anthropogenic global warming denialism

Congratulations, America! You've just elected a conspiracy-mongering scientific ignoramus as President!

oracknows — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 09:45:54 +0000

Congratulations, America! You've just elected a conspiracy-mongering scientific ignoramus as President!

Well, I’m back.

Yes, late last night, I re-entered returned home from vacation in Mexico before our new President-Elect has a chance to build his wall. I was so exhausted that I had no time to write anything and remain so. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to go back to work today and instead took the whole week off. Like most of you, I’m still processing he cluster—oh, wait, no major profanity here—that was the US election, whose results definitely put a damper on the trip home.

In particular, I fear for what the new administration will do to science in this country, and might write about that in the near future. In the meantime, I’m recycling and partially updating a post I wrote six months ago, when Donald Trump first cinched the Republican nomination. I'm doing this to remind you that this is our new President-Elect, people. I hope those of you who voted for Trump are proud of yourselves.

I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump and vaccines in a while, although I did express amusement when Donald Trump appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to tout how healthy he supposedly is and when Deepak Chopra, of all people, castigated Trump for not being evidence-based. More importantly, I expressed dismay that disgraced antivaccine quack Andrew Wakefield reportedly met with Donald Trump and found a receptive ear.

Trump, it turns out, has a history of making wildly ridiculous antivaccine statements dating back at least to 2007. That was when I first discovered him and referred to him as the latest celebrity antivaccinationist drinking the Kool Aid of vaccine pseudoscience. A few years later, I noted his risibly nonsensical claim that a “monster shot” causes autism. Truly, Donald Trump’s history of making idiotic antivaccine statements is long and sordid. Of course, Donald Trump’s history of making idiotic statements about a great many subjects is long and sordid, but antivaccine pseudoscience is what I know better than domestic or foreign policy.

Of course, I don’t recall having heard anything from Trump in a while on the vaccine-autism front, at least not since September last year. But his antivaccine lunacy is definitely part of his persona, so much so that when I started to type “Donald Trump vaccines autism” the first entry on the search was a Natural News link from 2012. In any case, I get the feeling that Trump’s antivaccine views were too crazy even for most of Trump’s supporters, hence his relative silence these last eight months. Sure, he can spout off about how he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border and have Mexico pay for it and numerous other proposals even more ludicrous than that, but in the last few months leading up to the election he’d apparently toned down the antivaccine nonsense, with rare exceptions.

Still, now that Trump is President-Elect, after his inauguration he can do great damage to public health. Sure, school vaccine mandates are a state issue, but the guidelines upon which they are based are developed by the CDC. Over the last couple of decades, there have been various antivaccine legislators who have brought CDC officials before Congressional committees to demand “answers” about the link between vaccines and autism. Just imagine how much trouble President Trump can cause, with his power to appoint a Secretary of HHS. Consider this. Politico is reporting that one of Trump’s top candidates for HHS Secretary is Ben Carson, who has a dodgy history of making antivaccine statements himself. (He’s also apparently being considered for Secretary of Education, which is just as scary, but a topic for another day.)

I was reminded of this again by a video in a story a few months ago featuring Elizabeth Emken.

The reason this is relevant is that Emken used to be the Executive Director of Autism Speaks, an “autism advocacy” group that used to be very much into antivaccine pseudoscience. Indeed, after much foot dragging, it wasn’t until 2015 that Autism Speaks finally grudgingly admitted that there is no good evidence linking vaccines to autism after a large study was published showing no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism and a meta-analysis involving over a million children similarly failed to find a link. It’s not for nothing that Autism Speaks has been quite appropriately accused of speaking up too late on vaccines.

That tension, and the weasel words that characterized it among many autism advocacy groups, fairly drips from Emken’s response to a question about Donald Trump’s beliefs about vaccines, complete with an example of a quote by Donald Trump about having heard of children getting sick and becoming autistic after vaccination. Here’s the video:

Donald Trump campaign spokeswoman + ex-@AutismSpeaks exec @ElizabethEmken on Trump linking vaccines to autism: https://t.co/EwZKC488Q8

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) May 2, 2016

And here’s what Emken said:

Donald Trump spokeswoman Elizabeth Emken, a former executive with the leading advocacy group Autism Speaks, was put in a difficult position Monday when asked about the frontrunner’s earlier statements linking vaccines and autism.

Asked on CNN about Trump suggesting a scientific link exists between childhood vaccines and autism during a fall 2015 presidential debate, Emken sidestepped a direct rebuke of Trump’s claims.

“The position of Autism Speaks has been for quite awhile that we need to find out what's happening,” she replied. “We know there's a genetic component and there's an environmental trigger and until we get to the bottom of what's happening, no one knows what causes autism. Anyone that tells you what does or what doesn't cause autism is simply not basing that on facts."

I see now why Emkin was chosen to be Trump’s spokeswoman. The above is basically one massive appeal to ignorance, the implication that, because we don’t know what causes autism that some environmental factor—cough, cough, vaccines—must be causing autism. Don’t believe me? Check out what she says next:

“We don’t know, we need to keep looking,” Emken continued, saying she hadn’t discussed the issue with the GOP frontrunner. “But the bottom line is, look, vaccines are the most successful health program in the history of the world, so I don’t believe that’s at all what he was saying.”

This is, of course, a bald-faced lie; that is, unless Emken is not . Let’s take a look at the sort of things Donald Trump has said about vaccines over the years just on Twitter. Truly, the burning stupid flowing from that one Twitter account is not unlike a flow of ash from Mount Vesuvius engulfing Pompeii. Here is but a sampling:

Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2012

If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take - AUTISM.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 27, 2014

Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2014

No more massive injections. Tiny children are not horses—one vaccine at a time, over time.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2014

I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2014

"@OnlineOnTheAir: My friend's son, immediate #autism after #vaccines 10 yrs ago. So sad. Keep up good work Nay-sayers will understand soon."

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2014

I'm not against vaccinations for your children, I'm against them in 1 massive dose.Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2014

So many people who have children with autism have thanked me—amazing response. They know far better than fudged up reports!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2014

"@P01YN0NYM0U55: @jamandatrtl #vaccines #Shills insist #Autism starts in utero or genetic, but parents insist sudden onset after #vaccine"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2014

You get the idea. That’s some hard core antivaccine quackery. Trump’s meaning is very, very clear, Emken’s attempts to deny it notwithstanding.

But, hey, if that’s not enough for you, let’s review a bit more of what Trump has said on the topic over the years. I apologize to long time readers, who have probably seen many of these quotes before in various posts I’ve written over the years, but, now, with Trump on the verge of becoming the Republican nominee and Ted Cruz’s chances to stop him are fading, I feel the need to revisit these. Not that Cruz is any less scary than Trump, but he isn’t, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, antivaccine.

The first time I learned of Donald Trump's antivaccine proclivities was way back in 2007. What was he saying back then? This:

"When I was growing up, autism wasn't really a factor," Trump said. "And now all of a sudden, it's an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We've giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children."

He made the comments following a press conference at his Mar-A-Lago estate announcing a fundraising and lobbying push by Autism Speaks to get the brain disorder covered under private insurance policies.

And:

"When a little baby that weighs 20 pounds and 30 pounds gets pumped with 10 and 20 shots at one time, with one injection that's a giant injection, I personally think that has something to do with it. Now there's a group that agrees with that and there's a group that doesn't agree with that."

Referring to his and his wife Melania's 22-month-old son Baron, Trump continued: "What we've done with Baron, we've taken him on a very slow process. He gets one shot at a time then we wait a few months and give him another shot, the old-fashioned way. But today they pump the children with so much at a very young age. We do it on a very, very conservative level."

So, yes, back in 2007, Trump was already parroting the antivaccine pseudoscience that at that time I had been deconstructing for seven years and blogging about for nearly three. It was a performance—and, let's face it, everything Trump does in public is performance art, if you can call it that—that was brilliantly parodied at Autism News Beat as The art of the schlemiel. In any case, I'm hard pressed to come up with any time when a baby gets 10 or 20 shots at a time, and that's even assuming that Trump was ignorantly conflating the number of diseases vaccinated against in combination vaccines with "shots."

Four years later, Trump was still at it. On Fox and Friends, he repeated once again that he had a "theory" about vaccines, and that was:

Business mogul Donald Trump chose the fifth annual World Autism Awareness Day to reveal that he “strongly” believes that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are linked to exposure to vaccines.

In a Monday interview on Fox News, the reality star explained that a series of casual observations had led him to the conclusion that “monster” vaccinations cause autism.

“I’ve gotten to be pretty familiar with the subject,” Trump said. “You know, I have a theory — and it’s a theory that some people believe in — and that’s the vaccinations. We never had anything like this. This is now an epidemic. It’s way, way up over the past 10 years. It’s way up over the past two years. And, you know, when you take a little baby that weighs like 12 pounds into a doctor’s office and they pump them with many, many simultaneous vaccinations — I’m all for vaccinations, but I think when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different then lots of different things have happened. I really — I’ve known cases.”

The video can still be viewed here. Tellingly, when he was challenged on this by Gretchen Carlson, who noted that "the studies have said that there is no link" and that there hadn't been any mercury in vaccines for years, Trump would have none of it:

“It’s also very controversial to even say,” Trump acknowledged. “But I couldn’t care less. I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child, and they go for the vaccinations and a month later the child is no longer healthy.”

Don't trust those pointy-headed expert scientists. They've only been spending their entire lives studying the issue! Trump knows better then they do! Why? He's got anecdotes, man:

“It happened to somebody that worked for me recently,” he added. “I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of the sudden they go in and they get this monster shot. You ever see the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in — you know, it’s terrible, the amount. And they pump this in to this little body and then all of the sudden the child is different a month later. I strongly believe that’s it.”

All because of what Donald Trump calls a "monster shot." I note that this appears to be the example that was presented to Emken. It couldn’t be more clear what Trump meant, either: He attributed his employee’s son’s autism to vaccines, which he called a “monster shot.” As I pointed out at the time, even if the child were truly "different" after vaccination a month later, that would not be "all of a sudden." In any case, this is what those of us who pay attention to these things the "too many too soon" gambit. All spreading out vaccines accomplishes is to increase the period of time that a child is vulnerable to infectious diseases for no real benefit of reducing the chance of autism because there is no link between vaccines and autism.

If that’s not enough for you, in 2015, when interviewed by conservative talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt, the question of vaccines and autism came up. Here’s how the conversation went down:

HH: So you believe there’s a causal connection between vaccines and autism?

DT: Well, a lot of people do. I mean, there are many people that do. And I know at least two people, one of them who works in the building that I’m in right now, a beautiful woman, has a child. The child is 100% healthy, takes the child, who was I think around a year and a half or two years old to get the shot, gets this massive shot of fluid pumped into the baby’s body, and a few days later, catches a fever, and all of a sudden, is severely autistic. And many people, many people have had that experience, Hugh. And I will tell you, on Twitter and on Facebook, where you know, so many people, I feel, it’s sort of interesting, because I get so much response, people are praying for me that I at least say that. So I totally believe in the shot. I totally believe that you should be vaccinated. But let them spread it out over a little period of time. You can’t pump that, because have you ever seen the size of these inoculations? You can’t pump that much fluid into a little baby’s body. And I think it’s having an effect. And I know of at least two cases in my, but many people say the same thing happened to me where their child is totally healthy. They get pumped up with this huge pile of liquid, with many, many different vaccines, and their child turns out to be autistic after it. And all I’m saying is spread it out in smaller doses over a longer period of time.

HH: If a group of scientists came to you and said look, The Donald, that’s just, that’s not right, you’re giving out misinformation, would you change your mind if presented with facts on that?

DT: Well, I’ve seen babies that were totally healthy that weren’t healthy, and I’m not asking for anything. All I’m doing is saying spread it out over a period of time. I’m not saying don’t get inoculated, don’t get the shots, don’t get the vaccines. I’m saying spread it out over a period of time. It doesn’t hurt anybody other than probably the pharmaceutical companies, because they probably make more money putting it into one shot. Maybe it hurts the doctors. I don’t know. But I can say this. Everybody would get the vaccines. They just, they wouldn’t be pumping these massive amounts of liquid into a child.

Again, contrary to Emken’s twisting around the issue, Trump’s meaning couldn’t have been more plain. He believes vaccines cause autism. He doesn’t believe any of those elitist pointy-headed scientists who say otherwise, and nothing will make him change his mind. Nor does Trump sound as though he believes that vaccines are the “most successful health program in the history of the world,” as Emken put it.

I referred to the tension at the heart of Autism Speaks regarding vaccine-autism pseudoscience. The organization was founded by Bob and Suzanne Wright, who were always fence sitters on the question of whether he believed vaccines cause autism. His daughter Katie, however, was a true believer that vaccines cause autism, a belief that caused a great deal of friction with her parents and the organization. For years, the organization was riven with strife, as the Wrights tried to appease the vaccine/autism pseudoscience contingent, which provided much of the money and ultimately led to a schism in the group. As recently as last September, Bob Wright was using the same sort of weasel words that Emken used. It’s useful to note that the scientific advisor’s statement was:

Over the last two decades, extensive research has asked whether there is any link between childhood vaccinations and autism. The results of this research are clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. We urge that all children be fully vaccinated.

To which Bob Wright added:

Over the last two decades extensive research has asked whether there is any link between childhood vaccines and autism. Scientific research has not directly connected autism to vaccines. Vaccines are very important. Parents must make the decision whether to vaccinate their children. Efforts must be continually made to educate parents about vaccine safety. If parents decide not to vaccinate they must be aware of the consequences in their community and their local schools.

Note the weasel words: Scientific research has not “directly connected autism to vaccines” and “efforts must be continually made to educate parents about vaccine safety.” Not only that, but the science officer’s statement was expunged from the website. If you go to the Autism Speaks website, all you will find is Bob Wright’s statement.

One wonders what sort of position Emken might find in the Trump administration.

This isn’t all Trump is known for. As Jann Bellamy reminds us:

Trump started The Trump Network in 2009, a multi-level marketing scheme to sell nutritional supplements and weight-loss products. He promoted the scheme to those affected by the economic meltdown as “an opportunity for you to make as much money as you want.” Key to success, however, was not so much in selling his dubious products, but in recruiting other sellers and earning commissions. Trump’s “health” products included a multi-vitamin supposedly customized to the consumer’s needs based on an unvalidated mail-in urine test. There was also a weight-loss program developed by a naturopath but exposed by a real registered dietician as expensive and unhealthy. Trump sold The Trump Network in 2012.

Oh, and our new Vice President, Mike Pence, famously denied that smoking causes lung cancer.

