 10 glasses of wine per day, or even several glasses, will

predispose a person to accidents. A single experimental subject who consumed several

glasses of wine and then was incapacitated in an automobile accident would be all that

it would take to bring such research to a halt forever. The accident victim might

readily argue that the experiment requiring him to drink wine was responsible for his

accident, and that the experimenter – and the university at which he worked, and the

granting agency that funded his research – were liable for millions of dollars. In

anticipation of no more than the possibility of such a law suit, no granting agency

would fund such research, and no university or research institution would allow it to be

conducted under its roof.

Consuming substantial amounts of alcohol can not only cause accidents, but it can also

ruin health, destroy careers, distort personalities, break up marriages – for which

reason no experiment will ever require subjects to consume substantial amounts of

alcohol over extended periods of time. The possibility of harm, and thus of law suits,

can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a

subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and

unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his

marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him

sue for damages.

And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would

be invalid

Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the

double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating

alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were

conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way

of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best

experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the

subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in – they might not know, for

example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a

placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were

drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been

sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being

even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would

immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly

distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine

experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly

infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into.

A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the

experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For

example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until

the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo.

In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter

monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over

opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been

consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well.

The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it,

confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity

effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group

would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they

might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets,

exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in

order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a

large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental

treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended

changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one

direction or the other.

Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the

experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects

do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less

wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably

end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and

hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in

longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in

beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption.

But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may

appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding

variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able

to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend

a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose

to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am

able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low

end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing

health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not

require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to

destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific

method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make

their appearance in a non-double-blind experiment, that such an experiment must be

considered to be fatally defective, and that no cause-effect conclusion can ever be

drawn from it with confidence.

Thus, no valid experiment exists. In short, we can be sure that no experiment has ever

been conducted to ascertain the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on longevity,

and that if such an experiment had ever been conducted, the impossibility of its being

double-blind, or even blind, would render it inconclusive.

The French Paradox Research

Must Have Been Correlational

But if the data featured in your 60 Minutes broadcast was not experimental, then what

was it? It must, by default, have been correlational. That is, rather than subjects

being assigned randomly to groups and being required to drink a given volume of alcohol

each day, it must have been merely observed what volume of alcohol they chose to drink

each day.

Alcohol consumption would be measured by self-report. Well, it is not quite true that

the experimenter would observe what volume of alcohol his subjects drank daily. It

would be impractical to follow subjects around and actually see how much alcohol they

consumed in restaurants, in bars, in their homes. Much more likely is that every once

in a long while, the subjects would be mailed a questionnaire asking them to report how

much alcohol they had been drinking lately. The inability to measure alcohol

consumption directly is already a weakness – subjects might not remember accurately how

much they had been drinking, or they might experience some pressure to distort how much

they had been drinking either upward or downward. However, this is not at all the big

weakness that I want to bring out, so let us get to that without further delay.

We have already seen that random assignment guarantees pre-treatment equality on all

dimensions. I first recapitulate that in the case of the random assignment of subjects

to groups in an experiment, we were guaranteed that the subjects in each group would be

initially equivalent on every conceivable dimension. The larger the random groups, the

closer to being precisely equal on every conceivable dimension would they become. Thus,

in a properly designed and executed double-blind experiment, any differences that

subsequently arose between groups would have to be attributed to the different

treatments that the experiment had administered to them – for example, if some groups

lived longer than others, nothing else would be able to explain this except that some

groups had consumed a different volume of wine than others.

Natural assignment guarantees pre-treatment inequality on many dimensions. But in a

correlational study, subjects are not assigned to groups randomly, they assign

themselves to groups naturally. A subject who is in a no-wine group, for example, is

one who has himself decided that he does not drink wine. Thus, the groups are referred

to not as randomly constituted, but as naturally constituted, as if nature had come

along and assigned each subject to one of the groups. Now here comes the really

important part. It is that experience teaches us that naturally-constituted groups are

capable of differing from each other on every conceivable dimension, and are highly

likely to differ from each other substantially on a number of dimensions. In other

words, people who drink no wine are likely to differ from people who drink several

glasses of wine in many ways. Perhaps the non-drinkers will have more females, and the

drinkers will have more males – or perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the drinkers will be

older or younger. Perhaps the drinkers will be richer or poorer. Perhaps the drinkers

will tend to be single and the teetotallers tend to be married, or vice versa.

Differences may readily be discovered in height, in weight, in education. Differences

could quite plausibly be discovered in smoking, in drug use, in exposure to industrial

pollutants, in diet. People who drink will tend to live in different parts of the city

from people who don't drink. People who drink may watch more television, use microwave

ovens more, spend more time breathing automobile exhaust – or less. As people of

different ethnic backgrounds, or religions, or races drink different amounts, it follows

that people who drink different amounts will differ in ethnic background, in religion,

and in race.

One can speculate about thousands of ways in which drinkers could differ from

teetotallers, and if one actually examined two such groups, one would find a few

dimensions on which such extraneous differences were large, several dimensions on which

such extraneous differences were moderate, and a large number of dimensions on which

such extraneous differences were present but small. The hurdle that the correlational

researcher is never able to overleap is that given that he is unable to look for every

conceivable difference, he will never know all the ways in which his

naturally-constituted groups did indeed differ from each other.

