Tag: politics

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The Science of Speaking Out

Ira Flatow had a group of climate scientists on his show, NPR’s Science Friday, this past week discussing the “fine line” that many scientists find themselves walking.  Philosophically, there are many in the scientific community that believe they should present the facts and allow the public to interpret them.  These scientists frequently just want to stay out of that realm of discourse, allowing the public (and, therefore, politicians) to decide how their data is used and what the best course of action is.  Largely, this is how it’s always been.  Early astronomers could tell what they knew, but had to wait for their ideas to be accepted by their respective communities.

This particular group of climate scientists, however, is getting together to move beyond the borders they have typically held themselves to, instead choosing to speak out with what they know and actually make policy recommendations based on their information.  Largely, this group adheres to what the great Carl Sagan once said:

“People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.”

That is to say, these scientists are tired of presenting facts time and time again only to have them ignored and have other people’s opinions matter more than proven factual data.  To the scientific community, there is no question regarding the fact that global warming is occurring and that humans contribute to it.  In a separate (but related) issue, to the scientific community, there is no question regarding the fact that evolution is occurring and that natural selection is the most likely mechanism.  There is no question that frozen embryos are kept in that state for years and end up “dying” in a liquid nitrogen freezer when they could have been used for stem cell research rather than being discarded in a biohazard bag and incinerated.  Yet politicians, for some reason, are able to ignore these facts in their decisions of what is taught in our schools and what energy policies should be enacted and how important research could be conducted.

After listening for awhile, an individual called in and asked a question that intrigued me, and it’s one that I haven’t really considered up until now: why is it that members of Congress, and politicians in general, feel the need to question facts of science, yet do not pose the same questions toward religious beliefs?  Let us assume that all politicians turn their magnifying glass toward all information that comes across their desks (hah!).  Shouldn’t that magnifying glass analyze all information the same way, equally?  Shouldn’t they ask, “Well, this group of people used rigorous experimental techniques and verified their findings, and this other group didn’t.  Which should we believe?”

I mentioned this concept to Brooke and her attitude was, generally speaking, “That’s Just How It Is.”  This is true, but it still irks me.  I realize that this is how religious beliefs have always been.  There has always been a large enough group of individuals that are so adamant about their beliefs that, no matter what facts you give them, they will not shift policy to match.  The most recent issue of childhood vaccinations and the misconceptions about them comes to mind.  I’m not sure if this is a failing of critical thinking skills or education in general, but it’s been such a pervasive problem throughout history that I have to wonder.  Frequently, it takes at least one generation to change minds about these things, and in some cases, many generations.  I’m just afraid that, on many of these issues, we don’t have that long.

Case in point: the Catholic Church condemned Galileo‘s heretical thinking about the Earth revolving around the Sun as “vehement suspicion of heresy.”  He died in 1642 and he couldn’t be buried with his family because of it (to be fair, the Church moved his remains to their rightful place almost 100 years later).  However, the Catholic Church waited over a century before accepting heliocentrism, and until 1965 to revoke its condemnation of Galileo himself.

Scientists are getting a little annoyed with that kind of treatment.  Granted, the world moves faster today and ideas are disseminated and accepted much faster, yet Natural Selection has been a concept for over 150 years and there are still people that use the phrase “but it’s just a Theory.”  It shouldn’t take over 150 years, let alone 300 years, for ideas to be accepted when those ideas are revolutionary to our understanding of our place in the universe, and it really shouldn’t take that long for governments to make policies that use legitimate scientific data to actually preserve our place in that universe by preventing our extinction from it.  In 300 years, without any change in policy, we won’t have California or Florida anymore.  It will be too late.

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Passing On

DSC_0105

We went down to Columbia this past weekend for my Grandma’s funeral. She was 95-years-old and took a fall a few weeks ago. Grandma never recovered from it and, thankfully, her pain didn’t last for too long. While my Aunts and Uncles (and Mom…and the whole family, for that matter) were sad to lose her, Grandma lived a very long life and was able to do things on her own for the vast majority of it. She only moved into a nursing home last year, and even then, her heart was always strong.

