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"Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days because of lobbyists? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really..."

Post Updated 2/19/10 to include new references.

The EPA, Skewered For First TSCA Action in Decades:

On December 30th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted action plans for four chemicals: phthalates, perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and short-chain chlorinated paraffins. (No really! It gets better :-) ) An action plan signals that the EPA intends possible regulation because the chemical poses a hazard. Chemical companies complained bitterly. The EPA also listed two more chemical action plans in the development process, for benzidine dyes/pigments, and bisphenol A. Scientific American commented at the time:

"This is a big deal because it is the first time since TSCA was passed in 1976 that the EPA has made such a move. To date, the agency has only successfully used TSCA to restrict or ban five of the 80,000-plus chemicals on its inventory"

However this week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel criticized the EPA's December chemical action plans, questioning why bisphenol A wasn't on the top four list: The EPA's "move" was "drawing suspicion", explains the paper:

"the head of the Environmental Protection Agency had been talking tough in one speech after another last fall about the need to protect the public from such chemicals, particularly BPA...but when the agency's list came out Dec. 30, identifying four chemicals that would face stricter labeling and reporting requirements, BPA was not among them..."

Writes MSJ: "Critics say the Dec. 22 meeting might have been why BPA was dropped from the top of the agency's list".

BPA is on the agency's list. But to the Journal-Sentinel's question, why is it not first up in the most recent round of action plans? Did lobbyists pressure OMB/OIRA to change EPA's stance on Dec. 22?

Now, Suddenly, The EPA Turns on A Dime?

The paper cites as the deciding factor a meeting of plastic and chemical lobbyists with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA):

"Eight days after a meeting between chemical industry lobbyists and Obama administration officials, federal regulators put off including bisphenol A on a list of dangerous chemicals that would be subject to stricter regulation"

The Center For Progressive Reform also forwarded the idea that the EPA was influenced to remove BPA from its chemical action plans list in a blog posted January 22:

"on December 22, just before EPA was about to release its first four chemical action plans, activists from American Chemistry Council and representatives of a major BPA producer met with officials at OIRA to plead the case for BPA's safety."

Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really.

But, lets look back to last fall, to a much quoted speech given by Lisa Jackson to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The MSJ quoted the speech in their article. At the time, we wrote in "The EPA Speaks To Me" that Jackson's speech, like the president's sweeping public orations, promised something for everyone:

"The more I read, the more Jackson's speech looked like a veritable public relations jambalaya. She spoke to those committed to wetlands, spotted owls, to asthma sufferers, climate change, to those concerned about coal and gas emissions, to the Clean Air Act, to trash incineration, dioxins, pesticides, green chemistry, research, unions, medical professionals, public health groups, industry, environmentalism, to those who want jobs, fast food packaging, to unborn children, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and postal workers, as well as everyone who emails public comments to the EPA or who's concerned about health care or health..."

I commented at the time that her speech was clearly a "marketing tool and conversation generator but not a public policy statement." We could get mad about a lot of things in her speech, I'm sure, if we took it as public policy commitment.

If Only Talking Made Policy

Of course, in that speech Jackson did mention bisphenol A, saying: "Every few weeks, we read about new potential threats: Bisphenol A, or BPA - a chemical that can affect brain development and has been linked to obesity and cancer..." Or, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sees it: "The first chemical on her list: BPA." But, writes MSJ: "In the end, though, her agency settled on four other chemicals to target first for the action plans." (emphasis ours)

So as MSJ says, it's true, "first" Jackson did mention BPA. Then she said "pthalates", then "dioxins, then "lead" (each once). One of the Journal-Sentinel's sources labeled EPA's stance as "curious". I'm as cynical as anyone, but lets look at Jackson's rhetorical choices.

San Francisco was the first in the nation to attempt action on bisphenol A and phthalates. Jackson was at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club talking to (I guess) some commoners -- not chemists or policy wonks. "Bisphenol A" and "pthalates", "dioxin", and "lead" would be recognizable and appreciated by the crowd. True, she didn't explicitly mention "polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) including the commercial versions of pentabromodiphenyl ether (c-pentaBDE), octabromodiphenyl ether (c-octaBDE), and decabromodiphenyl ether (c-decaBDE)" -- the flame retardants in the first batch of four EPA action plans. But had she, the crowd, eyes glazing over, probably would have slumped into trance instead of thinking the EPA was their friend and ally. Whether you view this as PR or marketing or just common sense, its elementary communication. And as an aside -- why no concern about the EPA's omission of lead or dioxin in the first batch of action plans?

Sept. 29th: EPA Announces Four Chemical "Action Plans". Sept. 30th: Names Chemicals

As for the EPA's choice of which chemicals would be targeted first, on September 29, 2009 , the EPA issued a press release" right after Jackson's speech, announcing its intention to issue four action plans in December:

"The EPA has identified an initial list of chemicals for possible risk management action and anticipates completing and posting an initial set of four action plans in December. It will complete and post additional chemical action plans in four-month intervals thereafter."

On September 30, 2009, the EPA issued another press release, naming the four chemicals of top interest, the same ones that it produced action plans for in December:

"EPA today announced a series of actions on four chemicals raising serious health or environmental concerns...The agency's actions represent its determination to use its authority under the existing Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to the fullest extent possible...In addition to phthalates, the chemicals EPA is addressing today are short-chain chlorinated paraffins, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perfluorinated chemicals, including PFOA.

So in a September 30th press release, the EPA named the same four chemicals that were in the December 30, 2009 action plan announcement. Then did the American Chemistry Council (ACC) really sway the EPA's BPA decision in a meeting December 22nd with OMB/OIRA, eight days before the EPA's action plan announcement?

The Chemical Lobby, BPA & The EPA: Economics Factors?

To me, aside from the overly conspiratorial premise of the article, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and CPR valuably point the public's attention to some enviable industry access. The ACC sent five representatives to meet with four OMB,OIRA staff; and SABIC, a Saudi BPA manufacturer, sent two. The ACC apparently sent a letter requesting the meeting dated November 3rd. This is news: If you're a chemical lobby group or a Saudi BPA manufacturer, you can get a meeting with OMB/OIRA in a month and a half.

ACC also submitted a slim bibliography(.pdf) of research sources. The ACC submissions show the industry's dedication to a relentlessly one-sided messaging on chemical safety.

