What? Good News from the Middle East? - Jonathan Edelstein thinks so. He's been following recent developments in the matter of the Palestinian "right of return" demand. Check his item for details. His conclusion:

The outline of a viable two-state solution is becoming conceptually clearer by the day; the only question is how many more people will die before the level of mutual trust and courage becomes sufficient to implement that solution.

The Return

Somewhere I picked up this odd fetish. I want to know the origins of food.

Not the first sentence of a newly-discovered story by Jorge Luis Borges. Rather the beginning of an entry on Dan Scheltema's Mark Two version of Dislogue. Dan's an old poet buddy from Compuserve and the West Chester conference, a fly fisherman and bon vivant. Dislogue is a culture blog in the tradition of God of the Machine and Polytropos. Culture broadly defined, needless to say. Dan also runs a work-oriented medical privacy news blog, which you should definitely read if that's the sort of thing you want to read.

That's [Not Yet] the News - Not found on Kazaa: Merle Haggard's forthcoming antiwar song. Also not yet found, the new Warren Zevon album, of which Brian "Access Hollywood" Linse says "I'm here to tell you that the work exceeds even my best hopes for a fitting final album from one of my all-time favorite artists." Nor can I find North, the forthcoming Elvis Costello album some are calling "Painted From Memory II." (This does not scare me away. To my mind, the two most durable EC albums in the last dozen years or so are the non-rockers, PFM and The Juliet Letters.)

California is on the other side of the country from here. I just don't give a shit about the recall election, if you're wondering. Actually, I don't give a shit even if you're not wondering, but you get the idea.

File under: Things We Don't Blog About And Why.

It's the Freakin' Weekend and I'm about to have me some fun - in New York City. Tomorrow night, I'm going to hear Patrick Nielsen Hayden's band, Whisperado, play at Otto's Shrunken Head, 535 E 14th St, between Avenues A and B. The Talking Dog, having determined that I do not smell bad and am not an axe murderer by an exhaustive investigation consisting of asking me if I smell bad or am an axe murderer, is letting me crash on the Talking Sofa Bed afterward. If you're a New York Loyal Reader or blogger, come by the Head, as it were, and have fun. Show starts at 8 and is slated to last an hour. I have it on the best authority that Teresa Nielsen Hayden will be there too.

16 Little Words - Well, 10 actually. "I think I fried the motherboard, and the fatherboard too" turns out to have been an overreaction and an overstatement. Acting on a tip from loyal reader R. Brockman, I checked and replaced the power supply. And here I am. Total cost of replacement part and one hour's blogging from the game and internet place? $40. Total donations? Considerably more.

So, does anyone want their money back? I feel kind of embarrassed now. If you don't reclaim it, I'll just spend it on myself - renew the site domain and hosting contract when the time comes, stuff like that. Maybe price wireless networking hubs. But I didn't make a "Donate because I'm swell" appeal, I asked for help getting the site back in operation and that turned out to be cheaper than I thought. The buck stops with my special assistant for Near East Affairs.

Also, crisis over, I've removed the Paypal button. Thank you very much to the generous people who contributed in my hour of need.

It's Been Real - Less than five minutes to go before my internet connection turns into a pumpkin. More drive-by blogging tomorrow or Sunday, I hope.

What have I learned tonight? M-10s are, apparently, "gay." I'd never have learned that surfing from home. Also, IE5 sucks.

Hunh?? - What's up with Gene Healy's site????

Yes, Sir, Mr. Kettle! - Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles, decries libertarians. The conflation of libertarianism with Ann Rand with what Fleming clearly takes to be an atomist view wouldn't even be excusable in someone who could reasonably claim ignorance. But Fleming, who despite his tirade has published many libertarian writers, can't make that claim. But the sheer amusement value of being called "irrelevant" by a paleoconservative more than makes up for any offense. Fleming bought two or three poems from me a decade ago, by the way, and he can be a fun read. (Link via Letter from Gotham.)

Local Color - Maybe there's hope that, one day, we can make a libertarian out of Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge after all:

Living in this town, what amazes me more than the sheer size of the federal government itself is the number of consulting companies that are hard at work “implementing strategies” and “adding value” for the government. CSC employs 90,000 people and seems to have its fingers in just about every slice of the Homeland Security pie, and yet you’ve never heard of them. At least, I hadn’t. It’s a wacky world.

Note to Nate: you're docked the 20-point "this town" penalty.