I’m very happy that Meg got to meet her Great-Grandma. In my case, I actually remember my Dad’s Grandparents (as they passed away in the late-1980s/early-1990s), but I never really knew my Mom’s Grandmother. We do, however, have a picture of Mom’s Grandmother holding me while in the nursing home when I was a baby. Similarly, Meg will probably get to know Brooke’s Grandparents over the next few years (as they’re all in their 70s), but will have a picture (or two) of her being held by my Grandma.

Of course, I now have someone else I can call “Grandma” (or whatever Meg decides to call my Mom, someday :-)).

On another note, some of you may have noticed the server was down over the weekend. We woke up Friday morning to find the server powered down. I tried a few things, but couldn’t get it started again – it wouldn’t power on at all. I was hoping it wasn’t the motherboard, as replacing that would likely have me lose the blog up until my last backup (which was a few weeks ago…grrrrr…). Fortuitously, we were going to Columbia anyway, where I could take advantage of Dad’s stash of components and electrical equipment, so I just took the server with us! Long story short, we tried a few things and eventually figured out it was the video card. The fan on the thing was immovable, suggesting it had overheated. After I removed it, the thing turned back on…but I had to go get a new one from Best Buy in order to actually see anything on the screen. The new card was recognized by Linux without a hitch and it’s all up and running again (obviously). Now I’m investigating ways of automatically backing up the blog database…

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Transcript Follows

An interchange of text messages between Brooke and I are as follows:

Brooke: “Guess who broke her rope but didn’t run away?”

Andy: “Sam? Oh wait…you said ‘her’… Meg? ;-)”

Brooke: “Yep. When i said day care i meant tied up with a rope.”

Guess you had to be there… 😛

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Context

So, typically at church on Sunday mornings, the scripture lesson will precede the sermon. Today, the lesson was:

4 The word of the LORD came to me, saying, 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you  were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Now, reading through that lesson, one would have to ask themselves, “hmmm…how’s Pastor Scott going to discuss abortion?”

He didn’t talk about it at all.  Didn’t come up once.

In fact, Scott talked about having purpose in your life (the sermon title was “Motivation for Life”).  He specifically discussed how the prophet Jeremiah was around 16 years old when God talked to him, and even at that young age, he had meaning in his life and was motivated to continue along the path put forth in front of him.  The verse talked about how Jeremiah, specifically, was called to preach God’s Word to the masses.

So, I sat there thinking: “how could two so drastically different messages come from the same verse?”  What Scott talked about was a motivation, a purpose, for all our lives and how we can do good with them.  Instead, there are other voices that stop after the word “apart” midway through the 5th verse.  These voices disregard the context in which the words were written, inserting their own meaning.

I realize we live in a world of soundbytes now, when a politician’s words can be cut and cropped to make it sound like they said something when they really didn’t.  Largely, I think this occurs because people are generally lazy and don’t care to listen to the full series of phrases, let alone the entirety of a single Bible verse.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that all of the world’s religions are guilty of the same mistakes…

…but I’d like to think we were smart enough now to know better than to accept the easy answer.

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Denialism

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Michael Specter
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Jon Stewart had Michael Specter on “The Daily Show” last night, a staff writer for The New Yorker who’s out with a new book, “Denialism.” The sub-title for the book explains what it’s about: “How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives.” The interview is about 7 minutes long and covers a wide range of topics, but he mostly focuses on medicine, genetically modified food products, and vaccines.

He begins highlighting how 62 million people have gotten the H1N1 vaccine with no deaths or serious injury, despite half of American adults saying they won’t vaccinate their children or themselves because they believe it to be unsafe. Specter goes on, citing a friend of his that read the book, but still said she wouldn’t vaccinate her child for polio because “there is no polio anymore.” This is true, but only for the United States: polio is still around in other countries where airplanes travel. Similarly, 200,000 people died last year from the measles, another “forgotten disease,” and while none of them were in the United States, it’s not like it would be hard for the disease to spread here.