Six of fifteen studies in the bibliography have ACC's Steve Hentges (meeting attendee and ACC lobby spokesperson, who has relentlessly messaged about BPA safety) listed as the senior author (not unbiased). Three industry related studies intend to prove that BPA degrades quickly, which is an important criteria for EPA action plans. At least four other studies with various aims are authored by groups sponsored by plastics, BPA or chemical foundations. It's true, as the MSJ writes, most of the studies authors have industry affiliations. There are hundreds of other studies to choose from which wouldn't bolster the ACC's arguments one tiny little bit. (Although to be fair, the ACC is a chemical lobby group -- not an unbiased journalist, a point I'd hope the EPA recognizes)

But the ACC included one study from Ryan et al published in Toxicological Sciences (Online October, 2009), that is an EPA study conducted by EPA employees. This study concludes that low-dose bisphenol A does not alter puberty, fertility, or anatomy and sexual behavior in rats, compared to the estrogen control. Several groups dispute this study because, for one, the strain of rat is not as sensitive to low-dose estrogen" (.PDF Update 02/19/10). However the study's sponsoring author has disputed their claims (which are longstanding) to Trevor Butterworth of Stats.org, which has been doing PR on behalf of the bisphenol A industry. We previously discussed Stats.org's role in several posts.

If anything might dissuade the EPA from acting on BPA it would be its own studies (which they didn't need the ACC to highlight.) The senior author on the study, L. Earl Gray Jr., also testified before the EPA in 2008, emphasizing that his level of "concern" (an agency measure of potential harm) about bisphenol A exposure was less that his level of concern for phthalates exposure. Industry groups have touted Ryan's and Gray's work. If the Ryan and Gray's study methodology is in question, no activist has been too public about it (Update 02/19/10: A letter in Toxicological Sciences published 02/17/10 explains the problem with rat strain.) Perhaps more media focus should be placed here, on the EPA's own study.

The ACC letter requesting the meeting asks for chemical industry participation in the EPA decision making process (a request that seems rather unnecessary given the easy access industry does have). The letter also asks EPA to "be sensitive to the potential and foreseeable negative effect on the marketplace...the market impact on bisphenol A demonstrates this is a serious and real concern." Of course this is the primary goal of ACC, to urge the EPA not to impact any one of 80,000 chemicals' markets.

The EPA, in contrast, has said that its priority is to "review all chemicals against safety standards that are based solely on considerations of risk - not economics or other factors." (emphasis ours). It will be interesting to see how the EPA decides on bisphenol A, and whether its considerations to "risk" will include industry consideration to economic factors - or not. However just the fact that OMB and EPA were willing to sit with the ACC lobby group shows a willingness to listen to their (always) economic arguments.

The EPA -- Total Pushover?

I don't think I'm particularly naive in these matters, we've been following industry influence on policy for a while, especially BPA, which we've been following since 2005. We've specifically written about EPA apparently backing off of regulation under pressure from OIRA/OMB several times before.

But I'd be surprised if the EPA turned their intentions for BPA around based on this meeting. First, it appears from their press releases that they had already concluded back in September which four chemicals were first up for action plans. The idea that they would be so swayed is practically absurd, given the transparently, almost lazily, self-interested documents submitted by industry. Somehow I have more confidence in this EPA then to think they changed action plans based on those almost disrespectful pleas. But they do, now, have their own scientists saying that BPA isn't as dangerous as phthalates.

Clearly the EPA is not quite committed to regulating BPA as activists want. But it has put $30 million towards EPA research. It's also conducting its own studies. Hundreds of science studies provide evidence that BPA is harmful, but there are enough impacts from EPA decisions on industry that the agency needs to continue its BPA investigation. However, consider dioxins, another chemical the EPA mentioned in its Commonwealth Club speech. Dioxins are proven to be carcinogenic, a far more damning research finding than has to date been applied to BPA, but the EPA is still struggling to contain their use. On BPA, I'd be the first to say that there's enough research, as would many states and communities. But federal policy-making is not science. So is it more than poppycock to suggest that the EPA was singularly pressured by one ACC meeting to change its mind on BPA?

Being that it's a slow day in the weekly cycle I should just kick back and peruse the glossy weekend magazine "How To Spend It", from the Financial Times' -- choose some baubles and get-ups to distract me, and lavish African safaris to amuse me. But a post is overdue. So some notes:

• Runaway Cars: Toyota's "Poppycock"

  Since 2003 the National Highway and Transportation Safety Authority has been investigating safety problems with Toyota vehicles. And apparently, in an effort to "ward off" too much investigation, Toyota hired two former NHTSA workers who helped forestall action government action and inquiry into the failures. Joan Claybrook, formerly of Public Citizen and the NHTSA, spoke about the company's duplicity in dealing with the issues:

  "Toyota came in on the floor mat issue and they said this is not a safety-related defect, but we're going to do it any way. And we're going to obey all of the rules and regulations that you have for carrying out a defect, but this is not a safety-related defect. This is poppycock and they should never have tried to get away with that."

  The company has apparently tried to frame a more serious problem as a floormat issue, but Claybrook recounts that the company is not only replacing the floormats but also installing a brake override:

  "in the recall dealing with the floor mats, this is the Lexus, the Camrys, some SUV's and the Prius, they're going to not only fix the floor mat, but they're going to install a brake override, as it's called, which is a software change which if there's a conflict between the accelerator, throttle and the brake, the brake wins out and you can stop the car. Right now a lot of cars have this, but the Toyota vehicles do not. So they need to have something electronic to stop these vehicles from being runaway vehicles."

  Admission of a widespread electronic problem would apparently be detrimental to the company. As for NHTSA, the agency has apparently been dealing with leadership turnover and budget woes. The growing outside perception is that the agency has grown altogether too close to the industry it's supposed to be regulating. We previously covered the NHTSA and industry coziness when writing about the EPA and the US government's efforts to reduce unhealthy automobile emissions.

  Columbia Journalism Review summarizes media coverage of NHTSA's dealings with Toyota, and reflexively criticizes the media in general for being lax.

• Gait

  There have been some interesting studies on gait lately. Barefoot running has become a fad and research has long indicated that running shoes increase ligament injuries, stress fractures and planter fasciitis. Now, a running shoe study by Lieberman et al in Nature "(subscription) shows that running shoes change human gait, from running toe-heel to running heel-toe. Actually, the authors distinguished three patterns, forefoot first, midfoot first, or rearfoot first. Running shoes encourage heel strike first, which differs from barefoot running. The researchers found heel strike running greatly increases resultant forces that can cause running injuries.

  In another recent study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Cunningham et al compared the amount of energy expended when humans walk heel-toe (plantigrade), vs. toe-heel (digitgrade). The study found that it takes 53% more energy to walk on the balls of your feet, and 83% more energy to walk on your toes, than to walk heel to toe. The authors conclude that humans conserve energy by walking heel-toe (plantigrade), but don't conserve energy when they run plantigrade. They suggest evolutionary reasons that made heel-toe walking more advantageous.

  Finally, slightly different, another study, also in the Journal of Experimental Biology looked at elephant gait. The authors built an elaborate structure to measure the forces of running elephants and found that elephants use less energy and manage to bounce less (which decreased forces) by adapting a half-walk, half-run stride. This stride decreases by almost one-half the forces exerted by a running elephant compared to a running human.