I Don't Want to Talk About It and neither does Jesse Walker, but he pretty much says what I too have to say about the flaccid appendage dangling from America's east coast and its role in the last Presidential election. Then, because nobody can wade into that particular swamp and get out cleanly, he says it again.

They Said It - Antiwar.com columnist Anthony Gancarski wrote an overwrought and peevish column about what he takes to be Howard Dean's genuflecting toward AIPAC. And was instantly rebuked for it:

Opponents of U.S. intervention abroad have always taken George Washington's wise counsel, in his "Farewell Address," as a guide to America's proper relationship to the rest of the world, and it deserves to be read closely. I would remind Gancarski that, in addition to advising us against "excessive partiality for one foreign nation," the Father of our country also warned against "excessive dislike of another." On the subject of Israel, or any other foreign country, non-interventionsts aren't for or against, they are neutral.

So writes, well, take a guess before you click the link.

Never Doubt Me Again - Did I not predict the return of this guy months over a year ago? The Sydney Morning-Herald reports :

Pentagon hard-liners pressing for change of government in Iran have held secret, unauthorised meetings in Paris with an arms dealer who was a main figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

Now why would they do that?

The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.

The immediate objective appeared to be to "antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them".

And liberals complain that George Bush wasn't elected president! What would that make Donald Rumsfeld?

Is there a larger point here? Yeah. Some people, noticing that we haven't immediately charged into Syria, Iran or any of the half-dozen places on the benevolent hegemony "regime change" list have concluded that this is it, that hard-to-digest Iraq and our stretched force posture and the President's sagging approval ratings have drawn the "preemptive defense" era to a close almost as soon as it began. To these people I say: don't kid yourselves. The crowd around Cheney and the Project for a New American Century took 12 years to get the Iraqi encore they desired. It didn't just happen to break their way, either. They worked in a hundred small and large ways over a decade, publishing monographs and columns, networking, organizing and accumulating power in the Republican Party's defense policy hierarchy. If it takes them another decade to get their war with Iran and Syria and the House of Saud and whoever else, they'll be disappointed but not, as it were, deterred. Future Republican candidates and party officials will no more be able to ignore the neo-imperialists than Democratic leaders could scant the wishes of the public employee unions.

Day 4: Offerings Held Hostage - Hello, Loyal Readers! I'm in a PC Game and Internet place in Wheaton - "cafe" is not a term one would use. It's dark. This keyboard bites. There are teenagers talking each other through games of Capture the Flag in whatever shooter. They routinely violate the strictures against swearing posted above the check-in counter. (Also, no adult sites, no downloading "hacker or virus software" and, just so we're clear on this, no fighting.)

But I'm having fun, dammit! (%#%$*&% library closes at 5 on Fridays.)

A public thanks to everyone who donated to the cause of restoring regular service here. I'm already at the point where single component replacements are covered. I should know tomorrow whether that will do it. No names because I don't know how the donors would feel about that, but your generosity humbles me. Here follow 46 minutes of actual blogging before my three bucks run out.

Technical Difficulties - So this morning, Mrs. Offering calls downstairs that "There's definitely something wrong with the computer. It even smells bad." On inspection, it appears that, in the words of that commercial, I think I fried the motherboard, and the fatherboard too. So! Blogging will be sparse. I can't blog from work. The undisclosed location from which I'm posting this item is not regularly available to me. Also:

As I've mentioned on occasion, I didn't get into libertarianism because it seemed the way to safeguard my nonexistant riches. For various reasons, including Mrs. Offering's fabulous 40th birthday, a new computer is not in the budget this month. The ordinary budget anyway. So I've taken a step I never really expected to take and added a Paypal button over there to the left. It's a longshot, but if any loyal readers care to generously contribute to computer replacement or repair, I'll be enormously grateful. Monies collected will go toward the new PC or repair of the old PC (if possible), which is to say, toward getting UO back to full capacity. I further promise that if a miracle happens and lots of donations come in, I'll buy a really nice computer, and tell you how cool it is. All donors will receive invites to Mrs. Offering's birthday party, held the end of this month. Strike a blow for the free exchange of goods, services and ideas! And thanks in advance.

UPDATE: For the next day or so, Paypal will show me as an UNVERIFIED user. I just upgraded my account and they're in the process of confirming my bank info. But donations can still be made, and will get to me.

ALSO UPDATE: Most of me e-mail is on the dead machine. Apologies if I owe you a reply. If the hard drive can be salvaged, I'll get to it.