Meanwhile, antivaccine loons are rejoicing. For example, on a VAXXED page, proposing a slate of antivaccinationists for a Trump administration:

Meanwhile, remember that Donald Trump apparently met with Andrew Wakefield in August. If Wakefield can manage to get in touch with President Trump, he will likely have a receptive ear to his antivaccine idiocy.

Congratulations, America. We’ve elected a conspiracy-mongering, antivaccine, scientific ignoramus as President of the United States, and I haven’t even gone into his anthropogenic climate change denial. The damage that can and likely will be done to America’s health and science programs over the next four years is incalculable. I’m reminded of H.L. Mencken’s famous quote:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

In 2016, our democracy was perfected.

oracknows Thu, 11/10/2016 - 04:45

Categories

Policy

A. California's senate justvreconfirmed a commitment to social justice and an intent to uphold values of tolerance. We have a spare room, if anyone needs refuge. http://sd24.senate.ca.gov/news/2016-11-09-joint-statement-california-le…

I really hope the wall waits. We have a conference in Mexico City in June. With three planned panels on vaccine related issues.

Of course, we were planning to fly. How tall is this hypothetical wall supposed to be?

Of course,

Did you vote?

Yes.

I have abandoned Facebook for the very reason that I believe it led us to be too complacent with this election - I plan on working locally to make sure that my community continues to be a tolerant, diverse and pro-science place to live.

Well, since Trump doesn't believe in Government Regulation, it actually puts him firmly on the side of not wanting to go after the Pharma industry, since that would be bad for business.

And certainly he's not going to appoint an activist to head any of the regulatory agencies.

As my mother so helpfully said to me, she was appalled when Nixon was elected back in 1968, but so did Nixon pass, so will Trump - and it is quite possible that he will fail so spectacularly in the first couple of years that people finally come to their senses.

I will also say that, for the majority of people who voted for Trump, they did have legitimate concerns with how Washington has not be responsive to large sections of our population....I just wish their protest vote does not permanently damage our country.

he was challenged on this by Gretchen Carlson, who noted that “the studies have said that there is no link” and that there hadn’t been any mercury in vaccines for years

As I said back when Orac first posted about this TV appearance, Fox was paying Ms. Carlson big bucks to play a bimbo on national TV, and she chose this of all issues to break character. Since then we have had confirmation, in the form of her sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox, that she was acting a part. To reiterate: someone who was acting like a stereotypical dumb blonde on national TV was actually smarter, at least on this issue, than Trump.

Welcome to postmodernist America, where reality is whatever the people running our government decide it is, never mind the actual facts. I invite them to test the theory of gravity by stepping off the top of the Washington Monument, because after all, gravity is only a theory.

The damage that can and likely will be done to America’s health and science programs over the next four years is incalculable.

If he serves four years. I doubt it will happen.

I'm not suggesting or recommending any 'second amendment solutions'. But Trump has been real quiet now, for about a day and a half. A large part of the time has been spent getting briefings, both classified and unclassified.

I suspect that he's like a dog chasing a car, except he did catch it. He is quickly going to find out that being President is a whole lot less fun than running for President, and Trump likes his fun.

I predict that he'll be sworn in, and in maybe a year (hopefully less) declare victory, resign, and give us President Pence.

Not a yuge improvement, but at this point, I'll take what I can get.

Depending on who Trump nominates for the various agency spots, I expect major push-back by Dems in Congress on confirmations...plus potentially large-scale resignations at the agencies themselves.

@President Donald Trump,

Congratulations and keep and eye on Orac!?!?

@Orac,

As President Obama departs, and in the spirit of Democracy, would you voluntarily pardon all those imprisoned in the RI automatic moderation queue?

On the local radio station this morning, Bobby Jindal is being considered for secretary HHS.

Louisianans will close the highways in order to facilitate his rapid departure from the state, as rapidly as is humanly possible.

If he does for the nation in HHS what he's done for Louisiana, we'll have the black death back in no time at all. Hell, it'd be even money that he'd reintroduce smallpox.

Just to reflect Trump, who thinks that having nuclear weapons and not using them is a bad thing, they should be used as often as possible.

Yeah, H.L. Mencken hit it spot on.

Not a yuge improvement, but at this point, I’ll take what I can get.

Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Pence is in many ways worse than Trump. Not necessarily on vaccination, but as documented at one of the links in the OP, Pence wrote in an editorial as recently as 2001 that smoking doesn't cause cancer, and his radical evangelical views are likely to be very bad for women's healthcare. He's at least as impervious to facts as Trump is.

I expect major push-back by Dems in Congress on confirmations

This assumes facts not in evidence: that Republicans will adhere to institutional norms. In this case, to actually hold hearings instead of putting the nominee directly to a vote, and to retain the filibuster. Democrats in the Senate will need at least one of those two things, and preferably both, to be able to push back on outrageous nominees.

The record shows that Republicans do not respect institutional norms: refusing to confirm Obama's nominee for Supreme Court, and refusing to debate his budget proposals, to name two. Astoundingly, they have been rewarded for this behavior.

Yup. Even though the Republicans hold a slim majority, there won't be much the Democrats can do. They can try to push back, but they are very unlikely to succeed, given the ruthlessness and cleverness with which Republicans wield Senate rules.

Basically, whomever Trump wants, he will get.

@Lawrence
"she was appalled when Nixon was elected back in 1968, but so did Nixon pass, so will Trump"

Ahh, but we're still stuck with the travisty of his 'drug war' and its' retarded 'controlled substances act' scheduling.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon aid

Correct, Mike Pence would not be much, if any, of an improvement over Donald Trump. Especially if you're not a straight white male. Mike Pence is likely to be responsible for most domestic policy for the next four years, anyway; LGBT rights are probably going to be the first to go under the new regime.

Oh, and don't go and look at this if you don't want to die a little (or a lot) inside.

Good lord, you're using Mencken as a cudgel against "plain folks of the land?" Those honky-tonk rubes who have been systematically impoverished by neopartisan policy favoring the control and manipulation of global capital over the diverse needs of our Union's member states? It does come down to geography, local economy, and, yes, class distinction. But the distinction is not that they're morons. It's that they're being systematically exploited by the urban centers. Their tax dollars turn around and pay to send their jobs overseas. Their tax dollars bailed out the banks who fucked them over with imaginary numbers, much as the media recently fucked us over with imaginary numbers. I'm down for globalism but not if it's about extracting wealth from the rest of the world to build up our cities and fuel our "progress." Fuck the ivory tower.

More about Trump's likely cabinet:

Climate change: "Myron Ebell, a climate skeptic who is running the EPA working group on Trump’s transition team, is seen as a top candidate to lead the EPA... Forrest Lucas, the 74-year-old co-founder of oil products company Lucas Oil, is seen as a top contender for Interior secretary... Continental Resources CEO Hamm has long been seen as a leading candidate for energy secretary."

Public Health: Carson probably won't get Education since Trump owes him wants to give him something important and "has made clear the Education Department would play a reduced role in his administration — if it exists at all. He has suggested he may try to do away with it altogether." So if Carson doesn't get HHS, he'll likely be Surgeon General, and Rick Scott will get HHS. Yes, Rick 'biggest Medicare fraud in history' Scott. Maybe Scott will make Brain Clement as an under-secretary. I jest. I hope. The ACA will be scrapped, as new strain to the healthcare system as the uninsured go back to ERs in even more woefully underfunded hospitals. The regulatory authority of the FDA will be knee-capped. Drug prices will skyrocket wherever the Shkrelis and Mylans can exploit 'the free market', and you can forget about reining in supplements, homeopathy, cancer scams and so on.

I doubt Trump will do anything directly about vaccines. Oh, if anyone asks his opinion, he might still give the 'monster shot' theory some lip service, But as far as actual policy goes, any politician only has so much political capital, and they're not going to spend it on vaccines because there no prospect of return on investment. More likely there might be some kind of broad-scale 'health freedom' legislation that would have some impact on immunization, perhaps by making it harder for states to eliminate non-medical exemptions.

I'd have expected the AVers to put posts up by the morning after the election calling anew for Congressional hearings into 'the CDC Whistleblower' if not just salivating in the belief this will surely happen. I just glanced at the AoA front page and there's was no hint of anything like that. Maybe they know they're not going to be on a GOP agenda busy f**king up much more serious aspects of the country, and/or that it would backfire into their face if it ever happened. (?)

Eric Lund@10

Pence is in many ways worse than Trump.

So much this, in so many ways. Frankly, I think the scariest thing about Trump is that we lost veto power against the Republican congress. Trump is an idiot and I don't think he'll actually cause much damage himself but he will almost certainly rubberstamp any bullsh!t that comes out of congress.

Pence on the other hand is awful and has the experience to affect his awfulness. See Indiana under him.

And the worst part is that even if they burn the country to the ground their supports will blame everything and everyone but their leaders. The Republicans have not been acting in the best interests of their base for decades and the rubes have given them control of everything. Manufacturing jobs ain't coming back but that sure has hell won't stop the base from voting for whatever monsters the Rs put forth in 2/4 years.

sadmar, wait until you see tomorrow's post.

Well, since Trump doesn’t believe in Government Regulation, it actually puts him firmly on the side of not wanting to go after the Pharma industry, since that would be bad for business.

The pharmas are a major funding source for ALEC, which drafts model right-wing legislation proposals, and funds the wingnut legislators who can help get them passed. Most of the climate-denying, evolution-denying, and generaly anti-science GOP congressmen are in the ALEC camp -- including the majority who appear sympathetic to anti-vax. This tells you a lot about how 'Big Pharma' actually views vaccines. Since the modest profits from vaccines are protected by The Vaccine Court, they can actually exploit the attacks on the CDC, FDA etc. to get a bit more wind in the sails of their anti-regulatory agenda. They want fewer hurdles in getting their new windfall-profit-potential meds to market faster, and probably fewer restrictions on advertising and promotion as well.

The Dow has rallied now, but when the markets were tanking right after the election NPR reported that one of the few stock sectors showing gains were the pharmas.

JP is correct about Pence:
wasn't be the one who wanted funerals for fetuses?

Some women made a facebook page which posts their letters to Pence describing their menses. Hilarious.
He supports 'counsel away the gay' nonsense.

Welcome to postmodernist America, where reality is whatever the people running our government decide it is, never mind the actual facts.

That should be 'postmodern America'. Postmodernism is [in this context] an attempt to understand how these historical changes came about and what their consequences might be. Some of the resulting theses suggest this is a 'good' thing, somesuggest it's a very 'bad' thing, others attempt to find some silver lining amidst the dark clouds. Since I first stumbled into this blog, I've argued that rejecting postmodernism[of this sort] is folly because one way or the other it can help us understand the changes going on around us we find so disturbing. This is true now more than ever, as 'the postmodern' is definitely not only here, but now at the center of the most powerful government in the world.

I suppose 'small government' republicans now get their fondest wishes -
Obama will be out/ they'll have total congressional rule-
and they can choose to DO NOTHING.

Isn't that what many of them want?

That is, after they cut women's rights, LGBT rights, civil rights, voting rights, taxes for the rich and stack the court..

At any rate, I am newly feeling hopeful .
I choose to see the glass as half full.

Here's why-
- there will be a renaissance in comedy writing
- there will be astute political analysis and investigation by
g-dless university educated wonks/ hacks
- liberals will get to feel the thrill of being the opposition
- you can meet interesting people at protests
- social scientists can analyse the differences between red and blue cultures which may lead to clever appellations for members of these two distinct groups **
- I can avoid places I never really wanted to visit anyway ( no names, I wouldn't want to insult anyone who lives there but...)
- we can revel in our elitism while we feast upon Thai food
- we can feel superior to more people than USUAL

** ideas, minions?

Denice:

He didn't just want funerals for fetuses. He championed a bill that required them in Indiana and signed it into law as governor. The bill has apparently been mis-represented by Pence opponents as requiring the mothers to pay for the cremation and burial. Technically, anyway, that's false as the law places the responsibility for that on "the health care facility" in which the miscarriage or abortion took place. Of course, these facilities may pass the costs off to the women receiving their services in the form of higher fees.

AND speaking of feeling superior...
has anyone been following Mikey ?

His post- election triumphant shlock is truly in a class by itself.

As per usual, Null voices defiance as he rides upon the coattails of city protestors last night.
( He never supported Trump but will gladly take the tax cuts)

@ sadmar:

Thanks for that.

@ sadmar

In addition to post-Modern America, I believe we have entered the era of post-factual or even post-knowledge America.

Sometimes I wonder: Instead of elections, should we hold lotteries instead?

"Congratulations, Miss Ethel Grant of Pennington, Wyoming! You are the first of this year's state Senators!"

""I choose to see the glass as half full.

The optimist says, "the drink is half full." The pessimist says, "the drink is half full but I might have bowel cancer."

-- Mr. B, Kids in the Hall (S1e17, 1988)

As my mother so helpfully said to me, she was appalled when Nixon was elected back in 1968, but so did Nixon pass, so will Trump...

As a meme I like to post says:
"This too will pass. It will pass like a kidney stone. But it WILL pass!"

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-abo…

Good lord, you’re using Mencken as a cudgel against “plain folks of the land?”

Perhaps you would prefer the Waco Kid's version from Blazing Saddles:

What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny"? "Make yourself at home"? "Marry my daughter"? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.

Wow, we really are now living in the age of anti-intellectualism, fueled & fomented in great part & parcel by the ignorance rampant on Internet & social media.

Mike Judge, the creator of MTV's 'Beavis & Butthead', wrote & directed a movie called 'Idiocracy' only a decade ago in 2006, which I always thought of as more of a satire & a comedy rather than a prophecy. Until now.

I am old enough to remember all the presidents back to Ike (not so well in his case) to the president elect. I believe Trump may be the most hated president in that time even before he actually sworn in. Whether Trump will be the most inept is to be seen but probably.

I just hope Trump doesn't lead us to Khmer Orange.

We'll see what happens when the full gravity of what he's gotten himself into finally sinks in.....

And in Congress, Paul Ryan might just turn into our best friend, because as much as I don't like him, he's not bat-shit crazy either.

Paul Ryan will be the one pushing Trump to embrace massive budget cuts and slashing the social safety net. Trump is actually not a deficit hawk and has expressed skepticism about massive budget cuts. Charles Pierce refers to him as the zombie-eyed granny starver. It's an accurate description, and now Ryan will likely get Trump to rubber stamp anything he wants.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19861/the-latest-in-zomb…

Ryan scares me as much as Trump.

Orac and his double super secret alternate identity are probably already on several secret lists of enemies and thugs are already on their way. Fortunately, the lady of the house kept her firearm for exactly this situation. Unfortunately, she seems to have misplaced its ramrod and her supply of lead balls.

Wesley Dodson @15: Rural people mad that their tax dollars go to the cities? Where the heck did you hear that? It's my urban tax dollars that go the rural areas, my coastal tax dollars that go to the interior states. This is not an opinion, this is a fact.

