Her mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope that the girl known as Mandy was still alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The case attracted national attention when Miller went on Montel Williams’s nationally syndicated television show in 2004 and consulted a psychic.

“She’s not alive, honey,” the psychic said. “Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call.”

After Berry’s mother died in 2006, there were occasional clues in the search for Berry, and police have conducted a number of searches over the years. All proved fruitless — until Monday night, when Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from the house in Cleveland.

As Ben Goldacre reminds us, that psychic was Sylvia Brown, speaking out of her ass, surely “just for entertainment purposes” when she told Louwana Miller her daughter was dead. As the Wiki shows, her predictions aren’t reliable, and not surprisingly, she has a history of criminal behavior, including indictments and convictions for fraud and grand theft.

Psychics are by definition frauds. They don’t have magic powers. No human has the ability to read minds or see into the future. If you then take money under such known false pretenses that is the definition of fraud. If they truly do think they have magic powers, they should submit themselves to James Randi’s 1 million dollar paranormal challenge to determine if they can perform in a blinded, controlled test (which none of these frauds has ever come close to passing). Not surprisingly, Sylvia Brown has refused, many times, to take this challenge. This is because psychics know they’re frauds. Worse, Brown has even been previously convicted of fraud but sadly not for giving psychic readings. As a criminal, I guess she smartened up since 1992, the question is, why don’t we treat all psychics as criminals all the time? The burden of proof should be on them to prove they have this exceptional ability under controlled circumstances. Until then, we should simply arrest people that take money from others on the basis of such lies.

The database released on Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lays out for the first time and in voluminous detail how much the vast majority of American hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures billed to Medicare. The database — which covers claims filed within fiscal year 2011 — spans 163,065 individual charges recorded at 3,337 hospitals located in 306 metropolitan areas.
…
Within the nation’s largest metropolitan area, the New York City area, a joint replacement runs anywhere between $15,000 and $155,000. At two hospitals in the Los Angeles area, the cost of the same treatment for pneumonia varies by $100,000, according to the database.

We discussed this issue before when it was brought to the public’s attention by Brill’s “Bitter Pill” piece in Time. Hospitals have a wildly-irrational billing scheme that represents a war they are in with payers. However, Brill was wrong to attribute excess costs of US healthcare to the charge master problem, while the HuffPo piece gets this issue right. It’s not a problem for insurance companies, or government, since they don’t pay these bills. It only screws payers without negotiating power or knowledge of how to navigate these bills – the uninsured:

“The charge masters are totally irrational,” Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance company executive who consults for health care companies as president of Alexandria, Va.-based Health Policy and Strategy Associates, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

Hospitals used to base prices on health care costs and on the need for profit that would, among other things, enable them to make investments in their facilities, Laszewski explained. “They became the baseline from which the hospitals started,” he wrote. But over time, hospitals raised charges in anticipation of negotiating discounts with private health insurance companies while maintaining their revenue streams, he said.

Prices have continued growing over decades to the point where there is no plausible justification for them, according to Laszewski: “Over the years, the charge masters have become more and more disconnected from reality.”

And since they haven’t been public or shared before now, I suspect each hospital probably has some set of services that appear to be priced excessively compared to their near neighbor. The costs haven’t grown so much from a response to the treatments they provide, so much as the perceived ability to force insurers to pay a larger portion. Each hospital has probably independently evolved a strategy to do this, hence the wide variability in pricing.

The charges are the prices hospitals establish themselves for the services they provide. Although Medicare and Medicaid don’t base their payment rates on these figures, private health insurance companies typically do, which means they usually pay more for the same health care than the government does. That translates into higher premiums for people with insurance. And uninsured people are expected to pay the full list price or a discount from that number, which tends to mean they pay more than anyone else.

When a hospital doesn’t get paid as much as it wants from one source, it tries to make up the difference in other ways, such as billing so-called self-pay patients — almost always the uninsured — for the full list price of a service, said Robert Huckman, a health care expert at Harvard Business School. Even when hospitals agree to huge discounts for patients who can’t pay the bill, those discounts are taken from inflated prices much higher than those the government or private insurance companies pay, he said.

“The charge master is complete nonsense that really doesn’t matter — unless you are an uninsured person and you’re getting these huge bills driving you toward bankruptcy,” Laszewski wrote. “The biggest irony of the U.S. health care system is that only the uninsured — often people who don’t have a lot of money — are the only ones the hospital expects to pay these incredibly inflated list prices!”

Hospitals also inflate charges to raise money for things that aren’t related to treatments, said former Sen. David Durenberger (R-Minn.), who is senior health policy fellow at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

“The biggest factor by far, in my experience, is what are you trying to cross-subsidize,” he said. Hospitals will increase charges to finance things like technology upgrades and education and research and to compensate for their operational efficiencies, Durenberger said.

We’ve discussed extensively the sources of excess costs in US healthcare. It’s not the chargemaster. It’s excessive administrative costs of private health insurance, excessive drug costs (everything from direct-to-consumer advertising, the fact US citizens are charged more and GWB made it so medicare can’t negotiate for lower drug prices), inefficient delivery (primary care in the ER), redundant delivery, lack of a government-implemented or regulated standardized electronic medical record (EMRs from private companies actually increase costs), defensive medicine, excessive end-of-life care, and excessive reimbursements of procedures and diagnostic testing.

What will this data release mean for health care costs? Probably not much as the hospitals will now just normalize excessive bills to each other, rather than just having their own individually-irrational billing scheme. The charge master is unjust, but it’s not why we pay more for healthcare overall.

There is a solution to the charge master problem though, and it was found in New Jersey. Force hospitals to charge the uninsured what they charge Medicare. It’s that simple. It’s that easy.

Think about that for a minute. Ignore, for the moment, the obvious factual inaccuracy of the statement given the homegrown terrorists that have bombed abortion clinics, churches, planes, the Olympics, or schools. Think about what Glenn Beck is saying. He’s saying that previous terrorists who have targeted the government, like for instance Timothy McVeigh, weren’t targeting people in their attacks. They were targeting government. Never mind that at OKC Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, including 19 children under 6, and injured 680. Those weren’t people. They were “the government”. This man is sick.