Natural groups may eat different amounts of broccoli. And so then, no cause-effect

conclusion will ever be possible from a correlational study. If the moderate drinkers

happen to live longer, we will never be able to conclude that this is caused by their

moderate drinking, because it might be caused by how close they live to high-voltage

lines or how often they wash their hands or how far they drive to work or how much

toothpaste they swallow or how much they salt their food or how close they sit to their

televisions or how many pets they keep or whether they sleep with their windows open or

whether they finish their broccoli. In an experiment, random assignment of subjects to

groups guarantees equality on all such extraneous dimensions, and this makes

cause-effect conclusions possible. In a correlational study, natural assignment of

subjects to groups guarantees inequality on many such extraneous dimensions, and this

makes cause-effect conclusions impossible.

Correlation does not imply causality. Every textbook on statistics or research

methodology underlines this same caveat, captured in the expression "correlation does

not imply causality," which warns that from correlational data, it is impossible to tell

what caused what. Science has developed only a single method for determining what

caused what – and that method is the experiment. No experiment, no cause effect

conclusion – it's that simple. Given correlational data, furthermore, there is no way

of extracting cause-effect conclusions by more subtle or more advanced analyses – no way

of equating the groups statistically, no way of matching subjects to achieve

statistically the pre-treatment equality that is needed to arrive at cause-effect

conclusions. Advanced methods of analyzing correlational data do exist, and are used by

naive researchers, and to the layman may appear to be effective, but the reality is that

all are fatally flawed, all have been demonstrated in the literature to be ineffective

and to lead to inconclusive results. The bottom line is that there is no way to extract

cause-effect conclusions from correlational data.

You overlooked that the causal direction might be reversed. In the case of The French

Paradox finding, I can readily see a plausible alternative interpretation as to how the

observed data could have arisen. The data do seem to show that as drinking declines

from a high to a moderate level, longevity increases. This accords with the notion that

alcohol is toxic, and that its effects are deleterious. What constitutes The French

Paradox, however, is that when one goes even farther along the drinking continuum from

moderate drinking all the way down to no drinking at all, instead of longevity

increasing still higher, the opposite happens – longevity shrinks.

What distinguishes the scientifically-trained mind from that of the layman in this case

is that the layman thinks of a single interpretation, and seizing on that as the only

one possible, stops thinking. That is, the layman thinks "Drinking not at all is

unhealthy, therefore I can improve my health by drinking." The scientifically-trained

mind, in contrast, recognizes that in correlational data a large number of

interpretations is possible, acknowledges the first interpretation that springs to mind

as one among the many that are possible, and keeps looking, and keeps finding, a number

of alternative interpretations, and ultimately acknowledges the impossibility of

choosing among them.

As illustrated in my own case. Specifically, I happen to find myself in a

naturally-constituted zero-alcohol group. That is, I drink not at all, or very close to

not at all. There is a reason for this, and that is that the effects of alcohol upon me

are toxic. Mainly, I get splitting headaches, even from the ingestion of small amounts

of alcohol, particularly if the alcohol comes in the form of wine. I take this to mean

that my constitution is weak, that I am unable to process alcohol efficiently, that I am

unable to detoxify my body of alcohol the way that others can, that my body chemistry is

not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink.

Please mark well what I have just done – I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion

that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but

what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not

drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't

know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal

direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we

first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a

situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are

destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol.

That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good

reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking.

Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a

correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or

longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that

hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes

hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates

don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling

shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly

recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short

life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All

that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is

to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case.

Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of

studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and

many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect

conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that

ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With

respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief

conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies.

(2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may

witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a

different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real

wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient

which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking

wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment

demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short

duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating

a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as

mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity,

since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative.

In short, the only research that can prove that prolonged drinking of three to five

glasses of wine per day can extend life is the non-feasible experiment that we have

already discussed above in which subjects are required to drink different amounts of

wine over an extended period of time, and the effects on longevity noted.

The Harm That You May Have Done.

What the above reasoning leads us to, then, is that you were without justification for

promoting the conclusion that you did – that drinking three to five glasses of wine each

day extends life. Quite possibly, your conclusion had the effect of increasing the

consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly wine, and possibly, the effects of this

increased consumption have been uniformly bad.

These may be among the damaging effects of your advice. The level of alcohol

consumption that you advocate slows reaction times and interferes with coordination and

impairs judgment, and therefore invites accidents. Certainly no airline pilot would be

permitted to consume a fraction of your recommended daily intake and still be allowed to

fly, and certainly every driver should recognize that he is putting himself at risk

drinking as much as you advocate. We recognize the damage that your advice may have

inflicted when we take into account that except for infants and the aging, accidents are

the leading cause of death.

The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate interferes with, or makes quite

impossible, difficult mental work. Thus, a university student who follows your advice

and has a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner is finished for the day – he might

as well head out to a pub after that, because he will find his calculus homework quite

incomprehensible. A chemistry professor who follows your advice and has a couple of

glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself making mistakes as he tries to lay out

the electron configuration of aluminum for his class – he had better find some simpler

topic to treat in that lecture if he doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of his

students. A lawyer arguing a complex case who follows your advice and has a couple of

glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself losing the thread of his argument in

court – he had better let his junior take over that afternoon if he wants to maintain

his reputation.

