Category Archives: Science and Edumacation

Politics, Science and Edumacation, The Nanny State, War on Terror

Monday Morning Linkorama

  • NYT on a drug crusader. This guy disconcerts me for two reasons. One, things like this:

    In his article on Avandia, Dr. Nissen was careful to note the limitations of his analysis. In some media interviews, though, he was less guarded. On the ABC television program “Nightline,” Dr. Nissen predicted that the deaths caused by Avandia could “dwarf” the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.

    Which is nonsense. Second, he seems to be of the school that only 100% safe drugs should be on the market. But, fool that I am, I think people should be allowed to make their decisions. As long as they know the potential risks, they can decide for themselves whether pain-killers like Vioxx or anti-diabetes meds like Avandia are worth it.

  • Apparently, problems at oil refineries are raising prices. Clearly, this is a conspiracy by Bush.
  • Boortz outdoes himself with this stupidity::

    Feingold said that Bush made misleading public statements on the war and went into Iraq without adequate military preparation. You know what? There has never been a war that this country entered with adequate military preparation. Feingold would have to censure FDR if this was the test. There was no way in hell the U.S. was prepared for war in 1941. The Japanese brought the war to us, and we responded. The Islamic fascists have now brought us war once again, and once again we must respond.

    Um, Neal? We had to go into World War II against two major superpowers on short notice in the middle of a Depression. We invaded Iraq with years of preparation times as the only superpower on the planet with a great economy. Those situations aren’t even remotely comparable.

    We could have been prepared. Men like Colin Powell tried to get use prepared with more troops and more allies. But Rummy wouldn’t have it.

    I usually like Boortz — still like him. But these World War II comparisons short circuit my temper. Bush supporters — what few of you remain — please memorize the following:

    World War II was not the only war in American History. Ths situation in Iraq is not even remotely comparable to World War II. If it were, Bush would have, like FDR, cut spending, instituted a draft and raised taxes. He would not be treating the war like it’s an annoyance he can’t seem to get rid of and would spend more time attacking the enemy than the other party.

    • 'Culture', Science and Edumacation

    Norm

    I’ve referenced Norman Borlaug twice in the last few weeks. I was going to write a long diatribe on how no one knows who this great American is, but Easterbrook, damn him, beat me to it.

    Borlaug is 93 and I hope he’s with us until he’s 193. I’ve heard him on television and his wit and intelligence is as vibrant as ever. But when goes, his tombstone could be inscribed, “one billion saved” as that’s the conservative estimate of how many lives he’s saved worldwide.

    And you probably know more about Brittany Spears’ underwear or lack thereof.

    Pathetic.

    One of Glenn Reynolds’ readers adds:

    Gregg Easterbrook has it half right about why Norman Borlaug is ignored by the press. It’s not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It’s that Mr. Borlaug didn’t serve the poor by giving away other people’s money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

    You won’t see any accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.

    This is an excellent point. Contrast the attention given to people like Bono or Princess Di to Borlaug. It’s amazing.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Politics 4, Science 1

    Radley Balko calls Carmona out on his own tendency to distort science:

    One issue Carmona didn’t address is medical marijuana. Last year, the FDA put out a baldly political press release claming that “no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States.”

    This is flatly wrong. A wide-ranging 1999 Institute of Medicine report actually did show medical benefits from smoked marijuana while also finding minimal harmful side effects. The FDA press release was right in one respect: There have been no conclusive studies since. But there’s a good reason for that: The federal government won’t allow them.

    Carmona didn’t mention medical marijuana in his list of grievances because Carmona isn’t any more interested in actual science on the medical marijuana issue than the Bush administration is. When the New York Times asked him his position on the issue, he gave the odd reply that he was against medical marijuana because, “Smoking is bad for you.”

    In other interviews, Carmona has said medical marijuana is a “science issue, not a political issue,” which would be a great answer had Carmona actually looked at the science during his tenure and not merely at the political landscape.

    And this:

    Last year, for example, Carmona boldly claimed that America’s weight problem was a “terror within,” and that the threat posed by obesity would “dwarf 9/11, or any other terrorist event.”

    Carmona trumpeted claims from the Centers for Disease Control that obesity kills 400,000 Americans each year to support his bizarre and completely out-of-context comparison, despite claims from critics that the 400,000 was exaggerated and flawed by poor methodology.

    The CDC later admitted its obesity mortality estimate was off by a factor of 15.

    Read the whole thing. Don’t expect the left to have hamsters over this they way they do about global warming. Because distorting the facts and politicizing science is only an issue for Republicans. It’s fine when Democrats and nanny-staters do it.

    Science and Edumacation

    The Plural of Anecdote

    One of the things that drives me berzerk about the global warming debate is the use of anecdotal evidence. Global warming supporters will cite Hurricane Katrina or a hot summer as evidence that global warming exists. Global warming detractors will cite a cold winter as evidence that it’s false.

    In science, this is known as “cherry picking” — taking only the data that support your view instead of analyzing all the data. Global warming is a slow process, one that’s much more subtle than the natural year to year variations in global temperature. It doesn’t just show up in July all of the sudden.