Enter Alex Jones, who has never had a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, from moon-landing conspiracies to constant (and hilariously false) predictions of impending government collapse, government assassinations, terror attacks, monetary collapse, or whatever seems to spring into his mind from moment to moment. A compendium of his hilariously-false predictions is a fascinating watch:

(thanks to Ed Brayton

By their fruits you shall know them.

Why should we be at all surprised that someone as full of hate as Tamerlan Tsaernev was a believer in a host of conspiracy theories:

It’s not particularly surprising that Tsarnaev would be drawn to a wide range of conspiracy theories, as research shows that people prone to believing one conspiracy theory will likely believe many — even if they’re completely contradictory. And he fits a profile of a type of person likely to be drawn to conspiratorial thinking, considering he was allegedly alienated from and disgruntled with society.

On top of Jones and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, we have to add the one that seems to be the most important of all: The kind of anti-American conspiracy theories pushed by Islamists. For instance, the Washington Post reports that the brothers were apparently motivated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers there. As with many conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth here — American soldiers really have done some horrible things in those countries. But Tsarnaev went beyond the evidence by telling people that “in Afghanistan, most casualties are innocent bystanders killed by American soldiers.” In fact, according to the U.N., the Taliban is responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths — 81 percent in 2012.

Anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are foundational to al-Qaida and other radical groups’ ideologies, according to Matthew Gray, a professor at Australian National University who wrote in his book “Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World,” that ”the speeches of Osama Bin Laden are peppered with conspiracist language and the assumptions that underline conspiracism.”

Indeed, conspiracy theories are hardly unique to the United States and often run rampant in the Muslim world, as Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy wrote in the New Republic, and seem to be especially strong among Islamists. A 2011 Pew poll of residents of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories and Indonesia found that the vast majority refused to believe that Arabs executed the terrorist attack on 9/11. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 percent accept that Arabs conducted the attack,” the study found.

From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to 9/11 truth, to Alex Jones Infowars, Tamerlan was a promiscuous-believer in conspiracy theories, and his younger brother, from his Twitter account, appears to also be a CT proponent of 9/11 truth.

While the right would like to blame the behavior of these individuals on radical Islam, I’d like to propose a different source of radical, and hateful behavior. I would suggest we consider that conspiratorial thinking might be behind this type of group violence. As the Salon article mentions, one of the major propaganda elements of groups like Al Qaeda are conspiracies about the US, about Jews, about Israel, about anyone who they believe is their enemy. Conspiracy theories are often a reflection of a feeling of powerlessness, and those who are more likely to believe them are reacting a world which is often disordered, and out-of-control. The conspiracy theory is a simplistic explanation for one’s troubles, and usually incorporate one’s irrational, tribal, or bigoted beliefs about the world.

But while conspiracy theories might make people feel better about an out-of-control world, as it gives them the false perception that they (and no one else) really knows what’s going on, at the same time they feed back on themselves and reinforce that very sense of powerlessness. If democratic government is just a sham, the US is imminently about to round us up and put us in FEMA camps, or kill us with a billion DHS bullets, your supposed grasp of the problem does nothing to solve it. It only further shows how helpless you are to do anything. What are the solutions the conspiracists fall back on? Arming yourself, doomsday prepping, and detachment from society, especially all those stupid sheeple (it’s amazing how often Jones calls his audience stupid!), is the solution. Civil society, voting, community, charity, and collective action aren’t the solution. It’s guns, and isolation.

Should we then be surprised when individuals influenced by these conspiracy theories resort to violence? Should we be surprised that when people are told the political process is a sham, the government is killing us at will, and everyone else who doesn’t believe this is stupid, that they then go out and target government, and other citizens, and cops, indiscriminately? Isn’t this just conspiracy theorists, like Jones, and Al Qaeda for that matter, just reaping what they sow?

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the usual actors came out of the woodwork to ghoulishly use human suffering to advance their agenda, whether it was attacking government, or blaming abortion, people who knew nothing and cared nothing for their fellow citizens sought to use the tragedy to their advantage. The conspiracists, of course, settled on the usual suspects (Beck has his Saudi agent/government conspiracy, Jones and Mike Adams the FBI/government). Not that they had any information that we didn’t. They were pronouncing this nonsense within minutes of the attack. Now that we have some information we know that the two alleged suspects have some pretty damning evidence against them if the timeline is correct. They were both witnessed at the scene with, and then without backpacks. One was filmed dropping a backpack at the scene of the second bomb. Both were filmed coolly-observing the aftermath. They shot one MIT police officer to death, apparently in cold blood. They carjacked an individual who said they identified themselves to him as the Boston Marathon bombers. They had pressure cooker bombs in their apartment. They exploded such a bomb while eluding police, critically injuring another police officer.

This is, to put it mildly, a damning case.

However, the conspiracy theorists have not changed their tune. Beck continues to blame some Saudi national who’s major crime appears to be he happened to be in Boston that day. Jones and infowars continues to blame the FBI, the CIA, anyone, including Sunil Tripathi, the missing student who has been found dead. Likely this will not stop them, they’ll just say that the FBI killed him to keep him quiet, and keep victimizing his poor family, who have suffered enough from the loss of their son. If the analysis reveals he died over a month ago, that won’t stop them either, because who did the analysis? The government! It’s sad, and pathetic, and horrible. They blame the innocent, and further create the impression that in our society there is no justice, the government is the real criminal (and is not composed of living, breathing, human people), anyone who believes otherwise is stupid.

My question is, for those who believe this nonsense, how long until we see another one plant a bomb? For those for who believe they have no political or civil power, isn’t violence the outcome encouraged by this belief?