You are wrong.

Hey, Mike Adams loves Trump! Surprise!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-alt-right-used-to-be-ignore…

Eric:

In addition to post-Modern America, I believe we have entered the era of post-factual or even post-knowledge America.

Well, I'd say the post-knowledge is pretty much a part of the postmodern, rather than something separate or beyond it somehow. Again, though, I'll suggest a substitution: 'post-reality' as opposed to 'post-factual'. Postmodern culture is overflowing with facts, since the 'simulacrum' or 'hyper-real' have characteristics that can be notated. 'Donald Trump said global warming is no more than Chinese propaganda,' is a fact, after all. Baudrillard wrote about the flow of "information" -- facts as data bits out of context, basically -- in the mass media as destroying meaning in it's shear volume and chaos.

Even the crazy and/or wrong postmodern theory gets to a lot of useful ideas in explaining something like the rise of Trump. i'm talking about stuff that was published over 30 years ago, and if science advocates and skeptics had grappled with it properly, instead of just going nuclear on straw man versions of it put out by political/cultural conservatives like Roger Kimball, they'd have seen our current mess coming and been better prepared for it.

In 1983, Fred Jameson wrote:

For political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum, there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the personal.

What is 'the scientific community'' after all but a group seeking "actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum", now facing off against fantasies rooted in dread of inexplicable catastrophe and cataclysm? And losing...

@ Rich Bly

You must not remember Nixon as well as I do.

sadmar,

I remember Nixon very well. Nixon in many ways was a very good president (look at the environmental laws enact during his time) but in many more ways was horrible (Watergate and things). I give Nixon a wash as a president.

What will trump do with the war powers act?

@ Orac
Thanks for the link to the Pierce article on Ryan. Great stuff! One of the dramas to unfold is how Trump will deal with the GOP 'traitors to the ticket' in Congress, Ryan first and foremost. Will they become his new BFFs,will he tolerate them when he has to and keep them at arms length otherwise, or will he run them out on a Tweet-storm rail? He did promise to adopt Ryan's budget, but he's been talking infrastructure projects first and foremost, and the two don't mesh, not that that would stop Trump from just pushing the bills waaay down the road. Ryan acting as a drag on Trumpism is pure fantasy, regardless, and with or without Ryan there will be major safety net slashing in healthcare, though Trump (or should I say Mercer and Bannon) aren't fool enough to gut Social Security.

Trump has all the cards, Ryan's hand is empty, and Ryan will be giving Trump anything he wants, not the other way round, or he won't be Speaker any more, assuming he even gets to keep that job in the new House to begin with.

@ Rich

I'm not talking about what Nixon did, just how much he was hated, well... especially by me so I'm biased. Probably had to do with me being 18-19 when he was on TV talking about Nam and Watergate, not yet being jaded, and just getting filled to overflowing with loathing listening to him. I was rooting for the phlebitis to get him, when he came down with it. Kent State hit me really hard - there but for the grace of FSM went I and all. Trump hasn't fostered actual murders yet, but give him time.

Why did you bring up the war powers act? It's just sadistic to ask me to think about it. I finally beat back my clinical depression to a reasonable distance a few years back after a good 15 years plus, and I started to feel it creeping back on the night of the election. I'm frittering away time I should be using for other things writing comments because it keeps my mind occupied more reliably....

Anyway, I have some inchoate thoughts about war and fascist regimes, but I'm not sure if the Breitbart gang are genuine fascists or just adepts at exploiting fascist sentiments. Regardless, there's nothing like an old school war to get those blue-collar guys back to work and establish authoritarian policing of dissent, but I don't know if that kind of factory-driven warfare has a place in the 21st century.

So I'll toss the question back to you: What WILL Trump do with the war powers act? [Trumph des Wliiens?}

Can you comment on your evaluation of the scientific credibility of this journal article ?
http://www.jpands.org/vol21no2/miller.pdf
a review of data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows a dose-dependent association between the number of vaccines administered simultaneously and the likelihood of hospitalization or death for an adverse reaction.

WTF with the tears? Worst case scenario MMR is bye bye, likely scenario it is just delayed, everyone still gets vaccinated and if early administration was the problem then bye bye to brain damaged children misdiagnosed with autism as well. This is good. So be straight with me if you really care about people getting vaccinated, what is the real issue here? Trump said and I quote "people must be vaccinated" and went on to talk about polio in his interview with Attkisson. So what am I missing in regards to corporate profit because I see no other reason for a beef here.

sadmar,

Unfortunately, I can think of many actions he may take with the war powers act. None of trump's actions with the war powers acts would be rational. Let's see what could he come up with: Bombing Mecca, sinking refugee boats, or invading Mexico/Canada. I have a very bleak outlook for the near future.

Sorry if I am such a downer.

In this election campaign, I was interested in one thing that seems to be affecting your electoral system as well as Canada's. The Pollsters have been way off in their claims. In last years election, they were calling for a slim majority or a minority Liberal government. We got a large majority Liberal government. They called for the NDP to be the official opposition, and the Conservatives to be effectively wiped of the electoral map. Not even close to reality.

The pollsters seem to be having the same issues with your election. Trump was never going to make it through the Republican nomination cycle. Yet he made it to the end. He wouldn't win the nomination because the party would never accept him. Trump won the nomination and faced off against the Democrats, who had their own pollster issues. In the election, Clinton never had less then a 2 point lead. She lost by a significant margin at the electoral college and number of states won.

This makes me wonder if modern tele-polls are running into the same issue as web-based polls. Self-selection. I know that I either hang-up or give random answers to pollsters that contact me because I don't care to perpetuate the tilting of the political balance by making one side appear to be the winner. Is this a reasonable hypothesis or am I way out in left-field? As may be obvious, my background in statistics of this sort is near enough to 0 to be indistinguishable.

# 44
The key issue is that Trump is a climate change denier. For all intents and purposes we have already lost a good part of Bangladesh, much of Florida and who knows what all else to future flooding. Think Atlantis.

Trump's possible impacts on medical care, human rights, finance and even war, excepting nuclear war, are essentially trivial compared to what he may do to the fight to mitigate global warming.

And at last report Trump has picked an infamous climate denier, Myron Ebell to head his EPA transition team and Myron has never met a coal mine he did not love.

If we cannot mitigate global warming at perhaps 2 degrees, and this looks unlikely, we are going to be seeing more extreme weather--droughts, fires, flood -- more epidemics, huge waves of refugees and so on.

Jeff: "Worst case scenario MMR is bye bye,..."

Wow, you must really hate children.

A problem has occurred with the threats to kill Trump.

I have a lingering question for all the anti-Trump people who are threatening to assasinate him. I do not understand the logic here. My question is simple ...

In what manner would you assasinate him being that you are all anti-gun?

Are you planning to sword fight him? Probably not since owning a sword means you support Knights Templar and that makes you racist. Would you hang him? No racists hang people and liberals are not racists. My guess is you would take the same cowardly way out and act like a member of Isis and suicide bomb him or run over him with a car. Oh wait. That would not be decent either because both methods would contribute to global warming. Hmmm. Your proposal to assasinate him seems illogical since you have no logical means in which method you would use that would not label you a hypocrite and go against what you say you stand for.

@Orac

"Ryan scares me as much as Trump."

He should scare you a hell of a lot more.

ht[]p://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

I'll just leave this here.

And in Congress, Paul Ryan might just turn into our best friend, because as much as I don’t like him, he’s not bat-shit crazy either.

Disagree. Ryan's skill is the ability to fool the admittedly not-very-smart Washington press corps into thinking he's smart, because he can produce charts that appear to support his talking points. But it's all wishful thinking at best, and in most cases outright fantasy. The difference between Ryan and most rank-and-file Republican congresscritters is that Ryan does a better job of hiding the crazy, it's not that he's significantly less crazy than the average among his party.

I don’t know if this is entirely true, but my 18 year old college freshman, gay grandson texted me yesterday that Pence believes that electroshock therapy “cures” homosexuality. He is truly terrified. I assured him it wouldn’t be a priority to “cure” gays, but some of the stuff I’m reading here makes me wonder. I am retired, so I’m leaving the country--I own some land somewhere else and I’ve offered refuge to my adult grandchildren. I have no desire to fight another day or have to participate in any of this. It sickens me that Obama met with him, frankly. He just gave the emperor some clothes to put on.

Terry Rodger: "A problem has occurred with the threats to kill Trump"

I am sorry, I thought I had read this entire page, and I don't recall someone threatening to kill Trump. Could you please link to that comment or quote the part of the article that suggests that as a valid alternative.

"In what manner would you assasinate him being that you are all anti-gun?"

Wow, that is a both a silly and presumptive assumption. What makes you think that?

Terry Rodgers, do not equate anyone commenting on this blog to the persons who are presently rioting in the streets. Those are common vandals.

Norman Miller: "Can you comment on your evaluation of the scientific credibility of this journal article ?"

Did you know there is a search box at the top right of this page. Why don't you try it, here is what you might find:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/?s=neil+miller

Also, please tell us what medical/science qualifications Mr Miller has? Why would we care about a political organization like the AAPS anyway?

Oh, and since you are too freaking lazy to do a simple search, here is the actual article you should read:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/06/16/combining-childhood-vaccin…

Thank you for unknowingly bringing some levity to the results of the election. You have illustrated perfectly the type of "research" that you tried (or not tried... whatever).

@Norman Jones #44, that article is written by Neil Z. Miller, a familiar name here. I went to the conclusion. Long story short, the very first claim Miller makes in his conclusion is demonstrably false. That pdf is not worth the data space it's taking up on a server.

@norman Jones (44)

Read the disclaimer on the VAERS website.

It is a voluntary reporting system and all reports are retained, whether verified or not. They are not a valid source of data for statistical analysis.

AAArgh... I am so sorry Norman Jones! I mixed up your name with the author of the paper you linked to. My sincerest apologies.

Though it would have helped if you searched this blog before posing!

Aargh, again... " before posting"

One piece of irony is that Big Pharma seems to enjoy having an anti-vaxxer as president.....

http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/trump-victory-pharma-stocks/

I looked on the 'net for a "Make America Smart Again" hat... Not available yet!

A problem has occurred with the threats to kill Trump.
I have a lingering question for all the anti-Trump people who are threatening to assasinate him. I do not understand the logic here. My question is simple …
In what manner would you assasinate him being that you are all anti-gun?
Are you planning to sword fight him? Probably not since owning a sword means you support Knights Templar and that makes you racist. Would you hang him? No racists hang people and liberals are not racists. My guess is you would take the same cowardly way out and act like a member of Isis and suicide bomb him or run over him with a car. Oh wait. That would not be decent either because both methods would contribute to global warming. Hmmm.

Simple, really. Give him a MASSIVE vaccine.

Nah, simplicity itself and indeed, is my chosen method of suicide.
Tie the hands at the side and watch the head explode due to a lack of the ability to gesticulate.*

*The estimated yield from my own head exploding is approximately 10 KT, so I have a special area of desert in mind... ;)

More seriously, I am quite with Orac on this, such threats can cause an unfriendly visit from the Secret Service, a warrant for the servers and logs and worse.
Then, a visit to the one initially making the threat. Few want to have a repeat of that experience.

@ Jeff #45 --clearly you didn't read about all the measles outbreaks in California in 2014 and 2015 due to declining measles vaccination rates there. I guess you're ok with the fact that before measles vaccination started in the US in 1963 "Before the measles vaccination program started in 1963, we estimate that about 3 to 4 million people got measles each year in the United States. Of those people, 400 to 500 died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 developed encephalitis (brain swelling) from measles." ( http://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/faqs.html ), which doesn't include the 1 in 500 or so who get measles and then will die from SSPE a few years to decades later.

If you're ok with that should the MMR vaccine go "bye -bye", please state so here so it's on the record so we have you on the record opposing solid scientific fact versus the delusions fiction of the "MMR causes autism" crowd.

Terry -

I'd say we have to take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

OK, stop it with the talk about assassinating Donald Trump. Seriously. Stop it. I know you're not advocating that and I certainly would never advocate that, but even mentioning assassination on my blog makes me nervous. He's President-Elect now, and I don't want a visit from the Secret Service.

Any further comments referencing assassination will be deleted with extreme prejudice. Stop it.

@ #44 norman jones

I cannot claim to speak for our esteemed host, but a few caveats are in order. I suggest visiting the VAERS web site and looking at both the FAQ section and the database pages' guide, especially https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/index. Important paragraphs:

VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning that reports about adverse events are not automatically collected, but require a report to be filed to VAERS. VAERS reports can be submitted voluntarily by anyone, including healthcare providers, patients, or family members. Reports vary in quality and completeness. They often lack details and sometimes can have information that contains errors.

A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that VAERS staff follow-up on all serious and other selected adverse event reports to obtain additional medical, laboratory, and/or autopsy records to help understand the concern raised. However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up. Note that the inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality.

The short version: VAERS is full of a lot of crap that any fool with an internet connection can contribute to. At best, it provides an indication that something may need to be checked out with real studies.

assassination? "Delete. With extreme prejudice."?

I see what Orac did there.
The horror. The horror.

The age of anti-intellectualism is not beholden to facts...a cursory glossing over of a topic w/ one's keen confirmation bias & an utter lack of personal insight, & all preconceived notions are exalted.

@ RobRN:

Perhaps you can't find a “Make America Smart Again” hat because you're looking at the wrong websites. Since Trump has said "We have to get smart." as often or more trhan he's said "make America great again" maybe you shouldcheck at Breitbart.Com.

People don't know how great you are. People don't know how smart you are. These are the smart people. These are the smart people. These are really the smart people. And they never like to say it, but I say it. And I'm a smart person. These are the smart. We have the smartest people. We have the smartest people. And they know it. Some say it, but they hate to say it, but we have the smartest people. [Trump to crowd at rally in Council Bluffs, IA, 9/28/16]

Seriously it's way past time to drop the 'us smart, you stupid,' thing, for all kinds of reasons. Check Narad's links at #52 for one. For another, the dichotomy is so simplistic for an accurate discussion of really-pretty-complicated and multivalent, often contradictory belief system its just, uhhhh....
...stupid.
;-)

Not a yuge improvement, but at this point, I’ll take what I can get.

Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Pence is in many ways worse than Trump. Not necessarily on vaccination, but as documented at one of the links in the OP, Pence wrote in an editorial as recently as 2001 that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, and his radical evangelical views are likely to be very bad for women’s healthcare. He’s at least as impervious to facts as Trump is.

I don't disagree with any particular point, Eric.

I'm not saying I wish for Trump to step down and let Pence in. It's just a thought I had, and so far this election cycle, I'm batting about .000 on predictions.

But when it comes to being the POTUS, there is more than science and civil rights. They are important, sure, but they aren't the universal set.