  Acronym Required previously looked at energetics in Nepalese Porters carrying loads, and in human walking obese and non-obese people

• Matchmaking for Cynics

  Acronym Required has jestingly suggested pairing people from perhaps opposing camps in the past, like an impertinent investigative reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, with a journalist contracting for a bisphenolA-is-safe lobby, as we wrote in BPA Rhetoric and Reaction; or a chemical lobbyist, with an environmental agency scientist, as we wrote "New Strategies for Bisphenol A and Chemicals?". We did this to celebrate the Obama era, as a light-hearted ode to getting everyone at the same table.

  But now an offshoot of Greenpeace has developed a far more sinister and cynical matchmaking concept in "P-Harmony", Polluter Harmony, which proposes to match various legislators and decision-makers with lobbyists. Of course there's no end to such real-life power matches, as a Google search for any combination of "sex", "sleeping with", "lobbyists", "Congressmen", "regulators", "Senators", "in bed with", etc. will attest to. But if I were to rate the site, I'd say it's ripe with potential and has some amusing detail, but is spare on the sort of fleshed-out scurrilous information people find so delicious.

• And Speaking of Which, The EPA...

  No, not lobbyists in-bed with regulators, but websites. The new EPA website is much improved. The Obama Open Government initiative aims to "break[] down long-standing barriers between the federal government and you". To that end, you can "share your ideas" at the open government site or just peruse the evolving EPA site. It's not the first time the EPA has tried to improve public information, but this is a far more comprehensive approach than others, like this 2007 effort. I haven't delved too deep into the site, but the top pages seem also to advance the agency's control over its messaging.

• Obama Quandries

  No one quite knows what to make of Obama. We wrote about the collective disappointment last month, and pondered whether, if people been paying attention, they'd have realized he wasn't necessarily the person they'd fabricated in their heads. We suggested people look at close adviser Cass Sunstein's politics, although they're also highly disputed, but certainly aren't liberal. Of course even as we suggested it, we know it's ridiculous to judge a president on one adviser.

  So you could judge Obama on two advisers. In an article in the New York Review of Books a couple of weeks ago, Jerome Groopman looked at healthcare reform and tried to predict how it would go based on Obama's "closest advisers" on the subject, Cass Sunstein, head of OIRA, and Peter Orszag, head of OMB (OIRA is within OMB).

  Groopman distinguished Sunstein's "nudge" approach based on behavioral economics, from Orszag's "shove" approach, a different take on behavioral economics. Groopman characterized Orszag's approach as a more stringent incentive system that would not allow doctors and heathcare providers to "opt out", but would penalize them for not following government set "comparative effectiveness" mandates. But comparative effectiveness is no different than "cost effectiveness", wrote Groopman, and cost effectiveness doesn't work and won't sell. Interestingly, I've always viewed Sunstein's cost-benefit analysis to have the same shortcomings Groopman seems to loathe. But Groopman wants Sunstein's way to prevail in the healthcare debate because Sunstein offers an "opt-out".

  But perhaps healthcare won't be swayed by only two advisers but four. The Financial Times also judges the president's decisions on the views of his too small circle. FT names four key advisers, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emmanuel, and David Axelrod and says that Obama needs to change up a bit to shake his governing woes. Is it realistic at all to judge the president on such small numbers of advisers? It's apparently a fun game, despite it's grounding in reality.

  As gripey as everyone is, I'm more optimistic on this President's day, thinking about the state of US governance and politics, than on the same holiday during the previous administration.

Twitter Changes Our Brains:

In "Cut This Story", Michael Kinsley writes that "newspaper articles are too long", whereas internet news stories "get to the point". In 1,809 words Kinsley calls out the vagaries and customs of print journalism, sniping at long articles filled with what he judges useless information. In one 1,456 word The New York Times story, the fluff surrounding the facts about the House Health Care Plan annoys him: "Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened", says Kinsley. He runs a tally of words he judges wasteful in various news articles: ^1,2

"The quote is 11 words, while identifying Miller takes 10"..."Quote: 18 words; identification: 21 words"..."Quote: 16 words; identification, 19 words"..."The first 13 words of the piece with tired rhetoric"..."56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author's point."

Is it a Twitter induced compulsion, first editing down to 140 characters, then getting stingy about words? As you can see, Kinsley's especially peeved about the use of quotes from experts, which he calls "unnecessary verbiage". He cites a NYT reporter who quotes compensation expert "Jesse M. Brill" -- a "total stranger". Reporters should just state their opinions, he says, instead of running them through proxy "experts", noting we only trust Brill because we trust the reporter, the editor, and the paper. In fact, we should cut out Brill, the "middleman", and other experts.

So then we'd be talk radio for readers?

Journalists tend to disagree with Kinsley. One Columbia Journalism Review writer argues that quotes from experts show a reporter has done their homework. Like Kinsley I have issues with experts, though I disagree with CJR's idealistic interpretation of their implementation. But "experts" serve many purposes, even if papers often deploy them egregiously.

As Kinsley points out, the use of experts often fails to ensure any reporting standard. But experts provide journalists with a dependable structure for stories, that they can file under deadline. Expert quotes in stories also give readers of varying opinions something to latch on to, which guarantees papers more subscriptions. One negative outcome of dependence on experts is that we're left subject to manipulation, experts can be used as tools by papers, lobbyists and politicians. But with careful attention to experts' backgrounds, smart readers can quickly understand the particular slant of the story. All to say that the use of experts doesn't waste newspaper space and it would be simplistic to conclude readers move online because articles are too long.

Balance of Evidence vs. Journalistic Balance

In our area of science and technology, journalists report the science in public policy stories like global warming and bisphenol A safety, with necessary journalistic traditions of "balance", "both sides", and statements from "experts". But most often they fail to relay important keystones to understanding science, like the more important "balance of evidence". For example, the balance of evidence supports global warming, although scientists disagree about some details and likely outcomes.

Furthermore, papers routinely identify policy advocates or lobbyists as "scientists" with dependable expertise because they hold a Ph.D., M.D., or other credential, but pay no heed to experts' affiliations or politics, which often provide the only meaningful information. Lobbyists in the global warming arena appear often in newspaper stories, although an opinion from Exxon-Mobil often doesn't offer credible science, rather an opinion as an "expert" on a certain policy preference.

In any area of science there is always valid disagreement, even when the preponderance of evidence tips to one high-level conclusion. But smaller disagreements don't necessarily make a "side" or provide "balance", except in the world of journalism. Journalistic balance seen through scientists' eyes often fails because it abandons accuracy and amplifies trivial opinions, seemingly on account of an editor who lacks the time or guts to report the balance of evidence.