I think we have to stop just blaming the religious extremism, and start considering the role of conspiratorial extremism in acts of political violence and terror around the world. When you make people feel powerless, and stupid, and excluded from society and participatory democracy, one should not be surprised when they turn to violence and political terrorism. The Tsaernev family insists their children didn’t learn this from them, or in their life abroad, they learned to think this way in America. Maybe they’re right.

Jones’ response that Tamerlan was a fan was typical, another conspiracy as will the responses to whatever I write here I’m sure. I’ll be accused of being paid off, working for the FBI, a shill, whatever. It’s boring, and part of the known self sealing aspect of conspiratorial thinking. Whenever anything conflicts with the predetermined truth, it must be then incorporated into a new, grander conspiracy. One of my commenters joked about this phenomenon:

A group of elderly JFK conspiracy theorists were comparing notes when one of them suddenly had a heart attack. After going through the whole tunnel light scenario he finds himself facing God. He asks “Oh Lord, who really killed JFK?” And God replied “It was Oswald acting alone.” At that point the EMTs were able to jolt him back to life. Later in the hospital with his co-theorists he said in a low voice “The conspiracy is bigger than we thought.”

So on that lighter note, I ask to think about how dismissive we should be of conspiracy theorists. We often treat them as just ridiculous and foolish. But given the historical and modern examples of hatemongering through conspiracy theories, and the conspiratorial beliefs of terrorists from Timothy McVeigh, to Al Qaeda, to the Tsaernevs, maybe we should be looking at the darker side of this behavior. Maybe it’s time to recognize that those who call us stupid, and powerless, and helpless, are the ones encouraging violence as a solution.

Why are the the same thing? Because they’re all ghouls, and they all use any tragic event to bolster their warped, abhorrent world view no matter what the facts are, and no matter how offensive to the victims.

Within minutes, with no one knowing any facts, Jones claims this is a false flag attack. The only appropriate response to an event like this, within the first minutes and hours, is to hope the first responders and emergency personnel can get to and rescue as many as possible. But to the ghoul, every event such as this is another chance to push their agenda of hate. For the Westboro Baptists, similarly not knowing anything, they think this is further evidence that God hates America because we tolerate homosexuality. For the conspiracy theorist, all traumatic events instantly become incorporated into their evidence that the government/FBI/CIA whatever is faking them/planning them to increase their control over us. No matter what the evidence is, or will be, it will just be further sealed into this fixed, false belief. Avicenna at FtB has a good post (warning for graphic images) of examples of how despicable this behavior can be. I think one of the most grotesque acts yet was one of the CTs asking the governor of Massachusetts if this was a false flag. How stupid and awful a person do you have to be to ask that question in the wake of such a tragedy? Here is the governor, trying to address a crisis, and some scumbag is basically asking (1) is the US government randomly murdering innocent US citizens (2) is he in on it? To the governor’s immense credit, he didn’t immediately jump into the crowd and start strangling the questioner. CTs were so awful as to accuse the victims of just being actors, of the whole thing being staged, or the whole thing actually being performed by government (read your fellow US citizens), including Mike Adams’ immediate blaming of the event on government agencies. What is their evidence? They have no evidence. They just hate without reason.

These conspiracy theorists are just another type of hatemonger. This event is just the latest proof. No matter what the reality is, what the facts are, every event just becomes further proof of their warped and hateful world view. Never mind that it casts civil servants and law enforcement as the murderers, the victims as liars, and the rest of us as fools, that’s what they believe. We shouldn’t continue to tolerate this as just fringe wackiness. This is hate mongering, and the worst kind. It’s hate mongering in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, designed to make us hate and fear our fellow citizens, those trying to help us, and those who were hurt the most. It’s hate and divisiveness when we should be pulling together rather than apart. It’s no different from what the Westboro Baptists church does. And Alex Jones and Mike Adams are just like Fred Phelps.

Unlike the GMO nonsense, this is a clear public health issue with a plausible (and demonstrated) mechanism of transmitted risk to humans. The author of the letter, Charles Hofacre, says two, wildly misleading things. For one, he suggests the antibiotics they are using are somehow substantively different from those in humans by saying, “About a third of livestock antibiotics used today are not used at all in human medicine.” Well, that means 2/3rds are the same and just because we don’t use the exact same antibiotics doesn’t mean they don’t share the exact same mechanism. If he’s trying to suggest resistance in livestock antibiotics isn’t relevant to human pathogens, he is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Second he says, “There is no proven link to antibiotic treatment failure in humans because of antibiotic use in animals for consumption — a critical point that is often missed. ” This is such a misleading statement I can’t believe an academic would say such a thing, as it assumes we’re just idiots. This suggests that there is not a transmission issue, or at least none of clinical relevance. But this is also wrong. There is extensive documentation of Methicillin-resistant Staph Aureus (MRSA) becoming more common in livestock, being transmitted to humans, and appearing in hospitals. There hasn’t been a “treatment failure”, because we still have antibiotics that work against MRSA, and MRSA is usually not pathogenic on its own without some failure of the host immune system, broken skin/non-sterile injection, surgery, chemo, etc. That doesn’t mean we should go around spreading MRSA! We have to start taking out the big guns to deal with MRSA infections when they do occur (we don’t treat colonization), and the more we expose these bacteria towards the better antibiotics, the more we’ll train them for resistance to those drugs. But it should be made clear, the transmission of resistant bacteria from farm animals to humans has been documented, just because the patients didn’t die doesn’t mean that there’s no problem here. This is just shameful.

Antibiotic resistance has existed since before we even used antibiotics and will only get worse the more we train the organisms to grow in the presence of antibiotics. These genes for resistance aren’t “new”, but not all bacteria carry them because there is an energy cost associated with production of proteins, and if it doesn’t benefit their survival, those bacterial strains wasting energy will become less common. If we constantly create a selective pressure on bacteria to maintain resistance genes, we are going to increase the proportion of bacteria that carry resistance, and thus the resistant organisms we are exposed to. Then, as we have to use more and more powerful antibiotics to address resistance, we create additional selective pressure on the organisms to carry more and better resistance genes (not all beta-lactamases are created equal), and as they mutate to become more effective, those effective resistance strains will eventually mutate into bacteria for which we have no therapeutic option. These are already starting to emerge as those who followed reports of the MDR-klebs outbreak at NIH know.