    Imagine that you were listening to the radio. Sometimes the music is loud, sometimes the music is soft. But the volume is being turned up slowly — so slowly you can hardly notice. But after a while, you have a headache.

    A graph of the planet’s temperature will look very spikey as we have cold years and warm years — literally noise. But slowly, the spikes are moving upward.

    Whatever you think of global warming, the plural of anecdote is not data (hat tip, Robert). A hurricane or a heat wave do not prove global warming any more than a cold snap disproves it. It’s the slow steady accumulation of planet-wide data that reveals the process.

    Law and Order, Politics, Science and Edumacation, Socialism, Sports

    Friday Linkorama

  • God, I love Fire Joe Morgan.
  • Remember how the sun is supposed to be causing global warming? Er, not so much.
  • This is outrageous. The music industry is now suing to get money from cover bands.

    Andrus said a friend of his who owned a restaurant that did not feature music was contacted by a company looking to charge him because it owned the rights to a Hank Williams Jr. song, “Are You Ready for Some Football?” The song preceded every “Monday Night Football” telecast, which the restaurant carried on its televisions.

    We need to seriously revisit our copyright laws. And by that, I don’t mean “give the recording industry yet more power”.

  • Continuing in that vein, weep for the death of Net Radio and the pending death of Fair Use.
  • Read this profile of the governor of Alaska. This is the first Republican I’ve read about in twenty years who inspires me — and not just because she’s hot. Know hope.
  • The NYT notes that everyone who is planning to create universal coverage is linking it to “controlling costs”. that’s libspeak for rationing.
    • 'Culture', Science and Edumacation

    Perspective

    Via Sully some thoughts:

    Watching Planet Earth, I was stuck by the sheer difficulty of life. You can’t help but feel for these animals, as they are forced to scrounge out a miserable existence in their ecological niche. I’m thinking of the desert kangaroos, who have to lick their paws to keep from overheating in 140 degree surface temperatures. Or the male polar bears, who are forced to swim for sixty miles in icy ocean in search of food. Or the penguins, huddled with their eggs in Antarctica. Life is short , nasty and brute. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

    And then I looked at myself, lazing on a couch and complaining about the lack of air-conditioning as I sipped my cold beer. I have absolutely no understanding of the struggle for existence, or just how cruel the selection of the fittest really is. Most Americans live similar lives of luxury. As a result, we don’t realize that staying alive (let alone reproducing) is damn hard work. And this leads us to dramatically underestimate the creative powers of natural selection. Most of us think it’s absurd that a simple algorithmic process could create an orchid, or a human brain, or hundreds of thousands of beetle species, in “just” a few hundred million years. Thus, we invoke God. But perhaps the ingenuity of evolution appears less absurd from the perspective of the male emperor penguin, who is shivering in a -90 degree blizzard right now.

    It’s not just the creationists. Our lack of understanding of the brutality of the natural world underplay all our attitudes. It’s Neal Boortz complaining that Planet Earth is too violet; it’s people claiming anything is too violent; it’s an anti-abortion movement that doesn’t understand how nature murders 50-80% of fetuses; it’s feminists who don’t remember that motherhood used to be the only thing a woman had time for; it’s socialized medicine morons who think we’ve cured all disease and can cripple innovation.

    The natural order of nature is brutality. We are fools if we forget this. Because nature will happily remind us of it on a moment’s notice.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Political Science

    The politicization of science has been in the news quite a bit lately.

    The thing is, this cuts both ways. It’s not just Republicans, no matter what the Bad Astronomer says. Al Gore is running around saying the seas are going to rise ten times more than even the most ambitious models predict; the greens are very eager to blame every disaster on global warming while anything that supports the Nanny State is trumpted as though proven fact.

    In fact, as Radley Balko pointed out, the exiting surgeon general, who is complaining about the politicization of science happily trumpeted an obesity death figure he knew to be garbage while telling us a whiff of second hand smoke would give us lung cancer.

    But then again, that’s in a good cause. And as we’ve found out, lies, distortions and evasions are only bad when they support conservative positions.

    Culture War, Law and Order, Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Weekend Linkorama

  • Obama wants to bring back merit pay for teachers. The thing is, this has been tried. And you end up giving merit pay raises to everyone to avoid nasty lawsuits and union actions.
  • Half the public wants Bush impeached. The numbers sound a little bit fishy to me. But as I said during the Clinton business, impeaching a President would be a lot of fun, would serve to keep future Presidents on their toes and wouldn’t do much harm. Of course, if Clinton hadn’t been impeached, we might have gotten Social Security reform.
  • Balko is on fire lately. He has a little note on some bizarre arrests and a brutal takedown of Michael Gerson’s bizarre assertion that Second Life represents Libertarianism.
  • Continuing with Balko, he links to this article on politically incorrect truths about human nature. Some of this is pseudo-science, however. Scientists have been speculating for decades why men are attracted to big breasts, and their theories have no more predictive power now than they ever have (or explanation as to why many men are attracted to small breasts). Oh well, at least they’re not longer trying to say that women’s breasts look like their backsides.