The Cut-throat Non-buyer's Market

Kinsley writes that attributing journalists' opinions to "experts" is as useless as "legacy code" in software programs. However true that expert opinions sometimes fail to hit the mark, sometimes it's critical to leave legacy code in the program, and if we're using analogies, some introns, "non-coding" or "junk" regions of DNA sequence, turn out to be important. Similarly, in more ways than one, the use of experts quotes is also important.

Like many papers that serve(d) as community anchors, New York Times serves as more than a source of "news" or a collection of facts. Rather, readers see it as a faithful morning companion, a little arts and entertainment, some sports maybe, business. Faithfully, whenever some meme floats around, the Times picks it up and ferrets out an expert somewhere to tell you that yes, what you suspected/heard/rumored/hoped/feared is true. The paper grounds stories with quotes and uses experts of opposing views to give readers choices and validate those choices with authority.

Global warming may wipe out your vacation home, but the NYT won't feed you that news with your morning coffee without some "balance". Can't stand the idea of your seaside resort washing away? Don't worry, the NYT has an expert just for you. The right expert, no matter how unreliable, can soften what would otherwise be scary news. Faux conflict that drives scientists nuts about media coverage, reassures readers and reinforces the status quo.

Also to maintain expectations and satisfy readers, papers sometimes add flourish to stories that say nothing. Kinsley rakes through Times and Post articles about healthcare reform, mocking the "sweeping" this and "hard-fought" that. He chastises one author for including what he judges unnecessary quotes from Republicans who unsurprisingly oppose reform. Funny enough, but what else would the paper tell readers? "Congress struggled for months and ended up with a meaningless bill that won't go anywhere? Wake up and smell the coffee?"

And of course if you're 50% of the population who counts yourself as a Republican, you don't want Kinsley's stripped down version, the "duly reported fact that all but one [Republican] voted against [healthcare reform]". You want the paragraph Kinsley would delete, the one with a Republican citing their talking points on healthcare: "more taxes", "more spending". You're glad to read that a Republican "relentless criticized" the "Democrats' plan", because later in the day, you'll do the same, listeners willing. The NYT can't cut out these bits because it needs to assure whatever conservatives it can cling on to, that it's a good morning in America.

Andrew Cohen, of The Atlantic Monthly also takes exception to Kinsley's assessment of experts. Brill's expertise is valuable, he writes, as is his own (Cohen frequently serves as a legal expert), and "straight news articles should include analysis from experts like Brill" (and him). Speaking as a legal expert he enjoys both being quoted and knowing the politics of other quoted legal experts, his peers. His seems like a defense of the Times as the Facebook for middle-aged lawyers, which reinforces my point. The NYT is a comfortable gathering place where you can feel good about yourself. Republicans may call it a liberal rag, but they still get representation.

Happy readers, even ones with unjostled minds are valuable. There are other sources if readers want to bang their heads against walls with harsh, uninsulated facts, but the NYT needs subscribers.

Years of Magical Thinking

Keeping readers and selling news doesn't necessarily bode well for informed civilian participation, don't get me wrong. Watered-down science, politics, and economics news can obscure or belie urgency and misrepresent the grinding difficulty of policy-making.³ Of course talk-radio and TV networks do far more to manipulate and polarize citizens, and dumb down difficulty, but newspapers contribute to the problem.

The use of experts hit a nadir when the New York Times ran stories detailing WMD evidence used by the US to justify declaring war on Iraq. George W. Bush convinced Congress and a good part of the US population that Iraq had WMDs. The president is an "expert" we trust. The Times and their reporter Judith Miller helped justify the urgency of invasion by quoting other "unanimous government experts and Iraqi sources. High level government authorities in turn quoted the New York Times to wider audiences watching weekend talk shows. Miller's sources turned out to be unreliable, vaporware, if you want to continue with software analogies.

The WMD deception worked because we're practically hard-wired to depend on "experts" who feed us the bottom line on what to watch, wear, think, espouse, etc. The White House manipulated us via the Times, a trusted Times reporter, and some experts. Kinsley is right. The "experts" were merely middleman. But their presence in the story was critical to its persuasive power.

On the other hand, the presence of experts gives us valuable insight, even though readers often ignore it. Like footnotes in research and links in blogs, we can look up experts backgrounds to help us judge the quality of the story. Unfortunately, too few people do.

Rising out of "Comas and Coal Mines"

When Kinsley criticizes newspaper stories "written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine", he ignores scads of fooled readers in our midst.

Maybe readers aren't emerging from in a coma, maybe they're stuck in a media trance. TV feeds people constant advertising about how their clothes will sparkle by switching detergents and how the loves of their lives will materialize if they drive the right car or sip the right cocoa. When fairies flit out of TV's morning cereals, a little bit of the brain pays attention (or atrophies, I'm not sure which), and over time we all start to believe the magic.

We buy lots of stuff because someone tells us it will solve out problems -- we buy and we bolster economies. But also 50% of Americans buy that global warming is a hoax. 50% believe that God created the earth a few thousand years ago. In staid, sensible Massachusetts half of voters believe that a Cosmo centerfold with a head of hair worthy of a Rograine ad will deliver them from their problems. And over 50% of Americans voted for an articulate capable president from Illinois, but now want to fire him because he didn't magical action figure they imagined. "Experts" in church, on TV, and in newspapers, spawn and encourage these beliefs.

The constant onslaught of fairy dust diminishes our attention span (Twitter-mind) and analytical abilities. Newspapers are the least worrisome of culprits. We don't vote for charismatic puffballs who drive pick-ups because of newspapers. But newspaper editors to swath the facts of stories with hoopla and hand waving to snap us out of our media trance, and momentarily hold our attention when, it's true, many people would rather be watching a cat video on YouTube. Too many facts too fast, maybe even the who, what, where, when how, would wreck our mood, so newspapers need to be cautious, need to slip the truth in judiciously.

Readers will turn online for many reasons. But it's not because the news is more concise, as Kinsley suggests, rather, because in addition to being convenient, immediate, and interactive, there's unlimited escapist distraction, and far less news, per glance, than in the Washington Post or New York Times.

-------------------------

(1) As of this week, Kinsley is not longer associated with the online business site to be launched by The Atlantic Monthly

(2) Not necessarily true. Some blog posts are very long, longer than ours. And why should they be short? It costs very little to extend a 2,000 word article into a 10,000 word article.

(3) A few years ago we wrote about the New York Times' weak coverage of former President Thabo Mbeki's policies on AIDS in South Africa. Despite unrelenting illness and death Mbeki denied science, and rejected medicines, while the Times served Americans softball platitudes about Mbeki's thought processes that reflected, rather than criticized, US foreign policy. We've also written extensively about mambypamby coverage of global warming" -- there are many other issues.

The Los Angeles Times Science section is a-ok. Except, worryingly, the LA Times now puts Science in a subcategory under the category "US and World", in one of the top ten categories that editors use to divvy up the news: "US & World", "Local", "Business", "Sports", "Entertainment", "Health", "Living", "Travel"", "Opinion", and "More".

