Bad Luck Causes Cancer

I can believe this. (originally from Science Magazine)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Plain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking.

The researchers said on Thursday random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division are the prime culprits behind many cancer types.

They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian and brain cancer, could be explained largely by these random mutations – essentially biological bad luck.

If nothing else, it may be worth remembering: The Bad Luck theory of cancer.

“When someone gets cancer, immediately people want to know why,” said oncologist Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who conducted the study published in the journal Science with Johns Hopkins biomathematician Cristian Tomasetti.

“They like to believe there’s a reason. And the real reason in many cases is not because you didn’t behave well or were exposed to some bad environmental influence, it’s just because that person was unlucky. It’s losing the lottery.”

Tomasetti said harmful mutations occur for “no particular reason other than randomness” as the body’s master cells, called stem cells, divide in various tissues.

Although of course the article goes on to link smoking and lung cancer. That’s a dogmatic article of faith. It’s heresy to deny it.

Another sort of ban:

France is a country where so-called “anti-racist” organizations, heavily subsidized by the government, fight for the most part only a single “racism”: “Islamophobia.”

It is now a country where the only people allowed to speak freely of Islam to large audiences are those who describe it as a religion of peace and unlimited love.

People prosecuted and fined for uttering critical remarks on Islam, such as Christine Tasin, say out loud what thousands think without daring to speak.

Polls show that French citizens in ever-increasing numbers are concerned about the rising proportion of unintegrated Muslims in the country, the endless expansion of no-go zones, the increasing number of Islamic converts, and the “replacement” of the French people.

So the media reports daily that the Islamic State goes around raping women and chopping people’s heads off, and that Al Qaeda suicide bombers blow themselves up all over the place, which is kinda bound to lower people’s opinion of Islam, but they’re not allowed to say so?

I think that when some idea or practice gets banned, that’s an almost sure-fire way to make people adopt the idea or practice. Just like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. So everyone in Europe will end up hating Islam. And everyone will end up smoking, because nobody will believe that smoking causes lung cancer.

Or when something gets banned, it means that the usual methods of persuasion are no longer working.

And Scotland has got its first case of Ebola:

The Ebola Crisis That Never Ended

On the same day that the World Health Organization announced that 20,000 people have been infected with the virus, Scotland got its first case….

Meanwhile, on Monday, Liberia also announced a recent surge of new cases, which tempered hopes that the outbreak had stabilized there.

With this news, Ebola may be primed for a public awareness comeback in the United States. Earlier this month, the White House announced that Ron Klain would finish his tenure as “Ebola czar” in March. On Sunday, however, Klain was back on Meet the Press, where he continued to sound the alarm about the virus, calling it a “global threat” that won’t be finished “until we get all the way to zero.”

I think mentioning Ebola may have been banned too.