Too thick to be shamed

President Obama hugged Nina Pham. In the Oval Office!!!

All the wingnut chicken littles who've been fanning fear of ebola are probably too out of their minds with cowardice to notice that Obama's message to them is:

I'm not only smarter, calmer, and better informed, I'm much braver than you crybabies.

Right-wing media's purpose is to keep its consumers outraged and afraid so that they don't notice the con and keep swilling the bullshit and voting for its purveyors.

We used to say, "The stupid, it burns." Evidently not. I wish it did, but it wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all be Fox "News" personalities.

Limits of skepticism

In our bullshit-drenched world, a healthy dose of skepticism is nearly always the way to the truth. Bill Maher shows unhealthy skepticism:

Mr. Maher questioned letting someone stick “a disease into your arm,” wrongly implying that the flu shot contains a live virus. The flu shot is a killed vaccine.

He said he did not believe that healthy people were vulnerable to dying from the new H1N1 virus. This contradicts statements from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that young, healthy people from ages 5 to 24 appear particularly vulnerable to this flu. About a third of the 76 children who have died of H1N1 since April have had no underlying health problems.

Mr. Maher also discouraged pregnant women from getting vaccinated. Studies show pregnant women are among the most vulnerable to serious complications from H1N1.

Facts matter, and Maher is 0 for 3.

Take your pick:

• A risk lower than one in a million that you'd die from a swine flu vaccine
  
• A risk conservatively of one in ten thousand that you'd die of the swine flu, though it could be one in 300 in the bad scenario

A man's got to know his limitations

I had heard many years ago that suicides by gun outnumber homicides by gun in the U.S., but I had not seen it in print for so long that I had begun to doubt my memory and my sourcing. The risk to loved ones and myself is one reason I don't keep my .22 rifle, a legacy from my grandfather, in my house.

Here's the approximate breakdown of fatalities (in 2005):

• suicides - 17,000
• criminal homicides - 12,500
• accidents - 900
  
• putatively righteous shootings, most by cops - 600

What does this prove about gun control and the Constitution? Not necessarily anything; it's just some facts.

No vaccination against bullshit

Time carries a story about Gardasil, Merck's human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which is an attempt to prevent the cervical cancer that is a common sequela of its sexually transmitted and often asymptomatic infection. You probably have had it.

The Time story is completely useless. It's a he-said-she-said between parents whose children had some adverse health event after a vaccination and scientists who say there's no statistically significant correlation. But of course the anecdotes are much more vivid than the confidence intervals, so they get much more ink.

The constant exhibition in our media of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies helps keep us all stupid. It's why most of us still believe that a full moon brings out the crazies - if we run into a crazy driver and notice the moon is full (or even almost), we leap to the false conclusion that the full moon caused the craziness.

Battle of hot air

The scientific consensus on human causes of global is not new, except to Andrew Sullivan and others like him. It has existed since the early 1980s. Political resistance to that consensus hasn't changed it; it has merely trumped up ignorant doubt among the voters using essentially the "research" paradigm pioneered by the Tobacco Institute and the Institute for Creation Science (sic).

The climate change consensus existed during the Clinton administration, as it still does during the Bushist reign. Clinton and Gore had no need to suppress the actual science.

Now, of course, global warming deniers' comparisons to Clinton and Gore suggest a rhetorical trap. Do they have something from Newsmax or NRO alleging a suppression of dissent on climate change by someone connected to Al Gore? Is the fact that the UN's reports don't include Singer's dissent evidence for them of symmetrical suppression of scientists? Or did a denier's peer reviewed grant application get rejected? Well, out with it, then.

I will say this: Democrats are much more tolerant of mixed messages from the scientists in their administrations. This is true, I believe, because Democrats are more comfortable with dissent in general. Republicans, on the other hand, hearken to the corporate model, where the one version of the truth is handed down from the executive suite. The Bushists explicitly believe this - see Yoo, John.

Of course, science is not certain. It's empirical, not subject to certainty. It's qualitatively different from logic and mathematics. Their epistemic justification still has to deal with the often faulty reasoning power of humans, but at least they don't have to deal with the whole host of other sources of error and misinterpretation that are inherent in any study of the world.

The right question is: Based on our current knowledge, what should we do? We have three options - something, continued study, and nothing. Expense and confidence in our knowledge both do figure in a rational choice, but the expense is a balance of expenses since there is a large expected expense of doing nothing, too.

One source of my confidence in the scientific consensus is past cases. When scientists ascribed the ozone hole to freon, industry and its Republican handmaidens shrieked that the science wasn't certain, just as they do now (and as big tobacco has done for more than 40 years). Scientists not employed by the industry turned out to be right.

At this point, when deniers ("skeptics") suggest that maybe it's cheaper to address symptoms rather than causes, it sounds as though they're saying: "Hey, we ran the clock out on our opportunity to address the problem before dire consequences, and now it's too late to stop them." Hidden of course is the fact that mitigation is still possible even now that they have succeeded in causing us to miss out on prevention.

(Adapted from this comment on Philosoraptor.)

How do you know they're lying?

Their lips are moving? Nope. The Bushists lie even when they're not saying anything. Their intent is always to deceive. That's what they did when the White House OMB censored Julie Gerberding's testimony to Congress.

The people and their representatives don't need to know what is likely to happen with continued global warming, do they? Democracy is sooo much trouble.