There's being the National Command Authority for the military. Trump has said he'd order the military to commit war crimes. True, he didn't use the words 'war crimes', because I don't think he understands the concept. I can well imagine Trump issuing an unlawful order, and the crisis that it would cause. Pence would be a better CinC. Not good, just better, the same way a kick in the nuts is better than being fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.

Pence has studied law. I, too, doubt Trump has read the constitution.

When Trump said that he'd ban Muslim immigration, Pence piped up and said it would be flatly unconstitutional.

Trump seems to think he can change treaties on a whim, despite what the Constitution has to say on the matter. I think foreign policy would be a great deal less exciting under Pence.

Economic policy - probably a wash. (As an aside, prior to the election, I moved a chunk of 401-k money from stock into bonds in case Trump won. Another failed prophecy.)

Pence might do 'bad things' (in fact, I'd bet on it), but he'd do it within the rules. After all, he does have a law degree. Trump doesn't understand the concept of rules, or of limits on the power of the Presidency.

But it doesn't really matter. As I note above, for this election cycle, I've been given the gift of anti-prophecy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_RXPU1Lhg.

I'm sorry, but you are whining about what, exactly ?

Mr. Webber: "I’m sorry, but you are whining about what, exactly ?"

Your lack of reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, and that there too many other people just like you.

Orac : " OK, stop it with the talk..."

I just noticed that Mikey ( Natural News) did a rant on Thursday about how the *left* is planning violence against the Donald and his followers. As usual, there are a few barely hidden dog whistles about lynching..

Now that the election is over, I find that the type of nonsense ( Mikey, Gary et al) that I've surveyed for years being discussed on mainstream channels. Yiiiii. I can't escape it, can I?

Someone mentioned 'Idiocracy': how about Green Day's "American Idiot'? That was about George W, wasn't it?

BS from the darkest, dustiest corners of the 'net is now mainstreaming and working on the transition team ( Bannon). I just read a few disturbing articles about how he won and deportation ( Bloomberg Politics)

Although I try to see the glass as half full, the future looks bleak. Even with the protests planned.

Sadmar, sadmar play us a tune upon your lyre and entertain us. You're good at it.

OH NO! Let's not encourage assassination ideations in any way... President Pence would be a wingnut right wing evangelist in office!

Seriously it’s way past time to drop the ‘us smart, you stupid,’ thing, for all kinds of reasons.

Mmmyup.

I can't excuse the plain folks of the land for voting for Donald Trump. I understand that they are economically hard-up, but what they did was stupid and despicable. We probably should have given more support to Bernie Sanders. I hope we will support the right one next election.

I can't believe our purple state went red this year. I do place a lot of blame on the democrats, and HRC in general for misreading the people so badly.
But, in all seriousness, please keep yourself safe! I see the Trumps are already suing one blogger. I love your blog and the raw honesty that brings me joy. I know Doritt asked how high the wall is supposed to be, but I'm just glad that it can't block the INTERNET (yet).

Ann, while Donnie can sue, a court action is required, a defense is required.
One can, quite literally, theoretically, create an indefinite delaying action in the courts.
The trick is, creating it first, lest the corporation create it first and perpetually.

While I've long been considered a strike first sort, that isn't the reality. I'm the sort to create the strike longest and deepest.
For me, if Dumb Donald struck first, I'd immediately divert resources to strike forward, canceling efforts that should be created to divert resources. Then, move forward.
I've learned enough legal things to be incredibly dangerous.
And worse, creative.

So, Dumb Donald, wanna sue me? I'll both tie it up until the heat death of the universe, even if we feel chills in winter.
I'll also seek damages in excess of the entire national debt, to be awarded to the US government, because, I do have an opinion.
Go for it, sourpuss.
We'll share something, mutual command of portions of cyber command.
Then, it turns into loyalty, who actually saved lives vs a campaign prostitute.

Gauntlet tossed.

While anyone can sue for anything, under our libel laws winning a suit for the president or any of his team would and should be near impossible.

And should, appropriately, backfire big time in terms of public image.

And these are Supreme Court interpretations, not something congress can change.

And Trump is unlikely to be able to overturn that jurisprudence anytime soon even with, say, three nominations.

In usual conditions, that'd be true, considering public statements that a re anti-constitutional, they're actionable.
Then, it turns into an expensive delaying action.

We *do* have a Constitution and executive privilege is what, oh, privilege.
Otherwise, I'd be Emperor.

Get my rather lousy joke and hint?

While anyone can sue for anything, under our libel laws winning a suit for the president or any of his team would and should be near impossible.

The only corresponding lawsuit I can find was filed by Melania (weird lapse by the BBC on the "there has been no explanation of the discrepancy" bit, given that they had a legal consultant).

Denice

Although I try to see the glass as half full, the future looks bleak.

The glass was knocked over and broken.

The glass was knocked over and broken.

"If the buffalo goes through, he will fall into the abyss,
If he retreats into the enclosure, he will be butchered.
This little bit of a tail,
that is a strange thing indeed!"

Denice;

Thanks for the endorsement in lyre request (I think...)
I don't have a lyre. The only instrument I can play is the kazoo. (Both of my parents were symphony musicians. Go figure.) I've got pretty good chops on the kazoo, actually, but there's not much call for that.

There is (was?) a great neo-garage band named after the old string instrument, so I do sometimes play The Lyres on the stereo. Here's one of their tunes, with a fitting post-election sentiment.
https://youtu.be/ba0bybFE2PM?t=6s
(The video track added by the uploader is unrelated to the song or band, and I have no idea what it is or when it was made...)

Trump is only proposing a wall to keep out ILLEGAL entry into the country.

This is what is called COMMON SENSE, i know this escapes the puny minds of liberal drones out there, but Trump is not a bad man and that is not a bad idea to build a wall at the border.

Did you know Mexico has a border wall on its southern border?

Why dont you go into the middle of mexico city and burn the mexican flag and demand that they provide you free welfare?? and demand they make your anchor babies citizens of mexico??

Why not?? CAUSE THEYLL CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF!

so dont be a hypocrite hipster and repsect the laws of the land and what is right.

So, lemme get this straight, you want us to do what communist Russia did and build a dividing wall, where you allege one already exists in Mexico and is already ineffective.

And you'd try to convince us that Mexico decapitates people, thoroughly confusing Saudi Arabia with Mexico, despite the massive cultural and religious differences, not to mention the significant geographical distance between the two.
You know, different continents, big whopping ocean between them, not to mention yet another continent also being between them?

Don't be an idiot. Oh, my apologies, I already realize that that is far beyond your meager capabilities.

Trump is not a bad man

Lies without compunction
Routinely stiffs people who work for him
Engages in fraudulent schemes
Brags about committing sexual assault
Brags about incestuous desires

No, not a bad man at all.

Donald Trump, providing the world with a shining example of what a bad example looks like.

I thought Trump's "Build a Wall" promise was just silly from the start....given the massive amount of private land which the government would have to seize, followed by the years of litigation, environmental reviews, etc, there was never going to be a "wall."

It was bad campaign rhetoric & the numbskulls bought it.

Combatting antiscience denialism and quackery

oracknows — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 04:00:14 +0000

Combatting antiscience denialism and quackery

I spent a nice long weekend in New York at NECSS, which has grown to quite the big skeptical conference since the last time I was there five years ago. The Friday Science-Based Medicine session went quite well and, as far as I could tell, appeared to be well-received; so hopefully we will be doing something like it again next year. And, heck, I got to meet Bill Nye. How cool is that?

One topic that came up over and over at NECSS had to do with what is the best way to communicate science and, in particular, contrast it to the unfortunately all-too-common denialist antiscience doctrines of the day, such as denial of anthropogenic global climate change, vaccine safety and efficacy, and evolution. It's not an easy task, because antiscience and pseudoscience of theses sorts are ubiquitous. Some of them, such as climate change denial, are promoted through popular media outlets by powerful people and organizations. Others, like antivaccine pseudoscience, tend not to be promoted so much through the media, but the media has been guilty of facilitating its spread through one its most annoying tendencies, to apply the concept of "balance" to scientific stories, turning it into false balance. While telling both sides is usually a good thing when it comes to the majority of stories, in particular political stories, covered by the media, in science there are actually right and wrong answers. Representing "both sides" of a manufactroversy in which pseudoscience is being pitted against science gives pseudoscience the appearance of being an equally valid viewpoint to the scientific consensus when it is not. It's something I've complained about many times right on this very blog.

That's why an article by Julia Belluz over at Vox.com caught my interest yesterday. Entitled How should journalists cover quacks like Dr. Oz or the Food Babe? the article presents the viewpoints of several science communicators about how the media should cover such cranks. My first thought upon reading it was gratitude that I'm a blogger. I can basically write about what I want when I want and how I want. I have no editor watching over me; I don't have to pitch ideas to anyone; and I don't have people telling me what to cover. Of course, on the other hand, as a result I'll always be considered "second tier," always at least somewhat (and often a lot more than somewhat) less than legitimate when compared to the "real" press.

Belluz's description of her first encounter with Vani Hari's (a.k.a. The Food Babe's) ignorance rather mirrors mine, except that it happened later (I think) than mine because it started when she received a review copy of Hari's book, which was released a couple of months ago. Here was her reaction:

Everything about this reeked of pseudoscience: the suggestion that people can reinvent their bodies with quick fixes. The notion that we're being attacked by chemicals and in need of a thorough detox. I didn't want to dedicate any reporting energy to addressing Hari's nonsense.

A couple months later, I wondered if I'd made a mistake. Profiles of the Food Babe were turning up in the New York Times and the Atlantic. Her audience now numbered in the millions, and her mostly insane tirades against the toxins in our environment seemed to be catching on. Some were even calling her the next Dr. Oz.

The Food Babe was now impossible to ignore, so I wrote a quick item highlighting some of the reasons scientists think she’s completely off-base. It's a tactic I've used a lot in reporting on people like Hari. Highlight the gap between what a misinformed celebrity says and what the science says. Point out how they're hoodwinking the public, when necessary. Advocate for science and rational thinking.
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But even then, I wasn't sure if that was the right way to deal with Hari. Perhaps I should have dedicated many more reporting hours to debunking her ideas. Or perhaps I should have continued to ignore her altogether. Maybe drawing any attention to Hari would help popularize her message — making me complicit in spreading misinformation.

Belluz makes the point that the media need to get better at dealing with pseudoscience, and wonders:

The debate over how to handle peddlers of pseudoscience comes up again and again in the newsroom. With every Food Babe, Dr. Oz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Jenny McCarthy, we mull some combination of the following: Do they deserve to be addressed? Should we seriously engage their ideas? And if we cover them, what’s the best way to do so: mockery? Earnest debunking?

My answer to these questions would be a simple: Yes. Of course, the devil is in the details; i.e., knowing how to match the tactic to the crank and the situation. If it were easy, every scientist or science advocate could do it. Belluz points out that everyone she contacted agreed that it probably isn't worth it to engage cranks before they break through to the mainstream. The rationale seems to be that because such cranks thrive on attention.

I would tend to agree—if you are a journalist for a mainstream news outlet. However, ignoring such seeming "low level"—or perhaps "sub-mainstream" would be a better way to put it—cranks leads to a terrible problem. That "sub-mainstream" crankery can be very, very influential even if it never reaches the mainstream, like the messages of Dr. Mehmet Oz, The Food Babe, or Jenny McCarthy have done. Think, for example, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, and his website, NaturalNews.com, which reaches as many people as a lot of the mainstream media outlets. His articles espousing quackery and attacking science percolate through social media to wide audiences. The same is true, for instance, of Joe Mercola. If their quackery and pseudoscience are never addressed by the mainstream media, there it remains on the web for people doing Google searches to discover, high on the list of their search results and unopposed.

That's where I—and skeptical bloggers—come in. Yes, we know that there is the risk of giving cranks more attention, but consider an example. Several months ago, our old buddy, one of those whose crankery has gone mainstream, the ever-annoying, reiki-loving, quackery-spouting Dr. Mehmet Oz, did a segment in which he gave considerable credence to the idea that cell phone radiation can cause cancer, featuring a young woman who happened to carry her cell phone in her bra a lot and later developed breast cancer on the same side. Her mother was convinced that the cell phone had caused it, and Dr. Oz managed to find a breast surgeon who believed in the same crankery, publishing a rather crappy case series of four to make his point. Now, if you search for "Mehmet Oz cell phone cancer" on Google, what you will find on the first page is a link to Oz's original segment and a whole lot of links to stories basically presenting the story without one whit of skepticism. You will find only two skeptical links. First, you will find my deconstruction of this story, entitled Fear mongering over cell phones and cancer by Dr. Oz. Second, you will find a link to a different version of the same post that was published on my not-so-super-secret other blog. And that's it!

That. Is. It. (Well, other than a Google Plus link to one of my posts.)

That's not the only issue where this has happened, either, be it posts by other skeptical bloggers or myself. Now, granted, to achieve this, you have to achieve a certain level of traffic and Google juice, but that's what I've achieved in ten years, and I'm not alone. We can do this because we are not mainstream media.

But back to the mainstream media, and I do like the various principles Belluz lays down:

Don't just go after cranks — hold their enablers accountable.
Be clear on where the balance of scientific evidence lies.
Beware of turning cranks into martyrs.
Don't overstate the influence of cranks.
Critical coverage is important — but avoid creating controversy for its own sake.

In particular, I agree whole-heartedly with #1. A great example was Oprah Winfrey. After all, she created Dr. Oz, bringing him in as her regular go-to doctor and ultimately launching him on his own show. She shilled for the faith healing quack John of God. She promoted the New Age woo known as The Secret, which influenced at least one woman with breast cancer to eschew effective treatment in favor of wishful thinking. She paid with her life. Then there's America's quack Dr. Oz, who has, over the course of his show, featured an amazing panoply of quacks, including homeopaths, Joe Mercola, faith healers, and even psychic scammers John Edward and Theresa Caputo. The list goes on.

I also can't argue with #2. It's the sort of thing I've said time and time and time again: No false balance. Sometimes, even presenting a crank or a quack in the same segment as a real doctor or scientist, gives the impression that that crankery or quackery is somewhere near the same level as the real science. That's bad, and I really wish journalists would knock it off.

I'm less concerned about #3, because I don't quite buy the argument used to justify it:

A similar dynamic occurred with Andrew Wakefield, the fraudulent physician who popularized the autism-vaccine link. He fabricated his research — research that was retracted, research that is blamed for stoking vaccine fears and bringing back preventable diseases. But all along, he has insisted he's the victim of a witch hunt and PR campaign, and some vaccine deniers see him as a sacrificial lamb. "The more press coverage, the more scrutiny, the more you end up with these martyrs and with people saying, Everyone is against us,'" Oransky said.

