Category Archives: Science And Society

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Real Health Care

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Some thoughts from Jim Pinkerton:

…every billionaire eventually discovers that vast wealth is little better than health insurance when it comes to securing good health. Wealth and health insurance are both forms of finance, and whether the plan is deluxe or bare-bones, finance is retrospective — after you get sick, people get paid to treat you. And yet what plutocrats — and all of us — really need is prospective, even preemptive, medical science, the kind that produces not just wellness plans, but actual vaccines and cures. The rich can afford the best doctors, and the plushest hospital suites, but if that scientific spadework isn’t done in advance, if the right cure doesn’t exist when it’s needed, it can’t be bought on short notice at any price. The polio vaccine, for example, took 17 years; genuinely effective treatments for AIDS took 15 years. Cures cannot be impulse purchases. They can’t be bid for on eBay, or even at Sotheby’s.

And the Democrats’ preferred policies will only make things worse. It’s mass murder, really. Or at least manslaughter. If I can be so uncivil.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Thoughts On The Vaccine-Autism Fraud

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Pointing out the war on science by the politically correct:

It was this F-word—feels—that left Mr. Mnookin justifiably gobsmacked, and it serves as the departure point for The Panic Virus, an attempt to explain how thousands of otherwise sophisticated Americans could make a fatuous decision to opt out of what is arguably modernity’s greatest medical achievement. Most children “exempted” from vaccines (a fittingly ridiculous term, as if the kids place out via AP exam) are not low-information progeny. They are being raised in college towns, in wealthy suburbs and in tony urban enclaves like Park Slope, by the sorts of parents who are otherwise given to grave tut-tutting about the anti-science stances of others—the climate-change know-nothings, say, or the ovine devotees of the garish Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

This part really grates, though:

How do we handle Mr. Mnookin’s fatuous friend? The Panic Virus aims to engage him or, failing that, to explain him; and yet a better choice still is to spurn him. Surely this same man, at this same party, could not have denied the existence of climate change without provoking spit-takes of wheat beer or dropped forkfuls of braised ramps. And the two claims are analogous, for both deny science in the service of what is, at base, an ideology: the magical faith that sacrifice is never required—at least not by you!

As a firm believer that evolution is the best, if not only theory to explain the diversity of life and the fossil record, and that there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism, I get outraged at such comparisons. It is neither “anti-science” or “denying science” to be skeptical about the claims of those who have been fudging data and don’t know how to do basic programming, let alone model complex and chaotic phenomena, while demanding that we pauperize millions in the future in the name of their claims. Skepticism lies at the heart of science. And this is an oversimplistic characterization. No one I know of “denies climate change.” Anyone with a lick of sense knows that the climate has never been static. The issues are whether or not it is changing as a result of our actions in a predictable way, if such changes (if they’re occurring) will be net good or bad, and if bad, what the best means of dealing with the problem are. And we are a long way from knowing the answers to any of those questions. That many of the people who claim certainty on the matter have been shown to be hacks and frauds doesn’t increase confidence in anyone making such claims. If anyone is “anti-science,” it is those who betray it with such unscientific behavior.

[Update Monday morning]

Left-wing creationism.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Deinstitutionalization

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I wrote yesterday that there are no acceptable changes to current law that would have prevented Saturday’s horrific events, but Clayton Cramer says that perhaps there is one:

In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.

I will not claim that the public mental hospitals back then were wonderful places. They were chronically underfunded from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, conditions in some were the shame of civilized people everywhere. (Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.) But it did mean that many people who were mentally ill were either locked up (where they did not have access to guns, knives, or gasoline) or at least not sleeping on a park bench, catching pneumonia.

A large fraction of the “homeless” population are people who in earlier times would have had “homes,” though little or no freedom. But it’s not clear the degree to which people who are slaves to the roiling and chaotic chemical impulses of their brains can be said to be free, either, and some percentage of them endanger the rest of us, as we saw. But speaking as someone with a history of this in his family, it’s a very tough problem.

[Tuesday morning update]

“Politically incorrect” thoughts from Dr. Helen.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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Debunked:

There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.

I’m shocked, shocked that an environmental issue has been overhyped by the media. This part had me scratching my head, though:

Calculations show that the amount of energy it would take to remove plastics from the ocean is roughly 250 times the mass of the plastic itself;

Huh? If they’re talking about the mass equivalence of the energy in an Einsteinian sense, that’s obviously nonsense, but I’m sure that’s not what they mean. But what do they mean?

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

Botched Environmental Predictions

15 Comments

Here are eight.

Speaking of which, here’s some new research (yes, “peer reviewed”) indicating that most of the warming modelling done to date is invalid. I’m shocked, shocked.

Decades from now, scientists, real ones, are going to be amazed at the hubris of today’s generation of climate “scientists,” given how little we really understand this complex and chaotic phenomenon.