Specter also talked about how Vioxx “killed” 55,000 people (which, he points out, is the same number of Americans killed in Vietnam), yet Vioxx was never determined to be the sole cause of the deaths: just correlated. Those people had all kinds of other cardiovascular risk factors as well that likely contributed to the deaths. There were millions of other people that were on it and were just fine and benefited from the drug’s actions. Later in the interview, he points out that 45,000-50,000 Americans die in car accidents each year, but we don’t sue the automobile industry or stop using them like we did to Merck after the Vioxx scandal hit. He says, “We know if we lowered the speed limit 10 miles, we would save 8,000 lives, but, we want to get to the mall, so it’s something we’re willing to do.”

The whole vaccine thing just boggles my mind, honestly. A lot of it goes back to the idea of “over-parenting” (there was a nice article in Time Magazine a few weeks ago on that other can o’ worms), where we try to protect our children and ourselves from everything, when statistically, we’ve never been safer than we are now. Vaccines, according to Specter, are probably the single most important health achievement in human history next to clean drinking water, at least so far as the control of disease goes. And yet, there are people out there that continue to believe, against all scientific evidence, that they’re unsafe.

There are a wealth of other crazy beliefs that could be pointed out, of course, like those that don’t believe global warming is occurring (despite all scientific analysis saying it is)…or that mercury in vaccines causes autism, or that the Earth was created in 6 days, or that humans lived with dinosaurs, or that evolution isn’t real, or that the Earth is flat….and so on, ad infinitum…

Ignoring science certainly isn’t the answer. Humanity has developed knowledge over the generations that they’re supposed to use, preferably for the good of everyone. Picking and choosing the science you believe in is ridiculous. If you don’t believe in evolution, then you shouldn’t be allowed to use electricity: science has given us electricity and evolution, and if you won’t take one of those, you can’t have the other.

It’s a pity that rule isn’t enforced, as it would prevent all The Crazies from posting on the internet…

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All Or Nothing

In recent weeks (months? years?), I’ve been thinking about how voting, and politics in general, tends to be handled nowadays in the good ol’ U.S. of A… It doesn’t matter if you agree with the vast majority of what a particular candidate, or congressional bill, you stand for: if there is one hot-button issue you disagree with, that means you simply can’t vote for it. Around election time, we call these people “single-issue voters,” those that typically decide that they like everything a candidate says, but since they’re Pro-Life (or Pro-Choice, occasionally…) and the candidate disagrees with that one issue, that means you can’t vote for them (the death penalty is another one that fits that bill, amongst many others, I’m sure).

I think of this more recently in the context of the on-going health care debate. As Obama said in his Address to Congress on September 9th, 80% of what is in “the bill” (or, more accurately, the various iterations of bills floating around the halls of the Capitol) is agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans. They all want to get rid of denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, they all want to keep costs down, they all want to increase competition, etc….but as long as that “public option” is on the table, some won’t support it. Since when is 80% not “good enough?” In school, that constitutes a “B,” which while not being an excellent grade, necessarily, is certainly good enough for graduation and a half-way decent GPA. That’ll get you into college. That’ll get the job done.

I think, largely, many people agree on the vast majority of issues: murder is bad, babies are cute, hair should be washed, and so on. And years ago, the U.S. government got along fine with the agreement on most issues related to their debates, when finally they would compromise and get something passed (yes, it’s true…although, living in today’s society makes us forget that government can work for the benefit of its citizens, and can do so efficiently). Today, however, we find ourselves in an era of conflict. Who wants to watch a reality show about a happy family? Or a cop drama when no crimes happen? People nowadays won’t pay attention to anything unless there is some conflict, something to fight over. Maybe people have always wanted conflict to entertain them, and perhaps politicians finally realized that and figured out that, to make more money from donors, they need to be in conflict all the time in order to get extra exposure, and thus, extra cash.