The other difficulty is that these martyrs often wade into areas that relate to our very deepest fears and desires. Wakefield exploited parents' worries about vaccines and autism. Dr. Oz trades on the near-universal pursuit of better health and weight loss and mistrust of Big Pharma. Food Babe Vani Hari has built her brand around the worry that unseen and ubiquitous toxins are slowly killing us all.

When these figures are ridiculed and struck down by critics, their audiences can interpret the criticism of their work as diminishing or making fun of their own, often understandable concerns, thus helping to fuel the crank-to-martyr transformation.

In actuality, for several years, it was the press in the UK, mostly the tabloid press, that facilitated Andrew Wakefield, that spread his message. Without the press, Wakefield's message would never have spread throughout the UK and Europe and beyond, nor would it have sparked the fear of the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism that led to MMR uptake in the UK plummeting and the resultant entirely predictable resurgence of measles. In fact, it was a single journalist who went beyond skepticism and actually did the years of hard work it took to prove Wakefield's conflicts of interest (he took hundreds of thousands of pounds from a lawyer suing vaccine manufacturers to do his study) and his scientific fraud. In fact, arguably the press didn't truly turn against Wakefield until the British government began hearings to revoke his license to practice medicine, and didn't truly become as hostile as it is now until after Wakefield's original Lancet case series from 1998 that started the whole thing was retracted.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that martyring cranks is not a risk. It's just that fear of "martyring" a crank like Andrew Wakefield should not be a particularly large consideration in deciding whether to engage in critical reporting on him. Think of it this way. Conspiracy theories in which proponents of antiscience views are viewed as martyrs are part and parcel of denialist antiscience movements like the antivaccine movement. They already think they are martyrs and that the mainstream press is "persecuting" their heros. They already think that denialist leaders like Wakefield are "Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one." There's no real reason to go easy on them for fear of such a reaction, because the reaction is going to be there no matter what. It's baked in, so to speak.

I do, however, agree with #4. Those of us in the science blogosphere have a tendency to attribute more influence to certain cranks than they, in fact, actually have. The antivaccine views of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for instance, are virtually unknown outside of the antivaccine circles that admire him. To most people (at least those who even really know who he is), he's rather annoying as a person and an environmental activist. Most people (in the US, at least) have no idea who Andrew Wakefield is. On the other hand, I'm not quite down with this:

I asked Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, how he would suggest covering this event. He said it was important to consider the broader context here: "The fortunate truth of the matter is that there's tremendous confidence by the American public in vaccines," he said. "We have had 90 percent coverage for well over a decade. There are enclaves of people who are concerned. But most parents vaccinate and don't give it a second thought."

Well, yes and no. If you average over states or large swaths of the country, this is true, but in the case of vaccines there are enclaves of people who are more than just "concerned." They're "concerned" enough to go to the trouble of getting personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates or to sending their children to antivaccine-friendly private schools like Waldorf schools. It is a big problem, and Kahan is far too blase about the threat that even that small contingent of antivaccine parents is, because that small contingent tends to concentrate into groups where it causes the biggest hit to local vaccination rates.

Finally, who could disagree with #5? Of course you don't want to cause controversy just to cause controversy. Personally, though, I look at it this way. My target audience is not the hard core committed crank, such as Andrew Wakefield or the parents who worship him. It is the fence-sitters, the undecided, those who might be persuadable. I also reserve to myself all reasonable strategies ranging from presenting facts, dissecting bad arguments, pointing out the flaws in crank arguments, and, yes, mocking mercilessly particularly dumb crank arguments. Of course, I'm a blogger; I can do that. Mainstream press can't, although the five suggested rules presented by Belluz are, except perhaps for #3, a good set of guidelines.

oracknows Tue, 04/14/2015 - 00:00

More data on why people reject science

oracknows — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 01:13:02 +0000

More data on why people reject science

Although I focus mostly on medical topics, such as vaccines, alternative medicine, and cancer quackery, I don't limit myself to such topics. True, I used to write a lot more about evolution and creationism, the paranormal, and other standard skeptical topics, but over the last couple of years I've realized where my strength is and where my niche is. So I continue to do what I do, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest in those topics. I've just learned that there are those who can do them as well as I can, while the number of people who can do what I do with respect to quackery and medical pseudoscience is much smaller for the simple reason that there aren't very many trained physicians who take on skeptical topics. I really wish there were, as it would make my job easier and perhaps there wouldn't be so much quackademic medicine, but there aren't. In addition, there aren't any MD/PhDs that I know of who have taken an interest in such topics.

Of course, medical pseudoscience shares a lot of traits with pseudoscience of all stripes. It's just that the consequences tend to be more direct and immediate. Antivaccinationists lead to disease outbreaks; cancer quacks lead to people dying of cancer when they don't have to; practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) offer therapies that usually can't do any good and can sometimes do harm. In contrast, the effects of other forms of science denialism, such as creationism or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denialism, tend to be distant in that the consequences of teaching creationism is schools won't manifest themselves until those children grow up and the consequences of AGW denialism are likely to be decades away. Still, I wonder why people deny science, and that's why a study caught my eye. It's not the most rigorous study in the world, but, even so, I think it tells us some useful things about why people embrace irrationality.

The study is from the University of Western Australia:

Researchers from The University of Western Australia have examined what motivates people who are greatly involved in the climate debate to reject scientific evidence.
The study Motivated Rejection of Science, to be published in Psychological Science, was designed to investigate what motivates the rejection of science in visitors to climate blogs who choose to participate in the ongoing public debate about climate change.

The actual study itself is here, and it's NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (climate) science is a hoax, which goes to show that even scientists have a bit of a sense of humor.

The authors took an approach that I haven't seen before. Their approach happens to be both a weakness and a strength, as you'll see. Basically, visitors to climate blogs were asked to complete an online survey. Links to the survey were posted to eight climate blogs with a pro-science stance. Five AGW "skeptic" (i.e., denialist) blogs were approached but refused. It's not clear why these bloggers refused to take part, but they did. Be that as it may, I'm sure you can see why this represents a weakness. Basically, the participants were self-selected, which is always a potential confounding factor. On the other hand, in this case it might not be such a bad thing, because the self-selection process is likely to enrich the population for just the sorts of science denialists that we want to study.

The visitors to the blogs, over 1,000 of them, were queried about their beliefs regarding climate science, as well as several common conspiracy theories, such as whether Princess Diana's death was not an accident; that the Apollo moon landings never happened; that HIV does not cause AIDs; and that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. The interplay of these responses and the visitors' acceptance of climate scientist were studied, along with questions regarding belief in a free market ideology and the belief that previous environmental problems have been resolved.

Can you guess the results? I bet that you probably can.

Yes, as you might guess, a belief in free market ideology was associated with AGW denialism. This isn't anything new. We've known this for years; it's been suggested by several studies. In addition, belief in a free market ideology was also predictive of rejection of the scientifically demonstrated link between tobacco and lung cancer and between HIV and AIDS. I must admit, these latter two correlations were unexpected to me. I would expect that extreme free market and libertarian ideologies would be correlated with rejection of AGW science. After all, many of the proposed solutions for AGW involve government action and suggest that big business is a major contributor to the problem. I would have predicted that. I would not have predicted that free market ideology would correlate with the rejection of a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Maybe 40 years ago, when tobacco companies were still actively trying to undermine the science demonstrating that smoking causes lung cancer, but not now. A better question would have been to ask whether second hand smoke is a health hazard. As for HIV/AIDS denialism, I totally wouldn't have expected a link with free market ideology, but that's what the authors found.

More predictable is the link between conspiratorial thinking and AGW denialism, although not so predictable is that it would be a weaker link than the link between free market ideology and AGW denialism. This is, after all, simply another way of describing crank magnetism, which is the tendency for people who believe in one form of crankery or pseudoscience to believe in multiple forms of crankery and pseudoscience. All this study does is to reinforce that concept.

One thing was missing from the study that would have greatly interested me. Given that the authors asked about HIV/AIDS denialism, I was truly surprised that it wasn't included on the list of topics included in the survey. Regular readers will no doubt have guessed what I'm talking about. That's right: Antivaccine beliefs. I would have been interested to know whether they correlate with the same sort of extreme free market beliefs. It's not entirely clear that they would. It's certainly true that there is a libertarian wing of the antivaccine movement that is closely associated with the "health freedom" movement. However, there is also a more "crunchy," granola wing of the movement that believes that natural is always better, exhibits an extreme distrust of industry in general and big pharma in particular, and tends to be associated with more left wing politics. Ah, well, it was a lost opportunity.

In the end, this study, although in reality more of survey than a proper study and a self-selected one at that, is yet another bit of evidence that tells us that denial of science almost always boils down to ideology. Science that agrees with a person's ideology (or that at least does not conflict with it) doesn't cause a problem. It's science that challenges ideologist that result in denialism. That's why fundamentalist Christians tend to reject evolution and free market libertarian types tend to reject AGW. Perhaps more rigorous studies could help define more precisely what drives denialism of the sorts of science that I'm most interested in, specifically science-based medicine, as this current survey only hints at such issues. In the meantime, I'll simply keep bumbling along in my own way trying to combat in my own litter corner of the blogosphere the rising tide of irrationality when it comes to medicine. At the very least, I can shine a light on the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia.

oracknows Sun, 09/09/2012 - 21:13

Tags

Antivaccine nonsense

medicine

Quackery

Skepticism/Critical Thinking

AGW

aids

anthropogenic global warming denialism

There are some, let's say, methodological problems with the study:

"Despite Lewandowsky’s contrary statements and implications, even for most of the wacko conspiracies (e.g. the cluster around Moon, AIDS), more respondents professed to be warmists than skeptics."
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/

One more:
"By Lewandowsky’s own data, skeptics are 30-100 times less gullible than the average American or Brit."
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2012/09/lewandowsky-et-al-proves-skeptic…

And please, take a look at the number of positive samples in the MoonHoaxNutJob category.

If Andrew Wakefield had done such a job to feign an association, you would have torn it apart within seconds.

The correlations are not surprising to me at all. There is always the Lew Rockwell wing of the Libertarian community, which is surprisingly large and virulently anti-science.

Hmmm. Appear to have hit a nerve with Mr. Mach. One would hope that he would try to keep the number of comments to a reasonable number. Four comments in 20 minutes are too many too fast. That's how cranks flood comment threads.

In any case, one wonders if this was the reason:

For the record, I have never seriously doubted that the moon landings really happened or that cigarettes cause cancer. Also, I will add my name to the list of skeptical bloggers who were not contacted about the study — though I am a small fry, I am pretty easy to find given my URL.

Mr. Mach also appears to be assaulting a straw man, as the study doesn't claim that every AGW denialist is a moon landing denier or an HIV/AIDS denialist or that every libertarian/extreme free market type is an AGW denialist, HIV/AIDS denialist, or moon hoaxer. It's simply looking at correlations, and it notes (as I did) that there is a problem with self-selection.

Free market associated with denialism?

I have seen that in people who I FB with. Little "l" libertarians who are vaccine skeptics (but not outright anti), free market, small government, want drugs legalized..

Basically, they view anything the Gubmint says with skepticism and this extends to research done by Big Gubmint. Big Gubmint funds a LOT of research and has the machinery in place to collect much of the data (especially medical data). I have no idea what you have left when you ignore the previous body of work.

Here's one possible explanation for the correlation of AGW denialism and conspiracy-theory mongering.

Virtually every competent atmospheric scientist thinks that AGW is happening, and that it's potentially very disruptive. While it's possible -- in principle -- that all these scientists are simply mistaken, it seems much more plausible to many that they're all skewing their results for grant money, or because they're all a bunch of lefties who are searching for an excuse to exert greater social control (when the UN black helicopters swoop in to take away your pickup, and your gun too!).

In other words, unless you're prepared to accept a conspiracy theory to explain why all them scientists are lying, it's pretty hard to accept denialism, because then you have to accept that thousands of scientists pursuing different lines of evidence are all simply -- mistaken.

I'd be willing to bet good money that very few of the denialists are personally acquainted with many academic scientists. In academic science, your results have to be reproducible; if they're not, you're quickly found out to be either incompetent (well, anyone can make a mistake or two) or, God forbid, a fraud. It's just not worth it to cheat. For an example of what happens if you DO cheat, have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

So if I smell cooked data I must be a covert NSDAP sympathizer? That is the frame you put around the topic with "denialism". It's religion, not science, that brooks no disagreement. I expected better.
The congruence to those who accuse you of shilling for Big Pharma seems to escape you, although I'm sure we agree that they are at the very least tedious twits. The observation that a fair number of them make a living selling their worthless supplements also has its counterpart in this isometry.
I spent a few years sifting signal out of noise, and that's my basis for having some sympathy for Mann's misstep with the hockey stick. It's devilishly easy to tweak a filter that's not quite working right until it gives the right answer that you know is there. The circularity can be hard to see. But the whole ' "Shut up", they explained.' discourse that follows is harder to understand. It owes more to Alinsky than to Popper.

I would not have predicted that free market ideology would correlate with the rejection of a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Maybe 40 years ago, when tobacco companies were still actively trying to undermine the science demonstrating that smoking causes lung cancer, but not now. A better question would have been to ask whether second hand smoke is a health hazard. As for HIV/AIDS denialism, I totally wouldn’t have expected a link with free market ideology, but that’s what the authors found.

What they all have in common is the "bad things can't happen to good people" psychological defence:
* Rigid free-marketism holds that the poor are poor because they choose to be poor, bad luck has nothing to do with it
* Lung cancer likewise: smoking can't cause it because that would mean it might happen to me (If I'm right, this would be a weaker correlation than others.)
* HIV/AIDS: if it's a virus, I might get it even though I'm not some druggie.
* AGW: Happens to the virtuous (me) and the sinful (losers) alike.
* Moon landings: so what? Not my problem
* Diana: So what? Not my problem.

And you're very right that vaccination would have been another great question, since it's also in the "measles (or HIB, or smallpox, etc.) happen to the just and the unjust alike.

I agree that denying the science of AGW (just like discounting evolution) requires that one believe not only in conspiracies, but in a massive and unprecedented conspiracy of virtually every scientist in the relevant fields.

As an administrator in a scientific institution, I would invite the denialists to give me some tips on how to get two or more scientists to agree on anything so completely they would be able to manage a conspiracy. It would be something of Holy Grail for me.

And speaking of Holy Grails, I’d also love to hear where all those “big grants” come from that support this fraudulent research. Seriously – I know some researchers who could use the money. Please include a contact link.

I would not have predicted that free market ideology would correlate with the rejection of a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Maybe 40 years ago, when tobacco companies were still actively trying to undermine the science demonstrating that smoking causes lung cancer, but not now.

We have seen a few anti-vaccine libertarians on these threads, so we know they exist.