In my GMO thread I used the analogy that the beta-lactamase used for genetic modification of organisms by molecular biologists is like a “sharpened stick” it can use against weaker penicillins. This is why those resistance genes aren’t a danger for humans. They’ve been around forever anyway, all the bacteria that are going to carry them already do so we don’t even bother using weaker penicillins on those types of infections, and they can’t beat our stronger beta-lactam drugs like the anti-staph and extended-spectrum beta lactams. The multiple-resistance and pan-resistance bugs that we are finding in our ICUs are the “multiple nuclear warhead” bugs because they beat multiple classes of drugs as well as our extended-spectrum drugs. We’ve created these bugs by the steady application of selective pressure with exposure of the organisms to progressively more powerful antibiotics. The continued injudicious use of antibiotics in animals will invariably lead to the same phenomenon, just all over the place in communities and the workplace rather than just in the ICU. We are going to see a higher prevalence of resistant bacteria, those bacteria will mutate their resistance genes to become more and more effective, they’re already crossing over to humans and hospitals, and we’re going to have to use our big guns more which will speed up the loss of our antibacterials’ efficacy.

Some caveats. One, this represents more of a threat for farm workers than consumers, as MRSA is not carried in the meat itself, although it will likely contaminate the meat at higher frequency (this has indeed been shown) as the prevalence increases from slaughterhouse contamination. MRSA usually colonizes the outside of the animal, the nares, etc., not the inside of the animal. Two, standard practices of food handling will also decrease, but not eliminate our risk. Cooking meat and washing hands with soap after meat handling (which should be your standard practice) kills MRSA. Don’t prepare hamburger then pick your nose people. Clean surfaces on which meat has been prepared etc. However, the packaging, your cutting board, your trash can, all are likely to get contaminated if the meat was surface contaminated. Three, realize MRSA is not pathogenic in normal healthy people. But, something as simple as a cut can introduce staph and create a serious infection. Staph is everywhere, and the human body generally has no problem handling it. But when those defenses are down, MRSA reduces our therapeutic options. You don’t want that. Fourth, this is just one bug we may be exposed to, we’re also training the animals e. coli and enterobacter to become resistant too, and with poor food prep and exposure, you can get colonized with these bugs as well.

From a public-health standpoint it’s important that we reduce the prevalence of resistant bacteria we’re exposed to, so fewer of our infections will require the big-gun antibiotics. There is good news though, and we shouldn’t just develop a fatalistic attitude towards this problem. As we stop the overuse of antibiotics, selective pressure on the bacteria will cause some of them to shed the resistance genes, and there won’t be a reason for the bacteria to maintain and improve their antibiotic resistance genes. Without consistent exposure to antibiotics, they have far less selective pressure to produce proteins and maintain plasmids that provide them no advantage. While the resistance genes will still be out there (always have, always will), we can still benefit from common-sense measures that decrease their prevalence, and thus our individual risk of exposure to resistant organisms. And, the less we have to take out the big guns to treat infections, the fewer multiply-resistant organisms we’ll see.

The industry backlash is against the “Right to Know Act,” a bill introduced in February by Bonnie Lowenthal, a Democratic assemblywoman from Long Beach. It would make Internet companies, upon request, share with Californians personal information they have collected—including buying habits, physical location and sexual orientation—and what they have passed on to third parties such as marketing companies, app makers and other companies that collect and sell data.

Instead of discussing the merits of the bill, here I want to show an aspect of industry association lobbying. As noted previously, these groups are useful to companies for several reasons: they can be used to “launder” policy, they can air controversial views without attribution to any one company, they can help hide companies advocacy when it appears to conflict with previous commitments, and they defray critical reporting. They also amplify power, because they place legislators in a house of mirrors–trade groups allow companies to mask the provenance of their advocacy and to multiply it. This creates a kind of echo chamber for companies.

The Journal’s Vauhini Vara and Geoffrey Fowler reported:

The coalition includes such trade groups as the Internet Alliance, TechNet and TechAmerica, all of which represent major Internet companies

This past week, Will Gonzalez, a Facebook lobbyist based in Sacramento, aired concerns in a meeting about how the bill would hurt Facebook’s business, according to a legislative aide. Mr. Gonzalez didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Representatives for Facebook and Google declined to comment on the bill.

Vara and Fowler are on the right path–break through these groups and talk to their principals about their stance on the bill. Facebook and Google won’t comment to the Journal, I imagine, because AB 1291 is fundamentally a transparency measure. Opposition to it creates some dissonance with these companies’ rational choice/transparency/openness rhetoric.

But back to my point–the trade groups help companies hide their advocacy positions, and amplify them. Check out my poor man’s version of the web of web advocacy below.

This is the letterhead of the opposition letter submitted by tech companies against California’s AB 1291.

I’ve found in my experience, almost everyone carries one really cranky belief that they can’t seem to shake, no matter how evidence-based their other positions are (probably because we are all capable of carrying some overvalued ideas). But it’s worth peering through PPP’s full results to see the nature of some of these associations.

For one, some of these associations I think are spurious, poorly questioned, or just reflect misinformation, rather than conspiracy. For instance:

44% of voters believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about weapons of mass destruction to promote the Iraq War, while 45% disagree. 72% of Democrats believed the statement while 73% of Republicans did not. 22% of Democrats, 33% of Republicans and 28% of independents believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Many have questioned the inclusion of this question because, in reality, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. So the question of whether we were “misled” or “intentionally-misled” puts us in the murky position at having to guess at the motivations of individuals like Bush and Cheney. Mind-reading is a dubious activity, and I tend to ascribe to the Napoleonic belief that you shouldn’t ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence (also known as Hanlon’s razor). Is it conspiratorial to think maybe they were more malicious than incompetent? While I think that administration really were “true believers”, of course I don’t really know for sure, and I don’t think it’s fair to describe such as conspiratorial reasoning. Instead it’s just the dubious but common practice of guessing at the intentions of others. The generally-similar numbers on the Saddam Hussein/9/11 connection, I believe, just suggests ignorance, rather than necessitating active belief in a conspiratorial framework (keeping in mind the margin of error is about 3% these aren’t huge partisan differences like over WMD).