LA Insatiable for Hotlist, Brand X and The Envelope?

Let's look at how this works.

• Under the category "Entertainment", the LA Times has these subcategories: Movies, Television, Music, Celebrity, Arts & Culture, Company Town, Calendar, the Envelope, and Hotlist, in that order. Don't think they missed any "Entertainment" "news".

• Under the category "Living", the paper assigns these subcategories: Health, Home, Food, Image, Travel, Autos, Books, Hotlist, Brand X, Magazine and "Your Scene". Can't imagine they've missed much "Living" "news".

• Then, under the category "US and World", the paper puts these subcategories: Washington, Nation, Afghanistan, Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Science, Environment, and ominously, Obituaries -- again, in that order.

The LA Times has put "science" on the same level of "brand X", "the envelope", and "company town".

Bucket List

Get it? All the real news, all the stuff that really might impact us; like the whole rest of the world beside LA; two killer, budget decimating wars; 51 US states; global warming; stem cell research; microbiology research; astronomy and the universe; on and on -- all live in one convenient news bucket beside biographies of the dead.

Technology is in "Business". And where is "Europe"? I can't find it. Completely missing from the line-up? Perhaps so old world, that some editor shoved it into Obituaries? Does the Los Angeles Times have a grudge against all of Europe? Does that include Russia? Or is "Russia" in "Asia"?

I'm worried. Because if the LA Times can eighty-six all of "Europe", then it looks like the editors and managers have placed the two categores Science and Environment disconcertingly close to Obituaries. Say a little prayer for Science News, one banana peel away from the grave?

Many people who are now disappointed by the Obama administration didn't pay close enough attention during his campaign and election. It's the same with all presidents, really -- the promise of a new president brings at first a golden era of hope during which people seem to cavalierly shed their analytical abilities; then the denial phase as the president comes into his own; then the rude awakening when they're shocked, shocked, shocked at the scale of the deception.

Remember the Bush presidency? Mr. Compassionate Conservative? People barely twitched when he invaded Iraq, then slowly awoke to his mendacious governance -- the fact that there were no WMDs, there was global warming, arsenic levels weren't safe, Guantanamo prisoners were tortured to within an inch of their lives the end of their lives -- etc.

Warnings

But before presidents are elected there's time to profile their past, time for people to shake themselves out of wishful thinking into clarity. Usually at least one enterprising journalist digs into a candidate's history and accurately predicts their presidency. For instance, during the George W. Bush presidential campaign of 2000, Harper's author Joe Conason wrote an excellent, disturbing article about Bush's tenure in Texas politics called, "Notes on a Native Son: Part I. "The George W. Bush success story: A heartwarming tale about baseball, $1.7 billion, and a lot of swell friends." (Feb. 2000) The article disabused people of their ideas that George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore were very similar. Conason nailed Bush's future leadership proclivities. Perhaps some of it was luck, and I'm sure Conason wasn't the only one who caught on early. But the Harper's article showed that some people really can get a bead on leaders, and that if we pay attention we could too. That, at least, is reassuring to know.

Forward to the Obama campaign, in July, 2008, when New Yorker magazine shocked the world with a cover cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama pictured with radical accoutrements and dressed -- as Al Jazeera put it -- "in what many [Americans] see as 'Muslim clothing'". We think fewer people read the accompanying article, which we touched on back then in "We The Thin Skinned, The Public and The Media".

The New Yorker cleverly juxtaposed a detailed political biography of Obama by Ryan Lizza against their cartoon cover depiction. In Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama, Lizza portrayed Obama as a pragmatic politician alert to the vagaries of politics, who proved himself more than adept at maneuvering through the political quagmires of Chicago and Illinois to emerge unscathed, all the while governing blandly. We quoted this from Lizza's profile:

"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions..."

Liberals now realize that Obama's "existing institutions", as Lizza put it, were in many cases set up by the George W. Bush administration. The public didn't seem to get the New Yorker's sly joke back then, the paradox of the cover story versus the true inside scoop. The public went apoplectic over the cover. And only now are people starting to catch on to the fact that the Obama they compiled in their head isn't the Obama who's leading the country.

Misconceptions

If liberals and independents are unhappy -- Bush at least went full tilt with his base-- so too are conservatives. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat sought to explain the Obama paradox recently. He wrote: "In hindsight, the most prescient sentence penned during the presidential campaign belongs to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker", then quoted Lizza's two sentences ("Perhaps the greatest misconception...institutions"). Douthat's "The Obama Way" explained that everyone vilified Obama differently but the president fit no particular mold. The most discontented people were the liberals -- as Douthat said:

"The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama's professed principles and the compromises that he's willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn't one of them at all. They're wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue."

There goes Douthat, first heartily agreeing with Lizza's New Yorker quote describing Obama as a political accommodator, next labeling Obama a flaming liberal who's only tenuously tethered to some middle way -- as if to warn conservatives not to relax. Well, which is it, young feller?

Does Douthat peg Obama as impossible to categorize but at his core very liberal? Or does he fall for the same fallacies of judgement he's just finished explaining to us?

Pragmatism

How liberal is Obama, deep down inside? Honestly, we don't know. But look, for instance at the politics of one of his long term advisors, the only person with a more quixotic image than Obama himself, whose intentions are even more difficult for observers to pin down -- Cass Sunstein. Sunstein leads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA reviews regulations from all rule-making agencies in the Office of Management and Budget, regulations for banking, air and water quality, food, drugs, transportation...in other words, Sunstein's philosophy affects us all, and he's supposedly a close counsel of Obama's .

We've somewhat regularly followed Sunstein's progress in the Obama administration and his amazing ability to attract venomous critics as well as admiring followers from both the left and the right. There wasn't always such focus on OIRA administrators. Sunstein's very driven regulation-allergic conservative predecessors at OIRA, John Graham and Susan Dudley, attracted only the sparsest attention as they weakened regulation, ignored science, and developed symbiotic relationships with industry.

Sunstein often quotes John Graham and shares and builds on Graham's cost-benefit analysis legacy, yet people often label him, like Obama, as an out of bounds liberal. Sunstein's nomination was supported by conservative groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and by the Wall Street Journal. Yet wildly preposterous rumors about his views, for instance on animal rights, held up his OIRA nomination for months. Republican senators stymied his appointment, as hunters and factory farms hijacked meaningful deliberation about Sunstein's most controversial ideas -- on cost-benefit analysis, for instance -- by focusing on the false notions that he might ban hunting, something that he had actually convincingly argued against.