I wonder how many of these anti vaccine libertarians are simultaneously
- accepting "tobacco science", i.e. rejecting the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer
- rejecting vaccines studies because these are "tobacco science", or at least supporting groups which have this argument as part of their rhetoric.

Micheal Shermer *cough*

He was late to accept AGW and his arguments that deregulation had nothing to do with the financial meltdown - ti was all the fault of the government on the Skeptoligists blog was nothing short of pathetic. He apparently failed to notice that the heavily regulated Canadian banks didn't need a bailout. He is a prime example of how Libertarianism requires ignoring reality and history.

Oh boy! While I could spend a few paragraphs discussing econo-woo**, palindrom and DC hit a few things:

I think that in order for a person to ACCEPT conspiracies, there has to be a higher order belief above it all ( even above, "all scientists lying"/ "black helicopters") that overlooks data that is contradictory and simple reality-based notions like, " Wouldn't a plot of that size be very hard to pull off?" Perhaps it might reflect a particular worldview which I would expect derives from personality factors and early childhood events.

It also reeks of grandiosity: the whole world is wrong/ all the experts are wrong BUT I am correct. I hear this a lot.

Attributing economic outcomes to personal rather than societal/ enviromental factors is something that young children do and generally grow out of- however, NOT all children. There are cognitive factors that change the quality of thinking ( generally and socially) the occur around adolescence, making it more abstract and more likely to consider complicated ( multiple factor) situations and use qualifiers.

My prof used to say that kids' thinking gets more liberal as they develop. Not all, I'd add.

** extreme economic belief systems not supported by data.

OT: ( but is rhetorical hyperbole that involves martyrdom and persecution in WWII- ever truly OT @ RI?)

Today @ TMR, Ms MacNeil discusses three books that delineate the experiences of people in the Dustbowl/ Depression, a French woman who fought N-zi oppression and a serviceman in the Viet Nam war.

All of these horrendous situation were "created out of the greed and ignorance of those in power" which is strikingly analogous to being ( Surprise!) a parent of a child with autism.

I will suspend further comment about why I do not agree with Ms MacNeil.

Shame the denialist sites wouldn't host it. It would have made for an interesting comparison despite the obvious flaws.
I'm still wary of it in general though as it appeals to my prejudices. and it's only correlation taken alone.

We should remember that the laws of thermodynamics are not swayed by ideology.

I'm not terribly surprised at the free market association. I think D.C. brings up something interesting by tying it with the just world hypothesis. One alternate angle that comes to mind is that the heads of big polluters are "virtuous" because they're profitable, and they can't believe that their "virtuous" action of seeking profit is causing a negative change to our environment and thus our economy.

I also sense a bit of a paradox with some just world thinkers: They think they're doing everything right, therefore they should be greatly rewarded by the cosmos. They aren't being rewarded, therefore someone must be actively interfering with the natural course of events. Replace "cosmos" with "the invisible hand of the market" for the free market version.

On an aside, I wonder how many free marketers are unworried because they expect someone will find a way to fix AGW once market demand for a fix rises enough to make a profit. That ties into the meme that scientists can develop impossible sci-fi technologies, unconstrained by established physical laws if you just give them enough beakers and Jacob's Ladders.

To follow up on Orac's" two wings" of the anti-vax movement ( before I must depart):

amongst the web woo-meisters ( who offer a menu of anti-vaxx, hiv/aids denialism, anti-SBM, nature worship but NOT anti-AGW), they manage to walk a fine line that somehow addresses the concerns of BOTH wings- they wouldn't want to scare off any customers now, would they?

However, it seems that they despise governmental intervention and regulation that oppose 'health freedom' as well as any interference with the free market; they despise Keynes as well.. They simultaneously play on being 'liberal' or 'progressive' in other areas... the mind boggles as it ties itself into rhetorical knots...

-btw- if you want to be 'treated' to a rant along these lines that twists around in on itself in Mobius fashion- tune in to PRN live/ Gary Null show ( it will be archived for posterity). I have only heard half of it- mercifully, I need to go.

Palindrom and DC Sessions already covered most of what I wanted to say, but I have also noticed some odd geography on the part of the anti-AGW faction. One of their claims is that the Northwest Passage was open during the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 700-1000 years ago), and the evidence they cite for this claim is that Viking artifacts have been found along the shores of Hudson Bay. The problem is that while having an open Northwest Passage is a sufficient condition for reaching Hudson Bay, it is not a necessary condition. There has been a seaport at Churchill, Manitoba since the 1920s. Such a seaport is obviously useless if you can't reach Hudson Bay from the Atlantic or the Pacific. But the Northwest Passage has only started opening in the last decade or so; prior to that it has never found to be open since the first attempt to find it in 1497.

Doesn't Robert Baratz have a PhD and MD?

@Denice Walter, one thing they found in a lot of conspiracy theorists was a feeling of a loss of control over things. As I understand it, it's more comforting to believe that malicious forces are in control than to realise that even the people in charge aren't really in control.

Back in 2006, Prof Bob Altemeyer published a book called The Authoritarians. He makes it available for free online. You can download it from his web site at:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

It is clearly written and avoids snowing the reader with statistical jargon (but provides a chance to find it for those who are interested).

One of the questions Altemeyer asks is why the right wing authoritarians are not just closed minded but angry and downright hostile to those who try to refute them.

I suspect that anti-vax folks include both right wing authoritarians and a sort of hippy-dippy mirror image, but the ability to wall off rational arguments and contradictions seems to be something they have in common.

A Couple of Observations

Generally, the earth has been warming for about 12000 years. There have been centuries of variation within that period such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming. 3000 years ago the high desert in California was covered with streams, lakes, marshes and pine trees. Now, nothing but scrub and sand - hotter and dryer. The Sahara has been moving southward for hundreds of years. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower 10,000 years ago. Sea levels have been increasing for a very long time. Hysterical climate myopia serves no one - least of all science.

Regarding the origin of the universe, there are only two choices; eternally existing time, space and matter which auto organized and self animated, or an eternal, creative consciousness. Meaningless, nihilistic, happenstance or purpose.

Regarding vaccines I suspect that occasionally vaccines are responsible for some autoimmune disease. However, it is apparent that most vaccines do far more good than harm.

As mentioned by DCS and Bronze Dog, the Just World Hypothesis is ingrained so strongly in certain populations that any event which contradicts their outlook must be a conspiracy or a lie.

You see this on a small scale with crimes like rape, stalking and domestic violence, and it goes all the way through to government policy, and catastrophic events like 9/11 and 7/7.

The current US Republican "War on Women" is a good example. A group of religious people I've been debating always vote R. At the moment it's down to sheer racism, I'm afraid (they openly admit it) . However, this is a group with a consanguinous population, and catastrophic foetal defects are common. However, they are thoroughly convinced that their community will be exempt from restrictions/bans on abortion and foetal testing, because they deserve it, they're met like those women.

Same goes for their stance on welfare reform. They say it's great that Medicaid, Section 8, WIC and TANF would be gutted. When it's pointed out that some of their communities are so dependent on welfare that 80%+ are claimants, again it's "Yes, but they don't mean us, they mean them.

Their UK compatriots did exactly the same thing. When they were (predictably) hit very hard by the welfare changes (to the tune of hundreds of pounds per week, due to artificially inflated rents) it was denounced as a conspiracy, and some incredibly tasteless claims were made.

Anti-science attitudes bewilder me, as do people who hold no truck with the "common good". Thankfully that kind of extreme libertarianism is not as widespread in the UK as it apparently is in the US.

Tony Mach - shouldn't you be wittering on about "XMRV" and medical oppression somewhere?

@ Julian Frost:

Right. You might want to consider what's been written about 'locus-of-control' and 'mastery orientation vs helplessness' as personality/ attributional styles. Also 'agent vs pawn'. This is also important in developmental psych/ social cognition.

@elburto:

Young children often attribute being poor to a person being 'bad'/ being wealthy to being 'good'**. Often stories tailored to children reflect this while those which are instructional or aimed at older kids may reverse that policy and illustrate more situational/ historical causes.

** we've heard that before from people who aren't minors.

Doesn’t Robert Baratz have a PhD and MD?

He actually has an MD, PhD, and a DDS.

@Orac, What's a DDS?

Alain

@Alain

Doctor of Dental Surgery, I believe.

The anti-tobacco-science explanation seemed obvious to me, before going to "Just World" abstraction. In the Libertarian mind, business is good, government is bad. Big business (tobacco companies) for years denied smoking causes cancer. Much of the education on this point came from public-health efforts, i.e. government. What's the cigarette warning? "The Surgeon General has ...". That's government. End of story for Libertarians. If government was right and business was wrong (even downright deceptive), their world falls apart.

elurto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Dental_Surgery

There is always the Lew Rockwell wing of the Libertarian community, which is surprisingly large and virulently anti-science.

The train of thought running through Lew Rockwell's columns seems to be as follows:
1. Public-health initiatives like water fluoridation and vaccination programs are ideologically Bad Things because they are centralised, and FREEDOM.
2. Therefore fluoridated water and vaccines must be medically Bad Things... the universe being so constructed that ideology and empirical fact are always in harmony.*
3. Purity of Bodily fluids! Fluoride in children's ice-cream! Conspiracy!

It is particularly amusing when these Mies-Institute Libertarians pride themselves on their unstinting rationality and unsentimental clarity of thought.

* Much as the Soviet regime denied the existence of pollution, for its centrally-planned industries were following the principles of Marxist-Hegelian Dialectic and were therefore in harmony with the natural world.

@ Herr doctor bimler

ideology and empirical fact are always in harmony.

Finding parallels between libertarian and soviet ideologies has been on my mind for some time. Their ideologies seem diametrically opposed, and yet, I don't see many differences between the diatribe of a far-left guy I read on a French forum, and the recent post of a libertarian (SecondJ) in another thread.
Is it a Godwin, if I go out and assert that libertarians will be the communists of the 21st century?

Googling on a guess, I see that Lew Rockwell also promotes AIDS denialism, climate-change denialism (of course), and Cold Fusion.

The Rockwell website reminds me of the Analog SF magazine (and before that, Astounding) when the editor was John W. Campbell,* a similar kind of thinker... a hard-line libertarian, blissfully convinced of his rationality and mental superiority, in fact following a combination of magical thinking and wishful thinking.

* Campbell threw his weight behind the Dean Drive, radionic healing and remote diagnosis, and of course Dianetics

Let me present a more charitable view of some people who doubt AGW.

I attended a college with an extremely strong focus on science and engineering. I knew people who were chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, naval architects, and so on. I also knew people who majored in music, management and economics - though they received a bachelor of science degree in these fields. That's how strong the science focus was.

I don't recall hearing of a single person who majored in climate science, nor do I recall a single course in climate science. I've never heard of the great advances in climate science, nor seen any useful application of climate science in our daily lives.

In fact, the only thing I've known a climate scientist to do is predict the effects of anthropogenic global warming, attend conferences about AGW, and make recommendations on why AGW is so severe that we need to make drastic lifestyle changes to combat it.

Now, I accept that the logic behind the predictions makes sense. I agree that data showing an increase in atmospheric CO2 are certainly consistent with the probability that human activity will lead to a rise in average temperature. However, I can understand how some would question whether people in a field they've had no exposure to know what they're talking about, or have been indoctrinated.

Finding parallels between libertarian and soviet ideologies has been on my mind for some time. Their ideologies seem diametrically opposed, and yet, I don’t see many differences

Identical aesthetic tastes, certainly.

MO'B @1647: I'm not inclined to be charitable to those people, because unlike the average guy on the street, people who attend a university such as your undergraduate institution (and mine, which also is a science and engineering focused school which awards Bachelor of Science degrees to humanities/arts/social sciences majors--we may even have the same undergraduate alma mater) will normally have taken two semester equivalents of physics, and will therefore be familiar with conservation of energy. Earth absorbs a certain amount of energy from outer space (predominantly from the sun), and it radiates a certain amount of energy back into space. If you like the climate the way it is, you want those two numbers (or at least their long term average) to be equal; if they aren't, the average temperature of the Earth will change until they come back into balance. CO2 absorbs and emits photons in the frequency range of the energy radiated into space. The physics of this process does not care about the direction of emission, so the emitted photons will go out in all directions, roughly half of which will be toward the ground. But the absorbed photons are preferentially traveling in one direction (away from the Earth). So the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 (and of atmospheric H2O and CH4, the other two main contributors to the greenhouse effect) is to reduce the amount of energy radiated into space, causing the temperature of the planet to increase. So the anti-AGW crowd has to deny energy conservation. I can forgive most laymen (who have never taken physics) for ignorance of this point, but not anybody who has taken physics.

Also, just because you didn't know any climate science majors doesn't mean there weren't any; the department may have simply had a different name. Some universities have a separate atmospheric sciences department. Elsewhere (such as my undergraduate institution and the place I currently work), climate scientists will work in a department that includes other areas of geophysics (such as seismology or planetary science). Likewise, I didn't know any astronomy majors at either of my alma maters; the people who wanted to go into astronomy normally majored in physics, which departments included astronomy and astrophysics types. I don't know of anybody (outside of the Young Earth Creationist crowd and a few physics cranks) who denies the reality of astronomy.

Such studies are relevant only in the particular cultural context. In my country (Bulgaria), a common combination of beliefs among educated people is pro-free market, pro-evolution, pro-vaccines, anti-global warming. The first is a no-brainer for socialism survivors like us. For me, the mere fact that you have branded it "ideology" shows denialism.
I am myself a global warming denialist, that is, I reject the AGW theory as a guideline for any action. The theory may be correct, but in this case, the idea of its supporters to reverse the AGW effect by some minor economy attempts seems to me ridiculous. What would be expected to help is - to decimate the human population to a small fraction of its current size and to force on the remaining humans regression to preindustrial lifestyle. I do not accept this agenda, and I suspect many Western free-market "ideologues" feel the same way.

I don’t recall hearing of a single person who majored in climate science, nor do I recall a single course in climate science.

I imagine one would have been majoring in geophysical or environmental science, with climate science per se being a post-baccalaureate specialization. As a physics undergrad, my only exposure to the geophysics guys were when I was able to squeeze in fluid dynamics, which was in their department.

I’ve never heard of the great advances in climate science, nor seen any useful application of climate science in our daily lives.

Seen any useful applications out of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? Sometimes the methods and the data are the point.

(The oldest course catalog I can find from my alma mater is from 1995, which postdates me, but they did in fact have undergraduate "Biogeochemistry/Global Change.")