One of the most disappointing numbers was on belief in a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination:

51% of Americans believe there was a larger conspiracy at work in the JFK assassination, while 25% think Lee Harvey Oswald
acted alone.

That’s 51% conspiratorial belief, 24% probably showing ignorance of one of the most important events of the last century, and 25% actually informed. This is pretty sad. The movements of Oswald were so thoroughly-investigated and known, the hard evidence for his planning and involvement are so clear, the conspirators so unlikely (the mob/CIA/LBJ/KGB hiring crackpot loser communists for assassinations?), and the fabrications of the conspiracists so plain (asserting the shots couldn’t be made despite it being easily replicated by everyone from the Warren Commission to the Discovery Channel and even improved on, the disparaging of his marksmanship when LHO was a marine sharpshooter, altering the positions of the occupants of the car to make the bullet path from JFK to Connelly appear unlikely, etc.) it’s sad that so many have bought into this nonsense. The historically-bogus picture JFK, by Oliver Stone, may also play a large part in this, and is an example why Oliver Stone is really a terrible person. People that misrepresent history are the worst. If anyone wants to read a good book about the actual evidence that of what happened that day, as well as destroys the conspiracy position, Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi is my favorite, as well as the most thorough.

But there is one redeeming feature of conspiracy about the JFK assassination. For the most part, conspiratorial ideas on the subject aren’t due to some dark part in people’s souls, as for many other conspiracies, but rather the very human need to ascribe more to such earth-shattering events as the assassination of a president than just the madness of a pitiable loser. The imbalance between the magnitude of the event, and the banal crank that accomplished it, is simply too much. There’s no way that a 24-year-old, violent, wife-beating, Marxist roustabout could be responsible for the death of a man like JFK right? Sadly no. The evidence shows even a man that pathetic can destroy the life of a much greater man with a cheap rifle and a simple plan.

The conspiracy theories embedded within this poll that really disturb me because I think they demonstrate the effect of irrational hate are ones such as for whether President Obama is the antichrist (although is that even really a conspiracy?). 13% of respondents believed this, 5% of those that voted for him still answered this question in the affirmative (really? you voted for the antichrist) as opposed to 22% of those that voted for Romney. Do we really need to elevate political disagreement to the level of labeling people the antichrist? Around 9% thought government adds fluoride for “sinister” reasons, and 11% believe in the LIHOP 9/11 conspiracy theory. They clearly think very little of their fellow Americans, and believe some really demonic things about our government. Our government is neither competent enough, or evil enough, to engage in then successfully cover up either of these things. Our top spy couldn’t even hide a tawdry affair.

Other conspiracy theories seem to indicate their is a baseline number of people, at about 15%, who will believe in just about anything from the moon landing being hoaxed to bigfoot. I would have actually pegged this number higher, given my pessimism about rational thought, but that seems to be what we can read from this. However, without being able to see whether or not it was the same people answering yes to each individual absurd conspiracy from reptilians to “government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals”, it’s possible this number is actually much larger. I would be curious to see the data on the overlap between these questions, as the phenomenon of crank magnetism is well known.

Ultimately, I read this data as saying that Americans have a big problem with conspiracy theories entering our political discourse. We should be embarrassed that as many as 37% of us believe that global warming is a “hoax”. That requires a belief is a grand conspiracy of scientists, policy-makers, journals, editors, etc., all acting together to somehow fabricate data for a single objective – often described as world-government control conspiracy to cede our sovereignty to the UN. Somehow, every single national scientific body, all those national academies, all those journals, and all those scientists, all those governments, all working in perfect secrecy according to some master plan (which I’m often accused of being a part of but I’m sure I’m missing the memo), and this is plausible how? The answer is, it’s not, unless you remain steadfastly ignorant of how science actually works and progresses.

Everyone, of any political persuasion, should be embarrassed by the conspiracy-theorists in their ranks. This isn’t healthy thinking, it isn’t rational discourse, and it only serves to divide us and make us hate. Enough of this already.

Under the new federal regulations, hospitals face hefty penalties for readmitting patients they have already treated, on the theory that many readmissions result from poor follow-up care.

It makes for cheaper and better care in the long run, the thinking goes, to help patients stay healthy than to be forced to readmit them for another costly hospital stay.

So hospitals call patients within 48 hours of discharge to find out how they are feeling. They arrange patients’ follow-up appointments with doctors even before a patient leaves. And they have redoubled their efforts to make sure patients understand what medicines to take at home.

Seems reasonable, right? These are things that are part of good medical care; good follow up, clarity with prescriptions, etc. It should be the responsibility of hospitals to get patients plugged into the safety net, assign social workers, and make sure patients won’t fail because they lack resources at home. However, the problem arises when the ideal of punishing readmissions as “failures” crashes into the reality of the general failure of our social safety net:

But hospitals have also taken on responsibilities far outside the medical realm: they are helping patients arrange transportation for follow-up doctor visits, get safe housing or even find a hot meal, all in an effort to keep them healthy.

“There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the cost of medical care by addressing these other things, the social aspects,” said Dr. Samuel Skootsky, chief medical officer of the U.C.L.A. Faculty Practice Group and Medical Group.

Medicare, which monitors hospitals’ compliance with the new rules, says nearly two-thirds of hospitals receiving traditional Medicare payments are expected to pay penalties totaling about $300 million in 2013 because too many of their patients were readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Last month, the agency reported that readmissions had dropped to 17.8 percent by late last year from about 19 percent in 2011.