Cool It - Alan Sullivan lets the air out of an alarmist CNN item on global warming.

Estimated Time of Arrival Day - Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein is sponsoring an Arrival Day blogburst next month. He explains the holiday:

On September 7, 1654, the ship St. Catherine landed in what was then New Amsterdam, carrying 23 Jewish passengers. This was the beginning of a diaspora that will celebrate its 350th anniversary next year - which seems as good an occasion as any to hold the first Arrival Day barbecue and celebrate the things that make American Jews unique.

and the blogburst itself:

Everyone, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, is welcome to take part in the blogburst. Those who want to participate can post on any topic having to do with Jews and Judaism, and need not do so from a Jewish point of view; gentile readers are welcome to write about their encounters with Jews or Jewish culture, or any other relevant Jewish-related subject. I will link to all Arrival Day posts.

I will also host an offline celebration of Arrival Day to which my family, friends and all readers in the NYC area are invited. I will post more details on this as the date gets closer.

Jonathan stresses that

Arrival Day is different from other Jewish holidays in that it is a purely secular occasion - a celebration of the Jewish ethnic group rather than the Jewish religion. As such, non-Jews are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to participate. Just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, on Arrival Day everyone is Jewish.

Sounds like fun. He allows, modestly, that "Yes, I realize how presumptuous it is for a C-list blogger like me to call for a blogburst, but I have to start somewhere." to which, two reactions: the thought that Jonathan is a "C-List blogger" compared to some others simply galls. We should all have his equanimity and open-mindedness, and yes, I do mean "we." And he seems to understate his, well, chutzpah. He seems to be trying not just to start a blogburst but, really, a whole new holiday. Hey, Google it! Nada pertinent that comes not, ultimately, from Jonathan.

Well, go for it, man. I'll be there, as invited.

Just You Wait - My beloved niece got teased terribly by her tent mates at Girl Scout camp. I doubt there's much that could make her feel better about it now, but I cheered myself up by rereading Kelly Crumrin's intro to Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things (ONI Press):

Now that I'm an adult . . . I see that I'm part of the diaspora of kids that was driven from the village, for various reasons, and spent adolescence observing it all from the outside. We've formed our own tribes, and as far as I can see, we, the geeks, won. We're smarter, we're independent, we're more courageous and we value each other more than the kids who fit in without effort, blending in and never really getting to know themselves. I only wish I could tell my little sister, who's about Courtney's age, and rapidly moving from the unicorn stage to the moody poetry stage and reading everything she can get her hands on, to hang in there. Sure, it'll be a rough eight or ten years, but at the end of it, she'll be a conscious, brilliant, confident woman with a loving, like-minded community and her own unique style. It's worth the pain you feel now. Trust me. And grown-up geekboys do make the best partners. I should know.

Actually, come to think of it, that doesn't sound particularly comforting - eight years is a lifetime to a kid. And of course, you can't tell kids anything.

Geek triumphalism has its limits, god knows, but it has its uses too.

Dispatches from the Bleeding Edge - About that text selection problem in Mozilla Firebird I discussed yesterday. Reader Josh Kaderlan has determined that this problem is specific to version 0.6.1. It will presumably be cleared up in future versions. Remember that we're still dealing with pre-release software here.

Firebird rendering oddities seem to crop up especially with, oddly enough, blogs. For instance, the content column of Juan Cole's blog, essential for following developments in Iraq, is too wide - it sticks out past the right edge of the browser window. And the popup comments box for The Agitator has no scrollbars. Since Radley's comments box repeats the text of the blog item (and why, Radley?) that means you can't read comments in Firebird.

Support-A-Soldier - Via Tacitus and Calpundit, I've learned of a charity that lets you "foster" a single, specific US soldier assigned to you. Interest is apparently high, and the website cautions would-be donors that

Due to overwhelming demand, we must ask you to be patient. It could take up to a month before you will be contacted about adopting a soldier.

Don't worry: they'll still be out there in a month. Calpundit Kevin Drum's comment thread on the issue aims to answer the question, "So what should we send our soldier anyway?"

An Item Related to the One Below? - Salam quotes his Iraqi colleague Riverbend, e-mailing from Mosul:

Well, I'm telling you now- there have been plenty of casualties in Mosul during the 'gunfight' and after (in one of the wooded areas), but you'll be hearing about those in the following form: Troops Die in Car Accident in North of Iraq as Car Swerves to Avoid Crossing Sheep!

