Destroying the Credibility of Science

By Alan Caruba

Back in 1990 when I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, I was mainly concerned about the torrent of lies about global warming.

Their beginning is usually dated to an appearance by James E. Hansen before a congressional committee in 1988 in which he claimed that global warming would destroy the earth. To this day Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has held that position since 1981. There is no rational reason why he continues to be employed by the U.S. government.

Global warming has been widely discredited thanks to the November 2009 release of thousands of emails between UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” that revealed their collusion to rig the data that supported the fraud.

GLOBAL WARMING. Climate alarmists are already worrying that the public has grown so tired of their idiotic claims that huge blizzards are caused by “warming” they are beginning to pour money into the education of a new generation of “environmental journalists” to ensure that more such lies make it to the front page of your daily newspaper or via other media.

Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer’s dollars have been flushed down the federal government rat hole to fund “research” guaranteed to support the hoax. It gets worse. Despite the defeat of the Cap-and-Trade bill based on the Big Lie that carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases cause global warming, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is attempting an end-run around Congress to impose limits on the carbon dioxide emissions of utilities and every form of manufacturing and business in America.

The EPA is engaged in a perversion of science, but what else is new? Americans have been ill-served by the alphabet soup of government agencies supposedly in place to protect the food we eat, medicines we take, the air and the water. In the process they are just as often stripping Americans of the protection afforded by pharmaceuticals and beneficial chemicals.

VACCINES v. AUTISM. A case in point is an article in the British Medical Journal that “accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an ‘elaborate fraud’ by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”

The result of that fraud was to convince thousands, if not millions, of parents that vaccines to protect their children against measles and mumps were a threat to their health. The ancillary question is why Andrew Wakefield’s paper was published in 1998. Science journals are expected to peer review such papers and determine if the data presented is valid. If it cannot be reproduced, it fails that test.

DDT. Starting in 1972, an EPA ban essentially ended its use anywhere in the nation and other nations followed suit. A year later a court upheld the EPA and that is an object lesson in what happens when matters of science are decided by men and women, lawyers, with no training or background in science. The DDT hoax continues to cause malaria deaths, particularly in Africa and mostly affecting women and children.

The U.S. is experiencing an outbreak of the bed bug population, eliminated decades ago, because the EPA has banned or limited the use of virtually every pesticide to exterminate them.

ALAR. Recall, too, the fraud perpetrated by environmental groups against Alar, a chemical that was widely used by apple growers to ensure that the crop would ripen in a fashion that permitted an efficient harvest. The Alar hoax cost American apple growers millions in lost revenue until it became known that Alar posed no health threat whatever.

SACCHARINE. Though cleared of charges dating from the 1980s that saccharin was a cancer-causing substance, it took until the 1990s to get it removed from the 9th edition of the “Report on Carcinogens” and it took until mid-December 2010 for the EPA to finally admit what everyone knew by then. You can thank “consumer” groups for foisting this fraud on everyone and agencies of the U.S. government for maintaining it until they no longer could.

BPA. A similar campaign exists to ban BPA, bisphenol-A, a chemical used to line plastic bottles and containers. It is literally a worldwide effort and it too is without any scientific merit. In the same way the claim that linked vaccines and autism, BPA is under attack, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. I have written about this in the past and intend to follow this to demonstrate how these “scientific” frauds debase all science in the process.

Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so.

Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Parsing the (Very) Bad News

By Alan Caruba

The dictionary says “parse” means to break down into component parts of speech with an analysis of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part. The Caruba definition means to take all manner of bits of information and try to make sense of any of it, in part or in whole.

Part of the problem is that there are so many “experts” in the world, PhDs which often translates to “piled higher and deeper.” The lesser degrees are often lacking as well. A college education today is obscenely expensive and, as many employers will tell you, of dubious value when it comes to the mastery of skills that were formerly acquired by the sixth grade.

A recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek was devoted to the year in review and perhaps the most astonishing statistical data it offered was the way Americans are “stuck in the middle” when it comes to opinions on all the major issue which the nation must address, half are for and half are against. Whether it’s gun ownership, doctor-assisted suicide, how to deal with illegal immigrants, government control of healthcare, or whether President Obama is doing a good job, one is led to believe that we are totally divided pro and con.