@Militant "Micheal Shermer *cough*"

Eurgh. I like so much of what he's done, but when I came across that bit in Believing Brain when he talked about how he's a libertarian and it's so much more rational than being a republican or democrat, and I just wanted to ask, dude, have you read your own stuff? :D

The Slacktivist had an interesting take on AGW. We do all, as people, contribute to the problem. But we don't see ourselves as bad people, generally, so people deny AGW to preserve their internal narratives of themselves as good people. It's an interesting hypothesis, and it would be interesting to see it investigated.

Eric, I've taken a few semesters of physics in college and I could not tell whether or not global warming was correct on the basis of conservation of energy. And in fact, the laws of conservation of energy were known long before scientists realized global warming was correct.

To Eric Lund - we all know that climate has undergone a lot of major changes long before humans were even present on Earth. I don't doubt that the law of conservation of energy has been in action all along. I don't think your slandering of opponents is helpful in the discussion.

Mephistopheles O'Brien: "I’ve never heard of the great advances in climate science, nor seen any useful application of climate science in our daily lives"

While others have answered this more eloquently than I can, I do want to add that you may have seen some useful applications without realizing it. My cousin is a limnologist whose post-doc work focused on paleolimnology. This all sounds very arcane until you consider that the fresh water fishery on the west coast of Canada ( Alaska, Washington and Oregon too) is deeply reliant on Salmon who spawn in fresh water. The better we understand their reproduction, the better we can manage this industry. As a side benefit, we can use cores from lake bottoms to look at salmon population and vegetable matter going back thousands of years. These data are also one one of the lines of evidence in the AGW puzzle.

I’ve taken a few semesters of physics in college and I could not tell whether or not global warming was correct on the basis of conservation of energy.

This does probably require some laboratory introduction to spectroscopy as a motivator, which I don't recall as occurring until my third undergraduate year, even though the basic concepts were already there.

I'm despairing... the latest screed at AoA is about autism as an autoimmune disease. They keep focusing on the words in their quotes but hell, they made a laundry list of quote for a condition (narcolepsy) that is known to affect 160 case over 33 millions vaccinated case...

Did they skip primary math level 4 and dropped out of school at level 5???

it boggle the mind.

Alain

@Alain,

I swear that AoA started out mildly conspiracy theory when I started reading it about two years ago and now it seems a third of their posts are either J'accuse! or blatant CT.

I don't think there's much point in reading it anymore, outside of seeing what whackadoodle ideas they are entertaining.

This is a typical article:

Autism is caused by vaccine damage
and/or
Autism is caused by environmental influences.

The government refuses to investigate or fund research on these premises.

Bad, BAD government! Government is cruel and callous and continues to ignore a veritable MOUNTAIN of evidence! They are re-victimizing all the individuals with autism and their families! It's irresponsible! Unethical! Unthinkable!

Bad, bad government!

We must continue to strive to prove what we KNOW is true, even in the face of such refusal to Face The Facts. ONWARD!

Eric Lund,

Good points all. And if you graduated towards the end of the 1980s, there's a very good chance we're talking about the same institution.

As I said, I became convinced of the plausibility of AGW some years ago (James Burke gave a particularly good description of the case at that time, at least in my view). And I tend to stay abreast of developments in a wide array of sciences. I can, though, see how someone who has not might well be tempted to dismiss what seems like an obscure science that is only (in the popular press) discussed in relation to a single topic and who (according to some reports) can't/won't share their raw data and who, at the end of the day, can only point to computer models. This does not excuse those who willfully ignore reality.

Niche Geek - sounds more like geology to me, possibly mixed with a little paleontology - but what do I know?

@ Anj,

Thanks for your comment (who feel like a breath of fresh air), I got a good laught out of it, I guess they'd fare poorly at the course I'm going to take at school (BIO291 Evaluating Scientific Evidence).

Speaking about courses, this course (& lab) include a lot of medical stats applications and give a lot of example in bayes statistics, the likelihood paradigm and the information theory approach; topics more at home in a graduate level course.

Alain

who (according to some reports) can’t/won’t share their raw data and who, at the end of the day, can only point to computer models. This does not excuse those who willfully ignore reality.

That computer model nonsense gets up my nose a bit. The three main legs supporting climate science generally are physics, paleoclimatology and modelling. And these are more like Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear than they are equally load-bearing legs of a tripod. Physics is very much the big daddy - seeing as it includes radiative physics, fluid dynamics and all points in between and far beyond.

As for data. The problems with data were mainly imposed by the 'free market' approach of many governments trying to turn their meteorology services into money spinners - and the only way they could find to do that was to bar initial users of data from publishing or distributing it to others. Hence we had months or years of climate scientists negotiating copyright clauses with intransigent governments in order to satisfy the wails and tantrums of those who claimed to want the data so they could contest the scientists' analyses.

(Biiiig joke here. The complete dataset used by scientists has been freely available for a goodly while now. Anyone care to guess how many of the contrarians have done their own analysis? Not one.)

Of course, it's all a bit hysterical just now. The Arctic's vanishing before their eyes along with the land-based glaciers and there's a fair amount of "look, squirrel!" jumping and pointing going on.

MO'B and Eric: MIT?

Sure sounds like the Tute.

Mephistopheles O'Brien,

Actually the work I described is in the department of biology.

It might be worth pointing out that there isn't really such a thing as a free market, just disagreement about which rules are legitimate. There always have been and always will be rules about what you can sell and who you can sell it to. Much talk of the free market seems to me to be people justifying the rules they like and castigating those they do not.

Maybe scientists sympathetic to the free market who haven't retired yet have better things to do with their time than read blogs?

That would leave idiots of all colours and susidised scientists (who might be expected to reject the free market like all subsidised folk), being the only ones actually providing data for the experiment. Presto, biassed sample!

By the way, the first paragraph reads as if you believe that some people who initially disagreed with you have been persuaded by the content of your blog articles. I think we'd all be interested to see hard data confirming this piece of bragging; it sounds more than a little improbable, and we're all scientists here, right?

Which are you Ian, subsidized scientist or idiot?

Not sure that there is any natural ideological link between libertarianism and the denial of climate change. Anyone with an extreme perspective on the importance of private property would promote preventing any individual from acting in any way that impacts the property of another without the latter's consent. Basically, if you can't contain the CO2 you release to your part of the atmosphere you must seek my permission (including the possibility of offering me monetary compensation) for any such release.

Many people today just mindlessly join teams. They then actively adhere to the central beliefs of those teams, even when those beliefs are inconsistent.

Krebiozen @0751: Yes on the subject of a free market. There have to be some rules, so that people who don't know each other well can trust each other well enough to trade, knowing that there are avenues of redress if either party thinks the other is cheating. Otherwise it comes down to, "Pray I do not alter the bargain further." Calling the belief that a market can continue to operate under such conditions an ideology is being too kind--it's more of a fantasy.

Obligatory quote on that subject:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves Orcs.

I think we’d all be interested to see hard data confirming this piece of bragging; it sounds more than a little improbable, and we’re all scientists here, right?

Funny you should ask. I know that the plural of anecdotal is not data, but...

Oh, and "subsidized scientists"?. Yeah, sure.
So if I understand correctly, when a private corporation pays someone for a job, it is a wage, but if it's a public entity doing the hiring, it's a subsidy?

I have a couple of problems with the free market arguments.

First, I'm a utilitarian and the free market has been shown, repeatedly, to produce good outcomes for some people, but not all (or even most.) The free market is based on the myth that everyone makes rational, informed decisions. Faced with an infection and the choice between antibiotics or a coffee enema, they would do the research and understand that the antibiotics work and the enema doesn't. But people aren't that rational or dedicated to finding the information. This is complicated by the fact that the free market allows quite a bit of stretch in the information that's out there. So, without regulation, someone could make claims that coffee enemas will cure infections and the consumer would have to work past those lies. To make matters worse, much of the evidence in that free market scenario would be people dying of infections when treated with coffee enemas.

My other issue is that the free market is based on a very subjective idea of "value." Science, on the other hand is far more objective. Something is (provisionally) true, or it isn't or we don't know yet. Assigning some subjective value to things can, and will, run counter to their objective truth.

ArtK -- it can be more insidious even than that. Even purely rational people cannot be relied upon to make the best decisions about health care for the same reason that torture victims cannot be relied upon to make a truthful confession -- they are not really in a possession to negotiate. If you believe you have a life-threatening infection, you do not have the luxury of time to research all options. If you're sick enough, you may not even realistically have the option of refusing the first option presented. With no regulation, this would lead to a lot of people accepting bogus cures for life-threatening conditions -- but even in the current market, it leads to wildly erratic prices. Since the health care consumer rarely has the option of picking which hospital the ambulance will take them to when they collapse with a heart attack, they have no way of choosing who is the best or the most cost effective. A recent survey of prices for common procedures revealed prices that were all over the place. One place might charge 10 times what another charged. The consumer would never even know, and logically therefore would also have no ability to exert market pressure on the more expensive ones. The free market is pretty good at picking the price of shoes. It's terrible at picking the price of medical care.

BobG - I cannot speak for Eric.

If the science is settled, we must first replace current energy generation with low-carbon energy generation. We must also remove some of the carbon already present in the air. Finally, we must raise the Earth's albedo.

In other words,it's time to a) regard anti-nuclear activists as traitors to the ecosphere, b) ban recycling and replace it with carbon burial, and c) cover the oceans with a layer of reflective plastic.

I'm reminded of unemployment denial in the 1970s. The Left wing of the time frequently accused conservatives of denying that unemployment was a problem. (One common argument was that conservatives should back the welfare state on the grounds that their policies made it necessary.) The Right wing of the time would claim that anybody who wanted a job could get one. Looking at the stagflation controversy in hindsight, we can see that unemployment was indeed a problem (even if was exaggerated by Leftists) but that it was alleviated by following policies exactly opposed to those recommended by the people who claimed to be most concerned about unemployment. I'm glad to say my fellow wingnuts are not repeating that mistake with regard to the current stagflation, but they appear to be making others.

Mr. Hertzlinger:

c) cover the oceans with a layer of reflective plastic.

What color is the sky on your planet? The one that does that not have these things called "ships" that move goods from one continent to another as part of this thing we call "international trade."

What do I know? I only spent a good part of my youth in Panama. You may have heard of it, it has a canal, which has recently been enlarged. It seem they may object if you block the ocean surface by covering it with plastic.

Also, do you like to breathe oxygen? In that case, why do you want to cut off sunlight to the largest producer of photosynthetic oxygen: phytoplankton?

So, really, what color is the sky on your planet? The one where you don't breathe oxygen and do not use your oceans for international trade.

Why can't we dump nuclear waste in deep space, or fire it off with a one way ticket to the sun?

I wonder if the reason for this tendency has less to do with the ideology of the right than it has with the ideology of the left.

Suppose evidence begins to come in to show that human activities are affecting the climate for the worse. Well, there's nothing political about that either way. But what is proposed that we should do about it, if this is the case? The solution involves government intervention. Taxes for activities deemed bad. Subsidies for activities deemed good. Maybe even a central planning bureau to allocate resources. And the opportunity to demonise opponents of this agenda as enemies of all humanity. Why, it's just like the good old days!

Small wonder, then, that the idea of climate change appeals to the left. Thus if the evidence is such that it would ordinarily convince, say, 80% of the public, those with strong left wing views will be all but unanimous. Even if the theory turns out wrong, the agenda suits them! Then of course the right wing community is less well convinced by comparison, and we can write lovely articles describing them as anti-science.

Even so, though, I'm not fully convinced that left wing environmentalism is very deep. It was all about green futures not long ago. Sustainability was the watchword. Not any more. Not now that people are feeling poorer, and fear for their jobs. Now everybody seems to want economic growth no matter what, and to hell with carbon quotas!

dingo199: Because hurling thousands of tonnes of neutron-irradiated concrete and steel into the sun demands ungodly amounts of rocket fuel, and all other forms of "nuclear waste" are either easily dealt with or potentially useful.

Why can’t we dump nuclear waste in deep space, or fire it off with a one way ticket to the sun?

1. cost
2. risk - what happens if the rocket explodes during takeoff as some, unfortunately, do?

Eric Lund @5:52PM:
Can I just add a huge thankyou for your explanation of why CO2 is so critical in AGW? I'm an IT person so never did any physics past high school, but your explanation made a great deal of sense to me. I just wish deniers would understand it.

While up until now I haven't understood the role of CO2, I've always believed in AGW - if you have an enquiring mind, as I like to think I do, you only have to look at the graphics of the receding ice sheets, or look at fish migration patterns, to realise something Really Bad is happening, and while climate change has happened in the past, it's never happened on this scale so quickly.

Kreboizen:
>It might be worth pointing out that there isn’t really such a thing as a free market, just disagreement about which rules are legitimate. There always have been and always will be rules about what you can sell and who you can sell it to. Much talk of the free market seems to me to be people justifying the rules they like and castigating those they do not.

This is what really pisses me off about people who rail against Big Gubmint and getting angry at those lazy public servants - they always complain about the state of the roads and how long it takes to see a doctor. And they never seem to realise that if we did away with ALL rules, there'd be chaos on the streets because people would be driving any way they wanted, there'd be no recourse for victims of crime, and no safe products available for sale.

1. cost
2. risk – what happens if the rocket explodes during takeoff as some, unfortunately, do?

Some of it also might come in handy some day.

[Insert rant about selling off the U.S. helium reserve.]

@ Christine...well stated.

" And they never seem to realise that if we did away with ALL rules, there’d be chaos on the streets because people would be driving any way they wanted,..."

Nor do they realize that Americans would be driving on the left (shudders)! :-)

"NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (climate) science is a hoax"

Absolute number of "skeptics" (real or fake) that responded positive to CYMoon:
1

Absolute number of "warmists" (real or fake) that responded positive to CYMoon:
4

Take away just one each, what do you get?

"NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore in believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming"?

If I am attacking an strawman, then one that was raised by Lewandowsky – and irks me if people, who's opinion in CAM-BS medical issues I tend to trust, fall uncritically for such "studies" that are supposed to show something. So do I now have to check your blog posts about CAM-BS with a fine comb, because it is likely that you might be critical to only one side? I don't know.

And the problem is, that this study – bordering somewhere between sociology and psychology – should fall squarely in your field of expertise. Small sample sizes? Awfully worded questions? No possibility of "no opinion" answers? Dubious selection of responses? Reported results (see title) not supported by the data? And the reported results focus more on painting a "guilty by association" picture, than actually eroding any mechanisms why people believe in climate science one way or another?

Why is it, that Orac is not all over this study, dissecting it, throwing out all BS, until nothing of substance is left? Why is that, Orac?

Should read " … – Therefore I believe … "

Orac,
The AGW pseudo-skeptosphere -- led by Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre -- is all up in arms over Lewandowsky et al. So expect more noise like Tony Mach's posts. They're already firing FOI requests at Lewandowsky's university for his emails. Shameful witch-hunt stuff. Read about it here
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/09/10/more-data-on-why-people-re…

Lewandowsky's own responses to the denialist noise are here:
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyGof4.html

Tony Mach:

At Skeptical Science, a thread about the upcoming fall AGU meeting has been taken over by discussion of the Lewandowsky paper.