The other thing that's interesting given Sunstein's well-documented ideas, is how pundits from both sides seem to ignore history when they periodically burst out over one thing or another they unearth in his writing. Of course some people, like Rena Steinzor of the Center For Progressive Reform, have long focused on environmental law, cost-benefit analysis, and the likely impact of Cass Sunstein heading OIRA. But to my point, recently Glenn Greenwald popularized a flurry of concern about Sunstein with his Salon article, "Obama Confidant's Spine-chilling Proposal". Greenwald's focus is not on Sunstein's cost-benefit machinations or environmental stances, but on Sunstein's exploration of government control of "conspiracy theories".

The Mirror, A Gift or A Curse?

Greenwald takes Sunstein to task for advocating in a 2008 paper that the government ought to do things like anonymously infiltrate groups to dissipate conspiracy theories. The Sunstein paper is really interesting (and funny, to me), and Greenwald competently attacks the ideas Sunstein presents. But just like Bush and Obama, Sunstein's proposals in 2008 proved consistent with what he has publicly explored/advocated for years.

In his 2001 book Republic.com, for instance, Sunstein argued that the government (he later changed this to private companies) could fight internet "hate-sites" and polarization that 'threatened democracy' by enforcing things like cross-linking to politically opposing sites. What did Thaler/Sunstein's book Nudge urge but for the government to "architect" our "choices"? If you circle through his books and papers you'll find that one way or another, either by infiltration or nudging, Sunstein's quite pre-occupied with government control of "undesirable" information, voices and outcomes, as judged by the government. These aren't terribly liberal obsessions, and it would be hard for me to call Sunstein a liberal.

Back to Douthat's point, I would also be hard-pressed to call Obama a liberal, either by his associations or his Illinois and presidential records. I'm surely biased, but so far he's a pragmatist, (though not a "centrist" Douthat says), and we were adequately and accurately warned. How many years does someone need to act like a centrist/pragmatist before people stop labeling them a liberal?*

Obama gets everyone together, he does. And they're all suspicious. During his campaign, people would say that Obama's campaign gift was that he made everyone see a bit of themselves in him. Perhaps now he has the opposite effect. No one can see any bit of themselves in him. Is that a curse?

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*And btw, as an aside, what is a liberal? And does the country need a "liberal" president, anyway, liberals?

Trick

Scientists sometimes confuse people with inscrutable acronyms -- BPA, NIEHS, NTP, EPA (bisphenol A, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Toxicology Program, Environmental Protection Agency), words that are difficult to pronounce -- "phthalates", or words that are difficult to get to the end of -- "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis". But lately, we've been stumping people with words everyone thought they knew, like "trick". People went wild over the idea that East Anglia scientists had used a "trick" to manipulate raw data.

"Trick", previously associated with annuals "treats" and six year olds in fairy costumes, was suddenly linked to nefarious acts. Yes, there is that "trick", but it's not often used¹. And did the media mayhem over "trick" top the media mayhem over the breast-baring wardrobe malfunction during Super Bowl half-time a couple of years ago? Hard to say -- but global warming is actually serious.

Scientists explained over and over that "trick" can be a good thing, like mathematics, logical thinking, transparency, pragmatism, maybe even dignity for life -- but their insistence only increased suspicion and talk. "Trick" dominated the news cycle longer than any five letter word should be allowed to and even wormed its way into events like the US legislature, where senators leveraged the word in committee meetings to veer away from very important topics like the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)².

Now we see the word all over the place. And like the original East Anglia "trick", it's often used to rationalize why climate change, the reality, isn't being translated into climate change policy. The Financial Times reported on the tension between China and the US in Copenhagen and quoted China's on its changing stance:

"'China will not be an obstacle [to a deal]. The obstacle now is from developed countries,' he said. 'I know people will say if there is no deal that China is to blame. This is a trick played by the developed countries. They have to look at their own position and can't use China as an excuse...'"

John Tierney recently used the word to propose a temperature based carbon-tax -- a joke perhaps, or to scoff at science?

"[U]se the temperature readings as the basis for a carbon tax instead of a cap-and-trade system...the carbon tax would be more effective at reducing emissions because it is simpler, more transparent, easier to enforce and less vulnerable to accounting tricks and political favoritism."

Up to his usual tricks, that Tierney.

Talking about the challenge the US Senate presents for Obama in Copenhagan, Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center described Obama's challenge as a "Goldilocks Problem":

''The trick is finding something just right in balancing the importance of demonstrating international leadership while not undermining the legislative dynamic here at home.''

Moving away from climate change, the word "trick" can morph from a bad thing or a challenge, to a good thing. An author recently mused in an essay in the New York Times about the "tricks" to maintaining a marriage.³

Hack

The confusion over "trick" is not entirely unjustified. Merriam Webster has seven possible uses of "trick". And another word that's ambiguous for some people, again, reasonably so, because it has nine uses in Merriam Webster, is "hack", as in, they hacked into the email server in East Anglia and stole a thousand emails.

During the December 2, 2009 hearing on the pressing imperative of revising the "Federal Toxic Substances Control Act" (TSCA), climate denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK) hijacked the meeting to windbag on about "tricks" in emails necessitating a halt to EPA emissions rulemaking.

Senator Boxer (D-CA) responded eloquently and forcefully, noting that although she was concerned about criminal acts of "hacking", she was more concerned about anthropogenic carbon emissions, about global warming, and about the repercussions for human health -- that's where her duty was, to the people effected by global warming. About the email break-in she said:

We're dealing with a criminal act of hacking into a computer...It seems to me they must have been hacking this for years. And just before Copenhagen they came out with it...That's what it seems to be...because, these emails, they go back...how many are there? Over a thousand emails? So I don't know how long a thousand emails...

This may be a silly example, but it shows how people with expertise in a particular area assume common understanding of simple words. Here it seems like "hacking" into a computer is visualized as George Washington trying to "hack" down a giant redwood tree in the Muir Woods National Park.

Hack can mean to chop at roughly. It can also mean to tolerate or bear something, for instance, I don't know how Senator Boxer can hack Senator Inofe's perennial global-warming-is-a-hoax B.S. so gracefully. Used as a noun, hack can also be a cough, a horse, a worker, or (derogatorily) someone who misconstrues or butchers something -- for example, Senator Inofe is a real hack when it comes to science and global warming.

But when someone hacks into a computer as they did in East Anglia, they exploit a vulnerability in order to access data owned by someone else. Different than hacking at a tree. It can take a computer hacker a while to find the vulnerability and locate the data, but then they most often swoop in, get it, in this case a bunch of emails, and go. Sometimes they lurk about, poised to commit further crimes, or leave an opening to come back, obviously there's no rules, but generally they're not hewing emails out of the server one at a time over many years 465 -- hack, hack hack, 466 -- chop, chop, 467 -- hack, hack -- that's a different use of the word.

The Trick for Scientists, If They Can Hack It

So "trick" can not so intuitively mean find a solution, as well as to deceive, and "hack" can mean deceptively break into a computer in order to plunder or pillage, as well as to chop at something. And confusingly, computer scientists, sometimes known as "hacks" but in a good way, will "hack" a solution to a very tricky programming problem, just as scientists use a "trick" to help analyze and make sense of data.