See also what Riverbend has to say about the position of women in post-Saddam Iraq. Meanwhile, G. in Baghdad ponders the dream of the "mukhabarat free society."

The Other Casualties - The Guardian takes up the matter of America's wounded. So does - strange bedfellows! - the Washington Times. The Times:

Walter Reed has treated about 750 patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom since the war began, 185 of whom have been battle casualties. Of the 185 battle casualties, 135 have been treated as inpatients and 50 as outpatients. The total number of battle casualty patients discharged is 111, including one death, leaving 24 currently at the medical center as inpatients.

The Guardian:

Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical centre in Bethesda, new marine injuries are delivered almost daily by a medical plane known as the Nightingale.

The Pentagon figure for "wounded in action" in Iraq is 827, but here again the total number of injuries appears to be much higher.

The estimate given by central command in Qatar is 926, but according to Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base, that too is understated.

"Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also," Col DeLane told National Public Radio.

He said 90% of injuries were directly war-related.

Some of that number may involve double-counting - if a soldier stays at the Andrews clinic on the way to Washington and then again on the way back to the war or back home, for example. But the actual number of wounded still appears to be much higher than the official figures.

Cut it in half to 2,000, keeping in mind that there will be wounded who don't pass through Andrews. Of those 2,000, some will make full recoveries, some will lose limbs, some will have throbbing headaches for the rest of their lives or tremors or bones that ache terribly in the rain or a propensity to waken out of sound sleep in a cold sweat.

This Just In - Ed Heil of the excellent EdBlog, which covers culture and roleplaying games, among other things, confirms that the correct pronunciation of "Polytropos" accents the second syllable, not the third. Writes Ed:

"pu-LI-tru-puss" would be a slightly Anglicized approximation of that -- perfectly correct.

"Polly-TRO-pos" is right out. Even though Greek is often pronounced with Anglo-Latin stresses and phonemes instead of the Greek (this is called the Henninian system), even under that system, the accent would fall on the antepenult, because the "o" in "tro" is short, making it a light syllable.

Nate has the rest. This makes me very happy. We've started a superhero campaign and one of my hero ideas was an omnicompetent fellow who got his abilities wandering in Europe and trying to get home. "Polytropos" was my first candidate name, but "Polly-TRO-pos" sounded off somehow, as a superhero name. Superhero naming is a tricky business. Even so good a writer as Brian Michael Bendis proves, in his POWERS series, to be hit-or-miss at coming up with them. Somehow, "pu-LI-tru-puss" sounds better to me.

On the imitation tech blog front, I call Movable Type users' attention to the campaign website linked in the previous paragraph. Note that it in no way resembes a weblog, but uses MT as a pure content manager. Cause I can. Nyah.

Further along the same front, I've discovered a Very Bad Thing about the current version of Mozilla Firebird, at least for bloggers: you can't select more than a single paragraph of text at a time from a webpage. That means that if you want to blog a lengthy passage, you have to copy each paragraph individually. This would kill some of my colleagues. So: the jury is very much out. I may go back to Opera yet.

UPDATE: Mrs. Offering and I watched Daredevil on DVD tonight, the first time we'd seen it since our viewing in the theater. We agreed that, if anything, we liked it better the second time around. That especially interests me since I'm coming at the movie from an aging fanboy perspective and she very much is not.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 169 pounds, 34.5" waist, up a pound from last week. I think it's fair to say this 168-169 range constitutes a definite plateau, having been here for a month now. On the bright side, I'm down to the last hole on my 32"-36" belt, which is belt number three since the diet started last Thanksgiving. (When I weighed 216 pounds.)

Fitness news: Avram Grumer recommends ExRx, the exercise prescription site - not least for its comprehensive list of muscles and exercises for same. This handy Walking Calorie Expenditures chart shows how many calories you'll burn per mile depending on how much you weigh. It's also how much you'll burn per mile running or, god help us, jogging - you'll just cover that mile faster. So a 150-pound walker who walks a mile at 3 mph burns 100 calories in 20 minutes, one who walks a mile at 4 mph burns 100 calories in 15 minutes and one who runs a mile in 7 minutes burns 100 calories in 7 minutes.

By the way, I have now discovered the absolute worst thing about "running":

It's kind of fun.

I can see how people get addicted to the activity. Now that I'm doing some, I feel its siren call. Best lash my knees to the rigging or they'll smash upon the rocks of repetitive motion injury.

ExRx also has a beginner's page.