But increasingly, health policy experts and hospital executives say the penalties, which went into effect in October, unfairly target hospitals that treat the sickest patients or the patients facing the greatest socioeconomic challenges. They say a hospital’s readmission rate is not a clear measure of the quality of care it provides, noting that hospitals with higher mortality rates may also have fewer returning patients.

“Dead patients can’t be readmitted,” Dr. Henderson said.

This is a problem with the careless application of rewards and penalties tied to medical outcomes. While I think it’s a healthy response that hospitals are taking on more of the social work that formerly would have been the arena of government programs, there is another defense mechanism used when government creates perverse incentives in health care. When you create payment incentives for good outcomes, you run the risk of patient selection, discrimination, and fraud. My favorite paper on this topic comes from the British NHS, and their attempt to reward physicians based on better clinical outcomes. My advice with this paper (and with most papers frankly) is to ignore what the authors say about their data (and the amazing success of their program!) and just look at the data for yourself. What they found with rewarding physicians based on health metrics was that doctors that treated the young, healthy, and rich did well, those with more patients, poorer patients, and older patients did more poorly. Finally, physicians that filed lots of “exception reports” to eliminate all their poorly-performing patients did great (yay, fraud!).

Metrics are good for identifying problems, but the mistake is the assumption that poor performance at a metric has everything to do with the physicians or the hospitals, or that slapping a penalty on poor performance will fix the problem. Sometimes, you’re studying society, not medical care. Incentive structures that put the burden on hospitals to take care of the most basic needs of their patients are going to penalize those hospitals that take care of the neediest, sickest, oldest patients, and reward those who treat insured, wealthy, younger, and fewer patients. Worse, if you penalize hospitals for taking care of difficult patient populations, I can predict the outcome. More bogus (and occasionally dangerous) transfers, more patients dumped on public and university hospitals, and all the other tricks of patient selection private hospitals can engage in to avoid getting stuck with the economic losses. That is, patients who are really sick, really poor, really old, and most in need of care will get transferred, obstructed, and dumped. Hospitals that are referral centers, major university and public hospitals that can’t refuse or transfer problem patients, will end up with the disproportionate amount of the penalties because they are often the healthcare providers of last resort. Not surprisingly, the early data already shows this is happening:

The second important development was the release of data on who will be penalized: two thirds of eligible U.S. hospitals were found to have readmission rates higher than the CMS models predicted, and each of these hospitals will receive a penalty. The number of hospitals penalized is much higher than most observers would have anticipated on the basis of CMS’s previous public reports, which identified less than 5% of hospitals as outliers. In addition, there is now convincing evidence that safety-net institutions (see graphsProportion of Hospitals Facing No Readmissions Penalty (Panel A) and Median Amount of Penalty (Panel B), According to the Proportion of Hospital’s Patients Who Receive Supplemental Security Income.), as well large teaching hospitals, which provide a substantial proportion of the care for patients with complex medical problems, are far more likely to be penalized under the HRRP.3 Left unchecked, the HRRP has the potential to exacerbate disparities in care and create disincentives to providing care for patients who are particularly ill or who have complex health needs, particularly if the penalties are larger than hospitals’ margins for caring for these patients.

It would be unfortunate if in the course of creating incentives for better care, we fall into the same old trap of punishing those who take care of the neediest. What we need instead is to acknowledge one major source of bad outcomes is a broken social-safety net. We can’t just keep creating these unfunded mandates that put all the onus of taking care of the uninsured, the poor and elderly on hospitals, and punish the centers that already carry the largest social burdens with responsibility for the failure of our nation to take care of its own. Unfortunately, our answer to problems like these is always to create one more shell game that hides the real, unavoidable costs of taking care of people by shifting it around. This will just result in higher bills on the insured, more crazy chargemaster fees, overburdened public and university hospitals, and ultimately, a system of regressive taxation.

This brings up an obvious answer for what to do with all the CO2 produced by power plants, office buildings and even fitness centers where people exhale vast quantities of CO2. The answer is to build adjacent greenhouses and pump the CO2 into the greenhouses.

Every coal-fired power plant, in other words, should have a vast array of greenhouses surrounding it. Most of what you see emitted from power plant smokestacks is water vapor and CO2, both essential nutrients for rapid growth of food crops. By diverting carbon dioxide and water into greenhouses, the problem of emissions is instantly solved because the plants update the CO2 and use it for photosynthesis, thus “sequestering” the CO2 while rapidly growing food crops. It also happens to produce oxygen as a “waste product” which can be released into the atmosphere, (slightly) upping the oxygen level of the air we breathe.

He seems to have forgotten about all the mercury, lead, cadmium, volatile organics, sulfur etc., emitted by burning coal. I wonder how these different crank theories somehow manage to occupy the same brain, as his mercury paranoia appears temporarily overwhelmed by his anti-government conspiracism. I mean, he’s defending burning coal. It boggles the mind. I’m not exactly the biggest food purity buff, but even I find the idea of growing food in coal-fire exhaust somewhat, well, insane? Mad? Totally bonkers? What’s the right word for it? Maybe we need to create a new word for this level of craziness? Maybe we should name it after Adams, and call it Adamsian. You could say “Adamsian nuttery” to really refer to a truly bizarre level of crankery. Unless it’s an April Fools day prank, but then it was published on the 31st…nope, I think he’s just that nuts.

When asked by The Guardian whom she most despised, Goodall responded, “The agricultural company Monsanto, because I know too much about GM organisms and crops.” She might know too much, but what if what she knows is completely wrong?

Many of the claims in Seeds of Hope can also be found in Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, a book by “consumer advocate” Jeffrey Smith. Goodall generously blurbed the book (“If you care about your health and that of your children, buy this book, become aware of the potential problems, and take action”) and in Seeds of Hope cites a “study” on GMO conducted by Smith’s “think tank,” the Institute for Responsible Technology.

