Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

One-Way Discovery Channel

April 8, 2014 Rand Simberg 10 Comments

Mark Steyn has an update on his court case:

On Saturday, I noted that Mann had yet to join me in filing an objection to National Review’s Motion to Stay Discovery. He did so today:

Defendant Mark Steyn opted not to appeal the denial of the motions to dismiss the amended complaint. Rather, Mr. Steyn has filed an answer and counterclaims and has expressed his intention to move forward with discovery, regardless of the fact that his co-defendants have opted to appeal.

Indeed, I have. So what’s Dr Mann’s position? Well, it’s a two-part response.

On the one hand, he’s in favor of his proceeding with discovery against me:

The fact that Mr. Steyn has not appealed the denial of the motions to dismiss counsels further against a discovery stay. Mr. Steyn, like Dr. Mann, has made clear his desire to have this Court resolve this lawsuit and to move forward with discovery immediately. As such, there is no reason for this Court to delay discovery further.

On the other hand, he’s totally opposed to my proceeding with discovery against him:

While Dr. Mann agrees with Mr. Steyn that discovery should move forward on Dr. Mann’s claims, discovery cannot move forward on Mr. Steyn’s counterclaims.

Oh, my. You do surprise me.

I am shocked, too, of course.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

What Is A Scientist?

April 6, 2014 Rand Simberg 48 Comments

Some thoughts. I may see if there’s some interest at USA Today to run something in response.

[Update a while later]

You know, in rereading, and thinking about it, that lead is quite fascinating in it’s apparent implications:

Keith Baugues is not a scientist, but that didn’t stop him on a recent wintry day from expressing skepticism about global warming — something that is broadly accepted in the scientific community.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the issue of whether or not Baugues actually is a scientist. Should we infer from this that only scientists are allowed to express skepticism about global warming? Or that “true” scientists aren’t skeptics, and therefore no one can be? Or what?

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Rethinking Fat

April 6, 2014 Rand Simberg

Even NPR is starting to figure it out.

But note, that, as with climate “science,” dissenters have trouble getting published when they have actual science in opposition to the “settled” science in nutrition:

“Fat was really the villain,” says Walter Willett, who is chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And, by default, people “had to load up on carbohydrates.”

But, by the mid-1990s, Willett says, there were already signs that the high-carb, low-fat approach might not lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes. He had a long-term study underway that was aimed at evaluating the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.

“We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease,” Willett says.

Willett submitted his data to a top medical journal, but he says the editors would not publish his findings. His paper was turned down.

“There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines,” Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat.

Willett’s paper was eventually published by a British medical journal, the BMJ, in 1996.

And that was almost twenty years ago, and the junk-science FDA guidelines that probably killed my father in the seventies remain pretty much in place.

Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Asteroid Strikes

April 6, 2014 Rand Simberg 6 Comments

New sensor data indicates that they’re from three to ten times more common than previously thought:

“The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’-sized asteroid is blind luck.”

…The Sentinel Infrared Space Telescope Mission is currently due for launch in mid-2018, with an estimated mission cost of $400 million.

But we spend billions in trying to reduce the amount of plant food in the atmosphere.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

“The Debate Is Over”

April 6, 2014 Rand Simberg 15 Comments

The syndrome seems to be spreading:

Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.
These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives.

But when it comes to authoritarian expression of “true” beliefs, it’s the progressive Left that increasingly seeks to impose orthodoxy. In this rising intellectual order, those who dissent on everything from climate change, the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, to opposition to abortion are increasingly marginalized and, in some cases, as in the Steyn trial, legally attacked.

When people say “the debate is over,” it generally really means they’re losing the debate.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Thank goodness we are nothing like intolerant societies that are ruled by mobs. We have evolved.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

“Begun, the Cold Civil War has.”

Yes, the culture was has been raging for a long time, except people didn’t notice it because it seemed to take place on the edges or in fringe settings. All the Eich affair did was make it obvious.

Ironically many people, even in the homosexual community, don’t want this culture war and are dismayed by the Eich witchunt. They don’t want it not only because … but I’ll get to that in a moment … especially since the Eich affair is not about gay marriage, except incidentally, any more than the Summers affair was about racism or feminism; or that Steyn’s suit has anything to do with warmism or denialism or the gunowners map was about school safety; or still less that the 2013 IRS persecution of Tea Party groups was to do with Citizen’s United.

The removal of Eich is about fascism. It’s about one group of people forcing everyone else to bow to their hat on a pole; it s about book burning, compelling obeisance to, as Jame Surowiecki put it, “a universal ideology” in a manner so bald that even those who might gain politically in the short term from it are horrified by its crudity.

Perceptive gays understand now, if they hadn’t noticed before, that a whole mechanism now exists for persecuting people whose views are deemed unacceptable. Today it is directed against Eich; once it was directed against Summers; on other occasions it was employed against Clarence Thomas. But sooner or later, probably sooner, they understand it will be directed against them — or us — or someone. And if it can get a corporate CEO who is widely regarded as the father of Javascript it can get pretty darned anyone.

They’ve sown the wind.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Scientists Warn NASA

April 5, 2014 Rand Simberg 8 Comments

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn what scientists have to say about human spaceflight policy. It drives me crazy that we continue to operate under the delusion that NASA sends humans into space for the purpose of science, and that scientists have anything useful to say about the subject. Someone should write a book about that. Oh, wait.