    Additionally, the allegation that polygyny creates Muslim terrorism out of poor woman-less men flies in the face of the well-off physicians who were attacking Britain last week.

  • Brink Lindsey takes out Ramesh Ponnuru. Mr. Party-of-Death is admitting the conservatives can’t win the culture war. So what was the fucking point of the culture war and the incredibly divisive books, statements and party platforms associated with it? I must conclude that it was a cynical ploy to whip the culturally conservative American people into a Bush-electing frenzy by taking advantage of their beliefs and prejudices. And if a few gays and women got trampled in the puritanical stampede . . . well, that’s just politics.
  • Fail the bar exam? It must be the fault of them evil homersexuals!
  • A proper way to celebrate independence day — put flag-flying Americans in jail.
  • NYC now has thousands of police officers enforcing a noise ordinance while Mississippi saves their women from the perils of orgasm. Guess they’ve got nothing better to do.
    • Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Big Macs Kill Polar Bears

    Climate resistance rips apart a study claiming obesity is a big cause of global warming.

    The original article is behind a firewall. But, man, is this what passes for science these days? I couldn’t get the NSF to fund my proposals, but some twerp is getting paid to make a bunch of unsubstantiated hyoptheses. And the guy can’t even bring himself to blame the obese. It’s not their fault they’re fat — it’s a corporate conspiracy!

    You know, maybe leaving academia wouldn’t be so bad after all.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Calling out China

    Wait a minute. Are the environmentalist getting some perspective?

    China, by some reports the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter, is a “crucial target” of the Live Earth concerts’ anti-global warning message, the United Nations representative in Beijing said Thursday.
    China’s business center of Shanghai is one of seven cities staging the 24-hour concerts on Saturday aimed at raising awareness of climate change.
    The location is poignant since the city is the linchpin of the booming Chinese economy – blamed for spewing ever-growing levels of green house gasses into the atmosphere.

    But . . . but . . it’s America that’s evil! We can’t blame the Chinese worker’s paradise!

    One thing that’s gone unnoticed is that the Bushies have been working to reduce industrial methane — methane being 23 times as much of a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide and not a necessary byproduct of industry.

    Maybe they can get China to go along.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Monday Linkorama

    I’ve got a couple of big posts cooking. In the meantime:

  • WSJ revisits the New Deal and FDR. Bruce Bartlette also commented on how Herbert Hoover’s protectionism was a primary basis for the Depression. Historians are generally way too worshipful of politicans who “do things” and assert authority. They ignore great men like Coolidge who created great economies through benign neglect.
  • In that vein, I finished Team of Rivals. If it weren’t for Goodwin’s celebrity status, I don’t think the book would be that popular. As a political history of Lincoln’s tenure, with an emphasis on the times he lived in and the back-room deal-cutting that makes politics work, it’s good. As an objective history of Lincoln, it doesn’t. My full review is here.
  • I’ve been writing about this for some time, but James Taylor (no, not that one), has a great takedown of Mr. Age of Reason, AlGore. You can’t rant about using fear as a political tool and then turn around and use fear as a political tool.
  • The Bad Astronomer explains the latest cosmological breakthrough. Astounding. If true.
    • Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Drug Sanity

    Rhode Island votes once again against our insane War on Drugs. Congress is apparently considering barring the feds from interfering with states that have passed medical marijuana laws. Look for George “Mr. States Rights” Bush to veto this.

    You know what the 11 states that have allowed medical pot should do? Refuse to turn over any money seized in drugs raids to the Feds until they back off on this. It’s ridiculous. No matter what you think of medical marijuana, having the Feds refuse to let the states decide the issue is a rape of the Constitution.

    But then again, we’ve gotten so used to that in the War on Drugs.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Slighty Less Dumb

    The energy bill passed by the Senate is slightly less dumb. Most of it is reasonable except:

  • The “anti-gouging” legislation. Congrfess should not be setting prices. Congress should especially not be setting prices when they’ve just created a huge reason for oil production to go way way down and oil prices to therefore go way way up.
  • I’ve blogged quite a bit on the stupidity of ethnanol. Here’s a prediction: Before 2022, when the ethanol requirements kick in, this provision will be cancelled when it turns out that ethanol is an ecological and economic disaster.
    • 'Culture', Politics, Science and Edumacation, Socialism, Taxes and Spending, War on Terror

    Thursday Linkorama

    An analysis of just how much seniors are going to rip us off with Medicare and Social Security. Nice to know that the debate in Washington is over who can make this situation worse.

    Center for New American Security has, what seems to me, a reasonable plan for getting out of Iraq. Money quote:

    Some may suggest the United States should withdraw only when victory is achieved but “there will no American victory in Iraq in the terms defined by the Bush administration,” the report concluded.

    I discovered this because Neal Boortz endorsed it. I think this is what the Right is looking for right now. A way to get out while still declaring victory. This report suggests phased withdrawal, timetables, etc. — everything the Right has railed against for years.

    Sand may be a greater menace than sharks. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

    Scott Adams gets to the heart of environmental hypocrisy and panic-mongering.

    Virginia school has a zero tolerance policy . . . on touching. Ugh.