Like Goodall, Smith isn’t a genetic scientist. According to New Yorker writer Michael Specter, he “has no experience in genetics or agriculture, and has no scientific degree from any institution” but did study “business at the Maharishi International University, founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.” (In Seeds of Hope, Goodall also recommends a book on GM by Maharishi Institute executive vice president Steven M. Druker, who also has no scientific training). As Professor Bruce Chassy, an emeritus food scientist at the University of Illinois, told Specter, “His only professional experience prior to taking up his crusade against biotechnology is as a ballroom-dance teacher, yogic flying instructor, and political candidate for the Maharishi cult’s natural-law party.” Along with fellow food scientist Dr. David Tribe, Chassy runs an entire website devoted to debunking Smith’s pseudoscience.

And it apparently escaped Goodall’s notice that Smith’s most recent book—the one that she fulsomely endorsed—features a foreword by British politician Michael Meacher, who, after being kicked out of the Tony Blair’s government in 2003, has devoted a significant amount of time to furthering 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Goodall is, of course, not the first scientist of fame and repute to fall in for crankery and pseudoscience. From Linus Pauling to Luc Montagnier, even Nobel Prize winning scientists have fallen for psuedoscientific theories. However, we should always be saddened when yet another famous scientist decides to go emeritus and abandon the reality-based community.

There always seem to be a couple of different factors at play when this happens. For one, such scientists appear to have reached a such a status that it becomes very difficult for others to criticize them. It’s like a state of ultra-tenure, in which you practically have to insult the intelligence of an entire continent before people will object to your misbehavior. The second common factor seems to be that they start operating in a field in which they lack expertise, but seem to assume their expertise in other unrelated fields should allow them to waive in. This appears to be the case with Goodall, as even someone with rudimentary knowledge of molecular biology should be able to see the gaping holes in the anti-GMO movement’s logic.

For example, let’s start with the easy-pickings at Natural News. A recent article by Jon Rapaport entitled “Brand new GMO food can rewire your body: more evil coming” is a perfect example of how the arguments made against GMO foods are based on fundamentally-unsound understanding of biology. The author writes:

It’s already bad. Very bad. For the past 25 years, the biotech Dr. Frankensteins have been inserting DNA into food crops.

The widespread dangers of this technique have been exposed. People all over the world, including many scientists and farmers, are up in arms about it.

Countries have banned GMO crops or insisted on labeling.

Now, though, the game is changing, and it’ll make things even more unpredictable. The threat is ominous and drastic, to say the least.

GM Watch reports the latest GMO innovation: designed food plants that make new double-stranded (ds) RNA. What does the RNA do? It can silence a gene. It can activate a gene that was silent.

If you imagine the gene structure as a board covered with light bulbs, in the course of living some genes light up (activation) and some genes go dark (silent) at different times. This new designed RNA can change that process. No one knows how.

No one knows because no safety studies have been done. If you have genes lighting up and going dark in unpredictable ways, the functions of a plant or a body can change randomly.
…

Pinball, roulette, use any metaphor you want to; this is playing with the fate of the human race. Walk around with designer-RNA in your body, and who knows what effects will follow.

At this point, I think anyone familiar with the science of RNA interference (RNAi) has slapped themselves in the forehead, for anyone who wants a decent introduction the Wiki does a pretty good job. It’s clear that the author is projecting his own ignorance of RNAi onto the rest of us. Briefly, until about 20 years ago, the so-called “central dogma of molecular biology” was a one way road from DNA being transcribed into RNA which was then translated into a functional protein. Even this is a pretty gross simplification, but it’s fair to say, that prior to the discovery of RNAi, RNA was thought to be little more than a messenger in the cell, serving as an intermediary between the DNA code, and the protein function. Yes, we knew that some RNA had enzymatic function, was incorporated into some proteins, etc., but it wasn’t seen so much as a regulatory molecule.

Then, after a few intriguing findings in plants, Fire and Mello discovered that RNA itself could control the translation of other genes in c. elegans. Almost by accident, they found that if you inserted a double-stranded RNA molecule corresponding to a RNA transcript, that transcript would be degraded and the protein it encoded for wouldn’t be expressed. It was a surprising finding. One would think that what would work would be the anti-sense strand of RNA that would bind the sense strand and somehow inhibit it’s entry into the ribosomal machinery and ultimately interfere with translation. Instead, what they found was double-stranded RNA had a function all of it’s own, with a previously unknown cellular machinery specifically-purposed with processing dsRNA and inhibiting gene function through an entirely different mechansim. Subsequently we’ve also found the RNAi not only can directly regulate the levels of RNA transcripts, but can also regulate gene suppression, and activation directly on promoter sequences on DNA itself.

It’s amazing, decades after the discovery of RNA and understanding of its primary function, we discovered this new and incredibly complex layer of regulation of genetics by RNA molecules involved in everything from development to disease. But what does that mean for us? Should we be worried about gene-regulating RNA molecules in our food?

Of course not! RNAi is an intrinsic function of most eukaryotes. Just about every food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life is chock-full of RNA molecules, including double-stranded inhibitory RNAs involved in the normal biological processes occurring within the cell. If other organisms could affect us by poisoning us with RNA, we wouldn’t last a minute. Weirdly, in GMO paranoia world, however, whatever we consume has the potential to take over our bodies. The basic molecules of all life, that exist in everything we eat, take on new powers once handled by human scientists. The article hinted at as evidence of this risk (but of course not actually cited by the author) that suggests miRNA may have “cross-kingdom” effects, is a great example of crank cherry-picking, as the evidence demonstrating it may be artifact is of course not mentioned. And we shouldn’t be surprised, as it would be a pretty extraordinary hole in our defenses if other organisms could so easily modify our gene expression.

One of the great limitations of gene therapy as a potential therapy has been that it’s extremely difficult to introduce genes, or specifically regulate them with external vectors. If it were as simple as just feeding us RNA that would be something. For better or worse (likely better), your body is extremely resistant to other organisms tinkering with its DNA or cellular machinery.