The Toronto Star reports that

A study by researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton found that sedentary women who exercised in front of a mirror for 20 minutes felt less energized, less relaxed and less positive than women who performed their workout without a mirror . . . Even women who felt good about their bodies experienced these negative effects in front of their reflections, the researchers found. The researchers say more work needs to be done in "real-world exercise environments" and on women outside of the university community to see if the negative effects of mirrors are widespread.

See the two drug posts below this one for Things to Watch Out For When it Comes to Studies. Among other things, the McMaster researchers haven't demonstrated that the general less good feelings of the mirror women definitely translate into higher dropout rates.

Though it may chagrin Nate Bruinooge to find himself cited in a fitness blog item, his Polytropos essay about his experiences with advanced yoga classes is interesting and touches on the whole complex of exercise intensity and subjective benefits.

We find ourselves undecided between whether the correct pronunciation is POL-ly-TRO-pos or puh-LIT-ro-pos, by the way. Classicists are urged to settle the matter for us.

Your Talking Dog muses on one of the fittest men in America. It seems to upset him, but I think a) your TD is just jealous, and b) I want that job.

See what a public-spirited narcissist I've become? I'm frontloading the general-interest items this week!

Glenn Reynolds says he likes the fitness blog items, probably because they're not about the war.

Captain's Log, Supplemental: no time tonight for the Vitamins and Me material I've been meaning to get to. I can report, though, that the protien shakes you mix yourself in a blender are not only cheaper than the premixed canned versions, they're better-tasting too. Richer and shakier.

Reason I know: I've written about the thigh pain that afflicts me after lower-body workouts. It resembles ordinary Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness the way, as Tom Disch once put it, a Dyson Sphere resembles a lamp shade. It hurts to walk for many days after working out my quads. One reason I switched from SuperSlow to Body-for-Life weight training is the hope that the latter would hurt my legs less. Turned out not to. My orthopedist suggested putting ice on my quads for 20 minutes right after working out. A magazine suggested speeding recovery by an immediate post-workout infusion of protien, preferably liquid protien. So this week, I did both, and then lots more cold after the first 20 minutes too - basically, as soon as the blue stuff was ready again.

Results: bupkus. My leg pain is just as bad as it ever was.

I almost despair. For the next couple of weeks, I'm going to operate on the counter-intuitive theory that doing next-day aerobics regardless will increase suppleness and be better for them than limping along. If that turns out not to be the case, I may drop lower-body weight training entirely, or at least quad exercises. "Running" works hamstrings, calves and glutes and duckwalks will train the quads - I've felt it.

This is your Blog on Drugs - Much mail on this afternoon's cannabis post. Chad Orzel and I went back and forth on the Danish and CMHS numbers, basically demonstrating that we can't tell what figures they give are rounded and what are not. (CMHS states that about 1% of the population has schizophrenia and that 1% of those without a family history get schizophrenia. Both things simply can't be true. I assumed that the former figure was roughly correct and the latter simply wrong. Chad essentially grants CMHS the benefit of the doubt by assuming that rounding tolerances will fit both claims in. The Danish numbers make me doubt that CMHS should get that much benefit.)

Several people including Chad made an even more basic point that I would ordinarily catch. Who? Avram "Iron Man" Grumer for one:

And of course, there's always the possibility that having a predisposition towards schizophrenia correlates with lesser mental problems that cause stresses that are especially amenable to treatment with smoking pot.

And Marc Ramsey:

Of course, one would also need to know how these studies controlled for the possibility that those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis, might be at increased risk of becoming heavy cannabis users prior to becoming symptomatic. It is notoriously difficult to separate cause from effect in studies where it is not clear whether some of the variables are, in fact, independent. Anyone who has spent signifcant time with heavy users would note that a significant portion appear to be engaged in some form of self-medication...

And - but you already guessed this - Julian Sanchez:

So I have trouble buying this study. First, it just seems implausible that an effect of that magnitude would have gone unnoticed until now if it were there, what with so many folks out to prove the ills of pot.More importantly, though, maybe the study controls for this, but we already know that schizophrenics are *much* more likely to be smokers. Not because smoking makes you schizophrenic, but because something in cigarettes helps to mitigate the symptoms. My first suspicion upon finding this kind of correlation would be that people feeling the early onset of schizophrenic symptoms turn to dope, not that dope causes schizophrenia.

Julian is a cigarette smoker, by the way.