IMO the criticisms posted there against Lewandowsky's paper, by advocates for climate science & for action against climate change, have been far more cogent and substantive than yours - or, for that matter, the criticisms you link to (the second one, in particular, amounts ot the same cherry pick you resort to in your comment @ 4:43 AM). I would not say they are necessarily correct, however.

Frankly, apart from any issues with framing or messaging (e.g. style or tone) who cares about the title? Does it affect the substance of the paper?

When I read the study, I see a loooong introduction explaining the background & pertinent research that led to the conducting of this survey, putting it in the context of prior research. In the methodology, results & discussions we again see Lewandowsky & company putting their findings in the context of other, prior research.

Reading your posts, we get a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions. Can you point to other research showing that samples of around 1,000 individuals are inadequate for surveys of this kind (small sample size is not necessarily inadequate, after all)? Can you point to other research showing that no 'no opinion' option is problematic?

I found Tom Curtis' criticisms of Lewandowsky's paper reasonable, and it appears most skeptic responses (and indeed, your response here) seem to rely on it to some extent. But Tom does not provide any context to show that his criticisms would be considered meritorious by sociologists/psychologists researching in similar domains.

"In other words,it’s time to a) regard anti-nuclear activists as traitors to the ecosphere, b) ban recycling and replace it with carbon burial, and c) cover the oceans with a layer of reflective plastic."

Except it's a myth, propagated by the nuclear industry and the people they've bought, that nukes have no carbon footprint. Mining ores, processing them into fuel, storing them safely, disposing of them when spent -- all of this gives nuclear power a huge carbon footprint. Wind and solar are far more cost-effective in terms of reducing the energy industry's carbon footprints: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99.html

Composer99: Thanks, but no matter how many commenters like you do the dissecting, somehow Tony Mach's seeming to have fetishized Orac means that while sane readers will be most appreciative of what you do, I suspect Mr. Mach will blow it off because it didn't come from Orac's keyboard.

Come to think of it, the whole cult-of-personality thing does look like something that many science denialists seem to indulge in. Wakefield, McCarthy, the Geiers, etc.

For anyone who might not know what the majority of "climate denialists" believe, it is that anthropogenic CO2 has some effect on global temperatures, but that natural influences are predominant. Such feedbacks as there are, are summatively negative rather than positive, and in any case, there is no cause for alarm; might even be cause for optimism since moderately higher temperatures may well be on balance beneficial. There is much more to fear from cooling than warming, perhaps particularly in temperate zones.

People who believe there was no global warming in the latter part of the twentieth century and/or that anthropogenic CO2 has no influence at all on global temperatures are a small minority, and are given short shrift on most sceptical blogs. This can easily be verified by spending a little time checking out past posts/comments at WUWT, by far the most popular sceptical blog.

In short, most sceptics fall in the “lukewarmer” category even if they don’t apply the term to themselves. They accept some role for AGW, just not CAGW (where the “C” denotes “catastrophic”).

WRT the Lewandowsky affair, it seems not so much that sceptical blogs refused to take part, as that the invitations (which, where they have been located, weren’t issued by Lewandowsky but an associate), were hardly prominent and were simply missed--they may have been rejected by spam filtering, for example. In addition, actual data from the study indicates that warmists were rather more in favour of conspiracy theories than were sceptics. Furthermore, the way the study was carried out left it open to abuse by any respondent wanting to skew the results to favour the hypothesis, and there is evidence that this might indeed have happened. Contributors to warmist blogs were certainly aware of the aim of the study, and, to be fair, Lewandowsky has received a certain amount of criticism even there.

In general, what dismays me personally is how in a number of highly visible areas of science, it is not considered acceptable to hold a differing opinion or to pursue alternative lines of research. Those who do can expect the guardians of paradigms to marginalize and vilify them, and to do all they can to keep dissenting opinion out of scientific journals. Those with a casual interest in specific areas naturally look to the authority of the gatekeepers, not realising that much politicking is going on in the background.

The real problem is the way that science is funded and how it fosters the formation of cadres whose main aim is to keep the funds rolling in. Alternative viewpoints are seen as a threat, and at all costs must be suppressed. But since when has science been a popularity contest? Those scientists who hold viewpoints different from the orthodoxy should be allowed proportional access to funding, and the battle should be fought out, intellectually speaking, on a level playing field.

I have spent many long hours examining the global warming issue, and am currently a lukewarmer, but am perfectly prepared to change my mind in light of future evidence. I have spent rather less time studying the HIV/AIDS issue and haven’t yet come to a firm conclusion, but it does appear that there is evidence that needs to be taken more seriously that HIV might not be the cause of AIDS. If it isn’t, then the conclusions from that would be extremely disturbing.

There are other areas I have looked at, and in general, I see a consistent pattern, whether or not a particular orthodoxy eventually proves to be right. The way science is being carried out, and how the scientific establishment interfaces with politics, the media and commercial interests, is the real point of concern. Increasingly, this is dawning on the public, journalists and politicians. Should it transpire that any of the major controversial areas, such as global warming or AIDS, be resolved in favour of currently dissident opinion, the consequences for the scientific establishment will be dire indeed.

@Composer99:
"Frankly, apart from any issues with framing or messaging (e.g. style or tone) who cares about the title? Does it affect the substance of the paper?"

People who reject the proclaimed census are painted as conspiracy-loons, regardless of their level of knowledge or motives – and this carried through in media reports of this study.

The title of this respectful-insolence blog-post may hold a clue as to why this might be rather unwise choice.

Besides, I think a study's title should be backed up by data and not anecdotal evidence – call me old fashioned, I think this good style.

Unless of course if Lewandowsky wanted to provoke people into rejection of his study, in order to gather data why people would "reject science" – to be published in an upcoming study.

Then I would stand here in awe given this incredible display of deviance of scientific ethics by Lewandowsky in order to make a point (and a another study).

I look forward to further psycho-pathologization of other groups to see if they react strongly: What about "Women – are they all hysterical?" Would you write then too: "Frankly, apart from any issues with framing or messaging (e.g. style or tone) who cares about the title? Does it affect the substance of the paper?"

And thanks to the link to SkS, this is a most helpful website.

"The Debunking Handbook is an … guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, unfortunately there is no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1139

Having an honest discussion, with honest study titles would be a start to reduce the influence of misinformation – but what do I expect of someone who is a "Professorial Fellow and Winthrop Professor in the School of Psychology".

Quite frankly, the more I see about psychology, there more I think it shares similarities with "sciences" such as chiropractic or osteopathic "medicine".

WRT the Lewandowsky affair, it seems not so much that sceptical blogs refused to take part, as that the invitations (which, where they have been located, weren’t issued by Lewandowsky but an associate), were hardly prominent and were simply missed–they may have been rejected by spam filtering, for example.

There's one you don't see every day.

Following up on Narad's point at 2:40 pm.The prominence of the emails and effectiveness of spam filters should have equally affected both "skeptical" sites and on those that support the current science... so it's hardly a suitable argument.

It would take an enthusiastically incompetent spam filter for this to be anything more than "the dog ate my homework." In the pre–Mirapoint appliance days, I'd say I had a false-positive rate of under 1 in 500 based solely on procmail dumping of IP blocks. It's a straight-up primitivistic fantasy that sounds "techy."

Composer99, just for the record: I have not only the fullest confidence that the allowed topics on both the SkS website and the Lewandowsky website are indistinguishable, if not identical, but I am furthermore sure that anybody who is nonplussed with the SkS/Lewandowsky work and questions said work – like "Tom Fuller" and "Poptech" did – that such an participant will find himself and all his comments going down the memory hole.

And to add insult to injury, if one is really successful, then one gets an Orwellian statement like this:
"Mr. Fuller found compliance with the comments policy too onerous a burden and has recused himself from further discussion. His comments were then excised from discussion as well;"

http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/15/lewandowskys-cleansing-program/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/12/the-cook-lewandowsky-social-inter…

So excuse me my dear "Composer99" if I decline to "participate" in a discussion in the SkS/Lewandowsky venue. Though such an attempt in participation in the SkS discussion might be instructive for anybody having misconceptions about the skeptical or scientific nature of the SkS website.

@Phoenix Woman
"Except it’s a myth, propagated by the nuclear industry and the people they’ve bought, that nukes have no carbon footprint. Mining ores, processing them into fuel, storing them safely, disposing of them when spent — all of this gives nuclear power a huge carbon footprint. Wind and solar are far more cost-effective in terms of reducing the energy industry’s carbon footprints: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99.html"

No-one said that nuclear power has no carbon footprint.
We should replace coal and gas-fired power stations with nuclear power plants (using the latest technology, e.g thorium reactors, not throw-back to 1950ies designs). We should use renewables as well. And we should not see the problem through polarized glasses: wind turbines and solar panels have to be manufactured, shipped, installed, and connected to the grid (a major issue given the geographical spread). Providing baseload power with renewables is hard, and can generate CO2 as well. For example, compressed air requires heating, storage basins need to be constructed, maintained, and are not without influence on the environment.

Please note that reliable baseload power makes the difference between electricity as a gadget or electricity as a tool. One of the effects of unreliable baseload supply would be a massive reduction in the food supply, given the reliance on long-term cooling and freezing for the preservation of foodstuffs.

I find free market capitalism completely congruent with skepticism. Maybe not Ayn Rand brand loyalty free market capitalism, but free market capitalism strictly as an economic philosophy.

Diana: who cares, let the tabloids sell papers
Moon landing: who cares, private company moon tours will be better anyway
HIV/AIDS: who cares, let the market push down the price of condoms and the charitable people provide them to those at risk
Global Warming: let the market sell green technology
Vaccines: let the market and chartible people try to herd innoculate
Tobacco: let people knowingly harm themselves if they want to

Internet-educated free market ideology enthusiasts are more likely than the average person to have been brainwashed by Lew Rockwell's various garbage ideas. Strong political alignment in general seems to ensure a degree of woo. Perhaps people should form a rational, evidence-based political party, but we wouldn't get many votes as we wouldn't be able to ethically make false promises.

You don't practice medicine, therefore, you don't have first hand knowledge. Thus, your opinion means very little. Or anyone else who has an opinion who doesn't practice medicine. It an entirely different world. The world you live in is full of "studies" funded by people who have billions of dollars worth of interests. The sum of such adding into the trillions. The misinformation, false propaganda, and junk science is astounding.

I can tell you that from first hand experience I see patients who have been failed by modern medicine over and over and who have been cured by natural remedies which work in concert with the body. Thus, I really don't care what your article or any other article has to say. It just doesn't matter when you have first hand knowledge. So the ill informed like yourself and others will keep arguing about recycled opinions which just aren't worth anything. The only thing you have is an uneducated opinion and the ability to disparage someone. Any 12 year old can do the same thing

Good day.

What you're saying, then, is that someone out there is being fooled, but it couldn't *possibly* be you! how could you possibly be mistaken about what you've seen with your own eyes??

Good question. For centuries doctors believed that bloodletting was good for the health of their patients, because of the evidence they saw with *their* own eyes. Boy, it's a good thing *you* couldn't possibly be wrong about the evidence of your own eyes like *they* were, hunh?

... seriously! I have actually clicked on the link that is in Orac's name under the article title. I know who he is and that he is a real doctor who works with real patients.

That "Chris" must be an "ND", which stands for "Not a Doctor."

Ecosystems, and a planetary system with life is nothing but ecosystems, are not contained by averages, rather they are controlled by extremes. Highest hot kills, lowest low kills, longest drought kills, longest submersion kills, highest wind kills, longest snow cover kills, the biggest waves kill, etc. Averages are boring and cause minor shifting in an ecosystem, the extremes, now they define the ecosystem. Tough to fine a lifeless place any where on this ball of dirt and water. Heat it, cool it, life remains, when something dies away, there are many lives ready to take the space vacated. This planet is not and has not been a stable system, it has vacillated in a rather wide range of extremes during the past few billions of years. Humans are not going to stop that change, nor has it been shown they will affect the extremes. That said, the only rules Mother nature has is adapt to change or die. Likewise no living organism exists without causing change in the ecosystem it inhabits.

I view the height of human hubris, the belief it is bad to say coastal folks should be affected by rising oceans and don't deserve to die (or any of the other equally stupid living situation humans place themselves in or are born to.) I say if one is that stupid, or born that unlucky, one surrenders life. There is even a nice name for it, "Darwin Award." Just look around the globe and there is much evidence of sea level change or coastal levels change (there is a difference) and to deny that fact, then issue blame, is just plain too dumb to live. Pick up your stuff and move, adapt to the change, now that is a solution. Stopping the change, now that is not going to happen.

No, this planet was changing before humans evolved on to the scene and it will continue to do so when the last human fossils are long turned to specks of clay. Get used to the idea, as you will never stop it. But clearly few humans ever look beyond their own puny time on the ground and see the big picture that change happens slowly or quickly; be it the slow thousand year grinding of a glacier, the days long eruption of a volcano or the few second of between the impact with the upper most atmosphere and the surface of the planet by an asteroid. Be lucky enough to be in the right location and you just won the lottery of death. Do not pass GO and do not collect $200.

You, me, your kids, their kids, we are all gonna die, how is not often known, but die you will, die they will and a carbon tax redistribution of wealth will not change that. Moving a few trillion, trillion, trillion carbon atoms from here to there is just a chance to laugh at fools who make this stuff up.

And just what is the human carrying capacity of this planet, 7, 14, 28, 56, 112, 224, 448, 896, 1792 BILLION or more? The last two doublings were in just about the past 100 years. At that rate the 1792 Billion will be here in a mere 800 years. 800 years ago was just the 13th Century when we humans had a pretty robust history even then.

"overhaul"

Wow. I am usually a fan of your posts. However as someone else pointed out you can find out in more detail on climateaudit.org, that study is of such quality that you'd have to wonder if even a homeopathy journal would accept the equivalent utter nonsense. Your post is the equivalent of supporting a pro-homeopathy type. You may have emotional reasons for liking the conclusions, but that shouldn't cause you to support such nonsense if you truly value science.

To many who have a broad background in science, there is some good climate research.. but much of it is like homeopathy or anti-vaccine folks who claim their work is based on "science'. Its like Richard Feynman's description of a "cargo cult science" which superficially mimics real science, or perhaps in the theory of scientific paradigm shifts its like a field which is dysfunctional and defending the status quo. Check out professor Judith Curry's paper on the "Uncertainty Monster" for a start (she is a high profile climate researcher, textbook author and widely published in the peer reviewed literature and someone who values real science)