Ok, but then you say, “Hey, that’s Natural News, we know they’re morons.” Ok, how about Clair Cummings in Common Dreams panic-posting about the GMO threat to our water supply from this week? Great evidence that “progressive” is no insulation from “anti-science”:

Today is World Water Day. The United Nations has set aside one day a year to focus the world’s attention on the importance of fresh water. And rightly so, as we are way behind in our efforts to protect both the quantity and quality of the water our growing world needs today.(Image: EarthTimes.org)

…

And now, there is a new form of water pollution: recombinant genes that are conferring antibiotic resistance on the bacteria in the water.

Researchers in China have found recombinant drug resistant DNA, molecules that are part of the manufacturing of genetically modified organisms, in every river they tested.

Genetically engineered organisms are manufactured using antibiotic resistant genes. And these bacteria are now exchanging their genetic information with the wild bacteria in rivers. As the study points out, bacteria already present in urban water systems provides “advantageous breeding conditions for the(se) microbes.”

Antibiotic resistance is perhaps the number one threat to public health today.

…

Transgenic pollution is already common in agriculture. U.C. Berkeley Professor Ignacio Chapela was the first scientist to identify the presence of genetically engineered maize in local maize varieties in Mexico. He is an authority on transgenic gene flow. He says it is alarming that “DNA from transgenic organisms have escaped to become an integral component of the genome of free-living bacteria in rivers.” He adds that “the transgenic DNA studied so far in these bacteria will confer antibiotic resistance on other organisms, making many different species resistant to the antibiotics we use to protect ourselves from infections.”

…

Our expensive attempts to filter and fight chemicals with other chemicals are only partially effective. Our attempts to regulate recombinant DNA technology has failed to prevent gene pollution. The only way to assure a sustainable source of clean water is to understand water for what it is: a living system of biotic communities, not a commodity. It is a living thing and as such it deserves our respect, as does the human right to have abundant fresh clean water for life.

You heard it, now they’re making up a new category of pollution “gene pollution”.

Let’s go back to some of the basic science here, so again, we can display just how silly and uninformed these Chicken Littles are. When molecular biologists wish to produce large quantities of a DNA or protein, what they usually do is insert the sequence into an easy-to-grow organism like E. Coli, or yeast, or some other cell, and then have the biologic machinery of those cells produce it for us. This is one of the most simple forms of genetic modification, and we use it from everything to making plasmid DNA in the lab, to the production of recombinant human insulin for diabetics. In order to make sure your organism is making your product of interest you include a gene that encodes for resistance to an antibiotic (in bacteria most commonly to ampicillin) so that when you grow your bug you can make sure the only cells growing are the ones that are working for you by including that antibiotic in the mix. Other resistance genes we use are often for antibiotics we don’t use in humans, like hygromycin or neomycin, which is nephrotoxic if injected (but also poorly absorbed).

“That’s terrible!”, you say, “how could we teach so many bacteria to be resistant to antibiotics! Surely this will kill us all!”

Um, no. For one, the resistance genes we use aren’t novel or made de novo by humans, they already existed before a single human was ever treated with an antibiotic. The first antibiotic discovered, penicillin, is a natural product. It’s an ancient agent in an ongoing war between microorganisms. The antidote for penicillin and related molecules was actually discovered at about the same time as we discovered penicillin. Beta-lactamase, which breaks open the structure of the penicillins and inhibits their antibiotic effects was around long before humans figured out how to harness antibiotics for our own purposes. The gene, which we clone into plasmids to make our GMO bacteria work for us, came from nature too. Now if we were growing bacteria in vancomycin or linezolid, yeah, I’d be pissed, but that’s not what’s happening. And even though we still use older penicillins clinically, it’s with full knowledge that resistance has been around for decades, and they are used for infections that we know never become resistant to the drugs, like group b strep (or syphilis). The war for penicillin is over. We lost. Any bug that’s going to become resistant to penicillin already is.

The antibiotic resistance that plagues our ICUs and hospitals doesn’t come from GMOs being taught to fight ampicillin, it comes from overuse of more powerful antibiotics in humans. The genes that are providing resistance to even beta-lactam resistant antibiotics like the carbapenems or methicillin are the result of a more classic form of genetic modification – natural selection.

So what is the risk to humans from the DNA encoding a wimpy beta-lactamase or whatever being detected in water? Zilch. Nada. Zip.

The paranoia over recombinant DNA has persisted for decades despite no rational basis for a threat to humans or other living things. The continued paranoia over rDNA is a sign that the GMO paranoids get their science from bad movies, not textbooks or serious knowledge of the risks and benefits of this technology. rDNA is why we have an unlimited supply of insulin, it’s how we have virtually all of our knowledge of molecular biology, it’s how we even have an understanding of how things like antibiotic resistance work. It’s been around since the 70s and how many times have you heard of it actually hurting a person?

This is the state of the argument over genetically-modified organisms. To the uninitiated this stuff sounds like it might be kind of scary. But with any real understanding of the molecular mechanisms of these technologies, the plausibility of their risk drops to zero. Sadly, Goodall has not only shown a pretty poor level of scholarship with this new book, but also, has fallen in with cranks promoting implausible risks of this biotechnology. It’s unfortunate because she should be respected for her previous work as an environmentalist and a conservationist. This is what is so annoying about anti-GMO paranoia. It makes environmentalists look like idiots, as it distracts from actual threats to the environment with invented threats and irrational fears of biotech. I’m sure I’ll now be accused of being in the pocket of big ag, as I am in every thread on GMO, but I assure you, I have no financial interests, or any dealings with these companies ever. I’m irritated with the anti-GMO movement because it’s an embarrassment. It’s Luddism, and ignorance masquerading as environmentalism. It’s bad biology. It’s the progressive equivalent of creationism or global warming denial. It’s classic anti-science, and we shouldn’t tolerate it.