What angers me most is that compromise doesn’t happen anymore, perhaps of that “conflict craving” (heck, I’d argue that the divorce rate is so high mostly because of a lack of compromise). There was a time when it behooved both sides (in marriage or congress) to agree most aspects of a plan and then focus on a more central issue: both sides would lose something, but both would also make gains because the goal was met. That’s how compromises work. It has worked well for centuries and should still work today.

It angers me because the compromise, in the particular issue of health care, is the so-called “Public Option,” as that is the logical middle ground between a single-payer system and a fully deregulated health insurance industry. The compromise is on the table already and it isn’t “good enough” for some people. Both sides agree on the majority of issues related to the debate, but the single issue holding it back is one where the compromise has already been made, providing both sides with necessary gains for their political careers, as well as American society as a whole.

Maybe “good enough for government work” is 80%? Or at least should be?

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To Put Things In Perspective

I really like Jon Stewart’s compilations off right-wing hypocrisy (you know, like when Bill O’Reilly says that it was the Nazis that went in and disrupted meetings…when, at the time, he was talking about Democrats… I doubt he still agrees…), which is why I post this. It’s a few minutes into the video, but the rest of it is very much worth the watch, anyway.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Healther Skelter
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It just puts things in perspective, better than I’d heard elsewhere thus far.

On a side-note, Rawstory.com had a blurb up about how Jon Stewart is actually loved (well, “respected,” at least…) by many Neoconservatives, including Bill Kristol.

From the article:

“‘There is genuine intellectual curiosity,’ [Cliff] May told New York [Magazine]. ‘He’s [Jon Stewart] a staunch liberal, but he’s a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that.’ May isn’t the only conservative gushing about Stewart. While the movement professes a disdain for the ‘liberal media elite,’ it has made an exception for the true-blue 46-year-old comedian. ‘He always gives you a chance to answer, which some people don’t do,’ says John Bolton, President Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and a Fox News contributor, who went on the show last month. ‘He’s got his perspective, but he’s been fair.’ Says Bolton: ‘In general, a lot of the media, especially on the left, has lost interest in debate and analysis. It has been much more ad hominem. Stewart fundamentally wants to talk about the issues. That’s what I want to do.'”

The author of the Rawstory article calls Jon Stewart “this generation’s Mark Twain,” and I think I’d have to agree.

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A Digital Brave New World

I was listening to my NPR Science Friday podcast yesterday discussing the topic of who owns your digital data, broadcast on July 31st. The discussion covered a variety of different issues, including recent attempts by Facebook to retain rights to anything you post there, how Google plans on archiving all information digitally (it’ll take 300 years), and the ability of Apple to remove content from your iPhone any time it wants to.

One thing brought up in the discussion, however, was the idea of purchasing content. When you buy an album through iTunes, for example, you can burn that to a CD, putting it in a form that you can then access anywhere or anyhow you want. Music is one space where this kind of transaction has been pioneered and largely works well. In the software space, however, it isn’t really like that. If I buy a game through Steam, for example, I’m given a limited number of installs, otherwise I have to purchase it again [you can burn a backup, though, in that particular case]. More to the point, if I purchase a game on my PS3 or Wii digitally (i.e. PSN or WiiWare), I can only play it on that machine. What happens when the PS4 or Wii 2 comes out? Can I still play those games? Will they still work?

There are some forms of Digital Rights Management, used by the game company Electronic Arts (EA), that actually limit the number of times you can install the software. For the game, Spore, you would buy your DVD and then could install it 3 times. That’s it. So, if you reformatted your computer and needed to reinstall it, you’d lose one of your turns and have to do it again. EA had to intervene and remove that DRM because people got so pissed about it.