And that's the challenge for scientists -- a trivial one, but another one. In addition doing science, teaching, writing grants, motivating grad students, negotiating politics and budget cuts, actually physically looking out for hackers and those who would break into scientists offices and steal computers as part of a global effort to undermine climate science; in addition to assessing threats of bodily harm, scientists need to simplify concepts, avoid acronyms and watch their use of simple seeming words whose meaning they take for granted.

All that work because even people with the best intentions don't always have a grip on either science or its lexicon. And once scientists sort out "trick" and "hack" for everyone, they'll then face the greater challenge of explaining the risks of doing nothing about global warming, with the risks of doing something. After all, probability and risk are orders more challenging for people to grasp than "tricks" and "hacks".

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¹ See, "Do Names Portend Profession?", in AR's Science Dust-Ups and Dirty Laundry

²

We wrote about TSCA here. Of 80,000 chemicals produced, there's little information about which ones are on the market, and only 5 are regulated by the EPA.

³ In the NYT on marriage: "Recently one of my wife's college students kept pressing us, with baffled curiosity, for our secret, as if there had to be some trick to it..."

Maher Still Loco on Vaccinations:

As he has for years, Bill Maher continues to spread disinformation about vaccines. Over countless news cycles Maher has infuriated doctors, public health officials, and responsible citizens with bizarre warnings about letting governments "stick a disease into your arm".

Challenged to get a word in edgewise between his fusillades about "mercury" and "diet" and natural "immunity", doctors and scientists nevertheless patiently correct his errors. They explain that a vaccine is not "a disease" but a disabled virus that looks to the immune system like a live virus or bacteria and therefore prevents infection by the actual deadly virus or bacteria¹ like polio, measles, diphtheria, or influenza.

But the talk show host persists, as is his habit. Last month, Bill "I'm also not f-king my interns" Maher baffled panelists Alec Baldwin, Chris Matthews and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley by rehashing his concerns with vaccines. Yesterday, Maher continued with a rambling column at The Huffington Post titled "A Conversation Worth Having", saying he aimed to

"clear up a few things about my beliefs concerning the flu shot, vaccines, and health in general...I will admit, I have gone off half cocked on this issue sometimes, and often only had time on my show to explain a fraction of what needed to be explained, and for that I am sorry...I agree with my critics who say there are far more qualified people than me"

Mea culpa? Unfortunately, and spoiler alert for the 2800 word article: no. I didn't say "anyone who gets a flu shot is an idiot", Maher said, "it was twittered...my bad". Then, "vaccination is a nuanced subject, and I've never said all vaccines in all situations are bad..." Nuanced? "All vaccines"? Cagey creepy crapola -- bring it on, Maher.

Discerning Maher's Health Prescription -- When "Sometimes It's OK to Fuck with Nature"

Maher writes "I'm not a germ theory denier" and he claims "I do understand the theory of inoculation", exuding all the candor of a intelligent design proselytizer putting quotes around "the theory" of evolution. To the helpful doctor who corrects him, Maher retorts snidely "Thanks, Doc, I thought there might be a little man inside the needle. Yes, I read Microbe Hunters when I was eight." (Doesn't think the conversation is worth having?)

Cocksure and funny, Maher acts as though he's arguing about some scrutable line that any eight year old can see - you don't need to be a doctor or scientist. To the left of the line there are the OK vaccines, except, he hedges, vaccines are unproven. To the right, there are the not-OK vaccines that we should be debating, like flu vaccine. But actually, if you can't already tell, there is no line or margin, because Maher is arguing the same old run-of-the-mill anti-vaccine/medicine/science schtick you've (yawwwwnn) already heard. He allows that "sometimes it's OK to fuck with nature" and prescribe medicine, but listen to enough Maher and you realize he maligns all medicine, all vaccines.

Casting Aside Science

Sure, at first you may be confused because he mixes recognizable words into gobbledygook. Do doctors ever ask patients what they eat, he asks rhetorically? No, he answers, "and a lot can be cured with diet and a healthier lifestyle" -- then Maher adds in parentheses -- "And a lot can't [be cured]. I also understand the role of genetics and generations of artificial selection".

Despite his unassailable understanding, lets review. The risk of some diseases, like diabetes Type II, can be reduced with healthier lifestyle. Some conditions, like obesity can be prevented with diet, and losing weight concurrently reduces the risks of morbidity and mortality associated with conditions like heart disease. This isn't just semantics. Diet won't prevent crippling polio, or a flu pandemic or death of a pregnant woman, or stop a kid from succumbing to weeks of illness and a 105 degree influenza fever. And typical of Maher's machinations on science, medicine and disease, he jumps down the rabbit hole with "genetics and "generations of artificial selection". Scientists use artificial selection to breed products like corn by selecting for certain traits. Humans are not hothouse flowers, subjected to "generations of artificial selection".

How Does Maher Distinguish Himself From Dr. Beetroot?

In cajoling his audience to exercise skepticism and caution and arguing for "debate", a word that should tip anyone off to incoming falsehoods; Maher says:

"Someone needs to be representing the point of view that says the preferred way to handle flus is to have a strong immune system to begin with..."

Actually, we can think we recognize this "point of view". Take, for instance South Africa's former health minister, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, (known derisively as Dr. Beetroot), who spent years telling South Africans to boost their immune systems against the AIDS virus with diet, beetroot and lemon.

In a familiar refrain, the South African Mbeki government insisted that Western drugs were too profit oriented and dangerous. As a result of this decision, hundreds of thousands of South Africans died from AIDS, and the dying isn't over, since infectious disease pandemics gather momentum over time. Newly elected President Zuma recently warned that the death rate from AIDS may overtake the birthrate in that country.

How is Maher's argument different than that of Tshabalala-Msimang's? Where does he draw his invisible line de-marking greedy Western medicine from essential life-saving medicine? How does this board member of the "Reason Project" (Wikipedia) dedicated to scientific and secular knowledge, identify good medicine?

How is Maher's Position Different Than A Mennonite's?

Instead of agreeing with scientists and doctors, Maher chooses to listen to Barbara Loe Fisher who he finds "extremely credible", because

"after devoting her life to studying this, she says that flu vaccines aren't proven and...points out that what we need, but do not yet have, are studies of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children."

Fisher is not a scientist or a doctor, and that's ok, anyone can educate themselves about vaccinations, eight or older. Based on her experience parenting and in public relations Fisher can certainly start a vaccination information center, appear on talk shows, testify at events like the "Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative: A U.S. Government Experiment in Public Engagement", and give lectures to naturopaths, chiropractors, and groups like "Body by God". Who's to say she can't?