Anyway, point entirely taken. I'm pretty firmly in the camp that a lot of "recreational" drug use and abuse constitutes self-medication. (We have a family friend for whom marijuana was the only relief for his TMJ for many years, for instance.) As Chad put it

Anecdotally, there was a definite correlation between heavy drug use and mental instability, back when I was in college. And some of them were definitely goofy before they started smoking dope...

Short of offering lots of known schizophrenics the opportunity to smoke a lot of pot, though, I'm not sure how you'd figure out what's causation and what's just correlation. That might be entertaining (in a sick sort of way), but it wouldn't be what I'd call good medical practice...

Not bad reality-show programming, though.

Let's Play Hide the Essentials! - It's not just a fun but a popular game, though you need to be a journalist or a policy advocate to play. Ananova reports that

A recent Dutch study of 4,000 people in the general population showed that those taking large amounts of cannabis were almost seven times more likely to have psychotic symptoms three years later.

Another study, in 1987, of 50,000 Swedish Army conscripts, found that those who admitted at age 18 to having taken cannabis on more than 50 occasions, were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia in the following 15 years.

Professor Murray said these findings had been largely ignored.

(Link via One Man Gang.) So what's missing? Only the crucial baseline risk of developing schizophrenia in the first place. If one in 10 million people develop schizophrenia in the normal course of things then heavy cannabis consumption raises the risk to 6 or 7 in 10 million. If one in a hundred people develop schizophrenia, then the cannabis enthusiast's risk rises from 1% to as high as 7%. That's a big difference, and if you're to intelligently manage the tradeoff between danger and pleasure in your life, it's a damned important one to know.

But of course you are not to intelligently manage the tradeoff between danger and pleasure in your life - that's for the likes of Ananova.com and Professor Murray.

Trying to find the baseline risk of schizophrenia on the net, I first learn instead that men are 42% more likely to develop schizophrenia than women, that structural brain abnormalities may be good predictors of risk (and that, per the same article, being related to a schizophrenic is itself a risk indicator) and that, in Denmark anyway, First- and second-generation immigrants have an increased risk of schizophrenia, according to the British Royal College of Psychiatrists. Finally in this article we learn that

Using data from the Danish Civil Registration System, the researchers analysed information on 2.14 million people born between January 1954 and 31st December 1983 who were living in Denmark by their 15th birthday . . . It was found that 10,244 people developed schizophrenia during the period studied. Foreign birth was associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia.

That's about one half of one percent of all Danes. That's still not a baseline risk, though. To get a baseline risk, you'd need to knock out the effect of maleness, heredity, immigrant status and other known risk factors.

The Danes also determined that urban growth and upbringing increase the risk of schizophrenia, though Reuters won't say how much.

Christian Mental Health Services avers that "Rates of schizophrenia are very similar from country to country—about 1 percent of the population," which is not what the Danish study shows and, again, is not a baseline risk. But we're in the ballpark. CMHS also says

Family studies indicate that genetic vulnerability is a risk factor for schizophrenia. A person with a parent or sibling with schizophrenia has approximately a 10 percent risk of developing the disorder compared to a 1 percent risk for a person with no family history of schizophrenia.

At the very least we're in the ballpark now, with a baseline risk somewhere between slightly below the Danish 0.5% and CMHS's 1%. My back-of-the-WinCalc estimates suggest that if 1% of the population has schizophrenia, that they and their close relatives constitute 5% of the population. Per the risk figures, 10% of those 5% should develop schizophrenia, which is 0.5% of the general population. That's half the cases. The other half come from the 95% of the population without close schizophrenic relatives, which is to say their risk is .5/.95 or 0.53%. If you prefer the Danish figure, you'd cut that in half.

So, armed with a little more data we can conclude that heavy cannabis use, one way or another, appears to take your risk of developing schizophrenia from something you can't roll on percentile dice to something you can - anywhere between 2 and 7%. Speaking as a gamer who has rolled percentile dice, I ain't touchin' that. You may feel differently, and if you do, more power to you. And if you fall into a high-risk group for schizophrenia, having a close schizophrenic relative or predictive brain abnormalities, you'd have to be - pardon the expression - insane to engage in heavy cannabis use, given what the studies appear to show.

What I'm saying is, speaking as a die-hard libertarian skeptical of every drug claim I meet until proven otherwise, this data scares me - now. But because it came wrapped in vagueness and mystery like every junk science study that ever gets reported, I was inclined to discount it. Every popular-press account of relative risk studies should include baseline risk information, as a matter of simple professionalism and even ethics. Hardly any of them do. Because it's not about enabling you to make informed judgments.