The key phrase here is “led to believe” because the data was largely drawn from Gallup surveys, the Pew Research Center, the National Journal, and other sources. As much as I regard Gallup, Rasmussen, Zogby and other gatherers of today’s instant “truth”, I remain skeptical of all these polls. Opinion is fickle, subject to the economy, one’s religion, race, age, gender, political values, and yesterday’s events.

Most certainly, taking at face value anything “the government” has to say on any topic is the height of folly. It exists as the instrument of anyone and any political party that holds the reins of power. As such it disgorges masses of “information” that is intended to herd the public in directions that will ensure they remain in power while, at the same time, often engaging in the most appalling abuses of power, including neglect of duty.

History is testimony to the most egregious errors of judgment by presidents and congresses that arrived with their biases and ideologies intact. We want to know what principles a president adheres to. Some like Reagan believed in America’s greatness, its exceptional place and role. Others like Obama arrived with their views carefully hidden behind meaningless phrases such as “hope and change.” Obama’s first executive order was to deny access to his entire life’s paper trail of documents.

My first profession was that of journalist and from that I developed a lifelong search for factual information, historic and current, with which to make sense of events. Even when I segued into public relations, I insisted that it be fact-based, i.e. the truth!

I collect the “news” all the time and maintain vast files of data that go back years. On my desk today are stacks of items culled from all manner of sources, most of which I regard as reliable, but The New York Times is high on my list of the greatest collection of liars and fools since the glory days of Pravda, the state-controlled Soviet newspaper.

A recent Times editorial was titled “Comeback Against Malaria” citing “insecticide-treated bed nets” to protect people from mosquitoes that transmit the disease. No where does it mention the way the Environmental Protection Agency, ignoring the science, banned DDT, effective December 31, 1972, and thus condemned millions to an early, unnecessary death. If African and other nations plagued by this mosquito-borne disease could begin to spray DDT, it would drastically reduce malaria worldwide. The Times will not tell you that.

Another news item reports that Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, has announced that her department is creating “a new task force to battle the effects of climate change on domestic security operation.” This is just one example of the Obama administration’s insane devotion to the totally debunked hoax of “global warming”, now renamed “climate change.” Suffice it to say it has nothing to do with homeland security and is beyond the reach of any government on planet Earth.

Piers Corbyn of Weather Action, a London-based, independent forecasting firm, has proven infinitely more accurate than the British government’s debased weather agency. He is predicting extreme weather for December 25-31 in Britain. Much of the weather forecasts of the U.S. government are corrupted by computer models that use manipulated “global warming” data from government agencies such as NOAA and NASA. Thank God for weather satellites.

Much of the data collected worldwide is from weather stations either positioned on “heat islands” known as cities or simply non-existent. The best computers in the world cannot include data on clouds, a major indicator, because even meteorologists have no idea why they do what they do, changing from moment to moment. Similarly, it is still virtually impossible to predict earthquakes or when volcanoes will erupt.

The government consistently refuses to tell the public that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since the late 1990s. Winters for decade to come will be harsher and longer. Crops will fail. Food prices will rise. The latest “compromise” that extended income tax rates also wasted billions on corn-based ethanol production mandates that even environmental organizations now oppose.

The latest Census reports that the U.S. population is up an astonishing 27 million in just ten years! Immigration, legal and illegal, accounted for three-quarters of that growth. This growth is exceeded by only two other decades in the entire history of the nation! Either we change our immigration policies, reducing this flood of humanity, and lock down our southern border or you won’t be able to recognize America in the space of a few decades.

So, parsing the news remains critical if we are to understand or make sense of anything happening in the U.S. and around the globe. One thing seems clear, like all empires based on economic and military strength, power is moving elsewhere after a half century since the end of World War II that positioned the U.S. as a “superpower.”

The nation has wasted its potential on “entitlement” programs that are trillions of dollars in debt into the foreseeable future. The national debt is owned by our grandchildren!

The government is in the process of locking up its vast natural resources from use by its own citizens. It is seizing vast tracks of the nation’s landmass. It is restricting all new offshore oil exploration and extraction, and will force coal-fired power plants to close despite the fact that coal provides half of all the electricity generated nationwide.

U.S. currency is being systematically devalued because the government failed its oversight of the financial marketplace and its central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Because the government was permitted to intrude in the housing market in the name of “social justice”, it is in a state of complete collapse.

The same will occur to our healthcare system if Obamacare is permitted to move ahead.

The news is bad. We have precious little time to reverse the process.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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