As another example, Brooke bought Bejeweled for her cell phone awhile back, then got a new one. So far as we can well, we can’t transfer that game to her new phone. So, did we ever really “own” the game? Because, if I “owned” it, I should be able to move it onto a new phone, just like if I bought a new stereo, I could put that same CD into it. Or a new TV, I could still watch the same DVD on it.

So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this as more things go from physical media to digital media. Movies, likely, are going to go that way where you won’t buy a DVD anymore: you’ll have a digital copy of the movie. And while that digital copy will work for awhile, what happens when the new hot tech toy comes out that can’t play that old file anymore? I’ll have to buy it again.

I guess we’ve gotten used to physical media over the years, where I could take that movie on VHS and copy it over to DVD. Sure, it wouldn’t look as good, but at least I wouldn’t have to buy it again. It just seems like some of these efforts by corporations trying to “protect their property” are going so far as to turn what you think you own into something more like a rental. And, personally, if I think I’m “renting” something, I don’t think I should be paying so much to use it.

This isn’t something that worries me tremendously: it’s just something to think about.

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More on Health Care

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Keith Olbermann did a nice job a few nights ago outlining another aspect of this argument, specifically how much money the insurance industry (and health industry as a whole) is pouring into buying votes in Congress. He points out some of the key individuals holding this up, Republican and Democrat alike, and how much money they’ve made in political support over the years. It’s a 13 min video, but pretty eye-opening.

One point he made in the first 3 minutes was one that I haven’t heard brought up often, however, was with regards to “bureaucrats getting in the way of the patient and the doctor.” Specifically:

“Wow, Senator [John Thune (R-SD)] — this illustrates how desperate you and the other Republicans are, right? Because Sen. Thune, if you really think ‘bureaucrats and politicians’ need to get out of the way of ‘patients and their doctors,’ then you support a woman patient’s right to get an abortion, and you supported Michael Schiavo’s right to take his wife off life support, and you oppose ‘bureaucrats and politicians’ getting in the way, and we’ll just mark you down on the pro-choice list. That’s a rare misstep for you Sen. Thune.”

This is an excellent point and it really shows how hypocritical these guys are. Bureaucrats have been trying to get between “you and your doctor” for years in the form of Pro-Life conservatives, amongst other things, but that’s the one that’s the real sticking point for me. These are the same people that say you can’t have an abortion. Well, that’s a politician making a decision for you. But they say that these decisions should lie between you and your doctor. Waitaminute…[head spinning in confusion]

The whole thing drives me nuts…

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Obama wants to kill old people!

Rachel Maddow has this 7 min segment discussing how the crazies are now coming out to say that health care reform is simply a backdoor to assisted suicide of the elderly. Seriously. That’s what’s being debated on the floor of the House. And on right-wing talk radio. The idea that Obama wants to kill old people.

The whole debate is getting rather annoying, honestly. There are all kinds of proposals being put forward from the Left, yet the Right is stopping at “tax cuts and stopping companies from denying you because of pre-existing conditions.” Sure, they’ll keep you and give you insurance, but jack up your premiums to high heaven to account for it. And if that’s all that they’re really proposing, then they have no comprehensive plan. Tax cuts and that simple regulation aren’t enough to fix the problem(s).

Reform needs to happen and we need to work together to get something useful passed. In my opinion, a Public Option should be included, but at the very least a LOT of regulations need to be imposed upon the private insurance industry if I plan on being able to afford health care in 10 years. Even if a Public Option isn’t included in the final bill, profits need to be reigned in at these health care companies, and I seriously doubt that any Republican-backed plan would suggest that.

Spreading fear and doubt about the existing ideas (i.e. “this plan will kill you!!”) is simply not helpful, and if anything, prevents anything from getting done. Much like back in 1993 when we tried getting something done, and it was stopped by similar tactics. And by “we,” I mean the Left. Because the Right is apparently just fine with where things stand.