The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate may damage health. The level of

alcohol consumption that you advocate possibly saps energy and depletes motivation,

possibly leads to more time spent in small talk and in television viewing, and less in

productive work and creative effort. Undoubtedly, the level of alcohol consumption that

you advocate promotes outright alcoholism. Yours has been a call based on

pseudo-science to abandon sobriety and embrace intoxication – hardly a direction that

American culture needs to be pushed in.

The French Paradox and The Ugly Face of Freedom were equally flawed. And to return to

the comparison of your 23Oct94 broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom to your 5Nov95

broadcast The French Paradox, I do see a striking parallel. In both cases, you didn't

know what you were talking about, but stepped forward and talked anyway. Given that you

had not studied the subjects to which you addressed yourself, given that you had not

thought about them, given that you were capable of nothing better than passing along the

most superficial, man-in-the-street, off-the-top-of-my-head conclusions, the truly

remarkable thing is that you would have the arrogance to think yourself worthy of

standing up in front of tens of millions of people and telling them what was your

opinion. Yet that is what you did, and in each case, you got it wrong. Your many

conclusions in these two broadcasts ranged from totally opposite to the truth to totally

unsupported by the evidence. The Ugly Face of Freedom for which you will always be

remembered in the Ukrainian community was wrong and destructive. The French Paradox

which judging from its Internet prominence appears to be your best-remembered broadcast

among your total audience – was also wrong, and also destructive.

A word concerning self-help. If you yourself subscribe to the prescription of drinking

three to five glasses of wine each day, then I would recommend that you attempt to break

yourself of the habit, and substitute for the many hours of inebriation thus avoided

some sober study. Had you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober reading

of history, you might have spared yourself the fiasco of The Ugly Face of Freedom. Had

you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober study of scientific method, you

might have spared yourself the fiasco of The French Paradox. Perhaps you have no more

than to look at these two pratfalls in your own career to see how damaging is the effect

of making a habit of indulging in alcohol.

Disclosure would be a step toward restoring professional credibility. As enthusiasm for

your French Paradox broadcasts seems to have its source in the wine industry, and as

your integrity has been brought into question on the matter of The Ugly Face of Freedom,

I wonder if your professional standing would not be enhanced by your assuring 60 Minutes

viewers that you have received no benefits from the wine industry in gratitude for the

increased sales that your French Paradox broadcasts have brought it. The absence of

such an assurance will invite some 60 Minutes viewers to construe your French Paradox

broadcasts more as infomercials than as investigative reporting.

Lubomyr Prytulak

cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike

Wallace.

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 1553 hits since 26Apr99

Morley Safer Letter 8 26Apr99 One out of 40 escaped shooting

It looks very much, Mr. Safer, as if on your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly

Face of Freedom, your chief witness testifying to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis

was himself a war criminal of substantial proportions, a former Gestapo agent with the

blood of many on his hands, perhaps much of it Jewish blood.

April 26, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I bring to your attention the following excerpt from an article by L. A. Ruvinsky

published in the Ukrainian Historical Journal in 1985:

After the end of the Second World War, the former head of the Lviv

Gestapo, P. Krause, replying to a question put by the writer V. P.

Bieliaev, testified: "If on our side, in the Gestapo, there had not

worked several agents from among the Zionists, we would never have been

able to capture and destroy such a large number of Jews, who were

living under false documents and assumed names." For example, in July

1941, Zionist Simon Wiesenthal, together with 39 other representatives

of the Lviv intelligentsia, found himself in prison. Somehow, as a

result of a "mysterious confluence of circumstances" all the arrested

except for himself were shot, and he was freed. It is not surprising

that after this, this Zionist provocateur became a regular Nazi agent.

Polish journalists have established this as an indisputable fact. That

is why the Hitlerites did not throw Wiesenthal into prison, which he

frequently confirms, but rather sent him there to organize subsequent

provocations. Evidently he was not lying when he said that he passed

through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps. In any case, it is not

difficult to imagine how many innocent victims are on the conscience of

this impenitent Zionist provocateur. It is such loathsome services for

the Fascist killers that were performed in the Yanivsky concentration

camp, in which people of various nationalities found themselves

Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.

L. A. Ruvinsky, The criminal conspiracy of Zionists and Fascists on the

eve of, and during the years of, the Second World War, Ukrainian

Historical Journal, 1985, No. 9, pp. 99-109, p. 105, translated from

the Ukrainian by Lubomyr Prytulak.

The above statement, by itself, is certainly insufficient to establish that Simon

Wiesenthal passed the war years as a Gestapo agent. However, it is even by itself

sufficient to lead an investigative journalist to ask Mr. Wiesenthal certain questions:

(1) Was Simon Wiesenthal in fact arrested along with 39 other members of the Lviv

intelligentsia?

(2) Was Simon Wiesenthal the only one of the 40 who avoided execution?

(3) Did Simon Wiesenthal pass through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps?


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