But given that Maher says she's devoted her life to studying vaccinations, you'd think she'd understand that vaccinating some children against polio, but not others, would be medically unethical. You'd think that Maher would also see the moral quagmire.

Furthermore, unfortunately, there's lots of evidence to prove that what Fisher and Maher say is the untested theory of vaccination is flat out false. As the NYT reported in 2003:

"The last two American polio outbreaks were in Amish and Mennonite communities in 1979 and in a Christian Science school in Connecticut in 1972. Measles killed 3 students of 125 infected in a Christian Science school in 1985, and a similar-size outbreak among the Amish in 1987 and 1988 killed 2 people. In 1991, 890 cases of rubella, leading to more than a dozen deformed children, hit Amish areas."

Since then, Africans who believed rumors that vaccinations are an attempt by Westerners to spread the HIV virus or sterilize Nigerians, started a polio epidemic. The Amish also suffered polio outbreaks. Mennonites, who don't believe in vaccination but do believe in travel caused outbreaks of measles in Minnesota, then South America. Like the Amish, Mennonites don't believe in vaccinations or insurance, but do believe that hospitals should cure them for a discount, once they get sick.

How is Maher's position different then that of a Mennonite? Can we have this conversation? How does Maher square his position on vaccines with his libertarian views when people end up demanding hospital bailouts because they didn't take it upon themselves to prevent illness?

The Dredged Up "Under-reported Point of View" is Often Wrong, Concludes A Bright Person

The consequences of not vaccinating become graver and more frequent as more people refuse vaccinations. The value of vaccinations is not "debatable". Vaccinations have saved millions of lives, saved millions of dollars by keeping people out of hospitals, and boosted productivity of nations. But Maher ignores all this and calls for some cost benefit analysis, more familiar anti-science denialism.

Maher appeals to all of those who eschew facts and take solace in unpopular views.

"I'm just trying to represent an under-reported medical point of view in this country, I'm not telling a specific pregnant lady what to do...[I]t's just that mainstream media rarely interviews doctors and scientists who present an alternative point of view..."

Pregnant women and kids are most susceptible to dying from H1N1 virus. Pregnant women have decreased lung capacity that increases the threat of pneumonia, and they have decreased immunity due to their pregnancy. The reason the media doesn't interview doctors and scientists with "alternative points of view" on the subject, is because doctors and scientists agree that vaccines save lives, and that pregnant woman and parents of children shouldn't die because they've been convinced by talk show hosts to doubt the CDC, the doctors, and the scientists.

Maher's is not selling an "under-reported medical point of view", rather he's latched onto a non-medical, non-science point of view. Hmmm....why does he persist?

Bill Maher's Mainstream Media Profit Motives

Unbelievably, after flogging his point of view for years, Maher says he has no motive and expects no outcome: "[M]y audience is bright, they wouldn't refuse a flu shot because they heard me talk about it...." But his audience claps when he talks non-scientific hokum -- perhaps only because they're prompted? Either they're not thinking at all, or they're confused about science, or they're easily swayed by paranoid views, or they think they're at a gladiator show - in which case they will eventually be disappointed by the "debate." Can such folks be considered "bright" in the 21st century?

To the point, though, if Maher's especially non-bright, non-medical, non-scientific point of view weren't selling, weren't rewarded with clapping and viewers and advertising dollars, would he still be ranting on? Maher's anti-vaccination position has populist appeal that draws viewers and boosts ratings. His refutation of "mainstream media's profit motives" sells well. But lets be clear. HBO's Real Time, with millions of viewers each night, is mainstream media. What's not? Acronym Required, for instance, is not "mainstream media".

And why pick on science? Scientists are a remarkably easy target, as we noted before when John McCain chronically made fun of science research. When Maher chose to accost religion, at least 50% of Americans are quite religious, and that's a lot of potential audience members to insult. Plus, religious people can get dangerous. Other Maher campaigns have also backfired, like when Maher's remarks about military recruiting spurred one Congressman to demand that Real Time be canceled.

Considering his options then, and the groups he's already alienated, scientists make a good target. They're pretty tame, therefore easy to pick on safely, and a select target for a large potential audience, since everyone's thinking of getting the flu vaccine. Maher can perhaps equivocate about good vs. bad vaccines and fool a lot of people. So Bill Maher and his mainstream media show try to expand his audience by maligning science to become more mainstream? So they forsake scientists, but also pregnant moms and kids in the process? Is this the conversation? More or less? Bravo, talk show host!

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Photo from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.

¹ 11/19 Added "bacteria"

Acronym Required wrote on vaccinations previously, for instance in Vaccinations, Why the Worry? we wrote about the long history of rebellion against vaccinations. We also wrote about vaccinations here and in various posts and vaccines for specific illnesses.

Bill Maher's shenanigans have been will covered by scientists like Respectful Insolence here and here, by Pharyngula; by Aetiology here and here here and by many others.

Death Ascendency:

Scientists, pollsters and journalists like to complain that Americans can't be bothered to read or understand science. That distresses these pundits. I don't believe their contentions are altogether accurate or their hand-wringing justified, but true enough, Americans seem distracted or even obsessed with subjects other than science. Like what?

Death, for one. Remember, the hoopla over death panels, and fears about the death of a grandpa because of illegal immigrants? Maybe you've forgotten the multi-month media requiem for Michael Jackson, but can remember via Time Magazine's 100 page Special Commemorative Michael Jackson Issue, still on the news stands through October. And if you missed that, you can now watch the movie. If Jackson was reclusive in life, his death just won't die.

And it's not just Michael Jackson. This summer and fall, the string of newsworthy celebrity deaths led MSNBC, the New York Times and others to recount the "the endless funereal season". Trying to slip in a post on death over the last few months, if you didn't want to seem like you were milking the trend in an unseemly way, (because we're the unblog blog) was near impossible.

The preoccupation with death spanned news on politics, employment and entertainment. What did AP feature in a story on career advice? "Funeral science: One business that's still alive: Amid layoffs and a weak job market, interest in mortuary science surges." And after death it's not over, as the New York Times pointed out in: "After a Death, the Pain That Doesn't Go Away".

You can't escape death -- the theme I mean. It's what people are living, breathing and reading. Non-fiction? At least four new books focus on death. "Annililation: The Sense and Significance of Death", "The Philosophy of Death", "Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death and Free Will", and "Death". You get the gist, but for more, FT reviewed the books here. Not satisfied with new books? Someone along my route today poured over "Stiff: The Curious Life of Cadavers".

And in fiction? Mass-market fiction? Deaths by aliens, apparitions, and evil-doers, not to mention more than one bubble-gum romance featuring irresistible marble-chested vampires. In sunny, otherwise cheerful September, 12 of the 20 best selling titles from the NYT mass-market fiction list were: "Dead Until Dark", "Frankenstein: Dead or Alive", "From Dead To Worse", "Club Dead", "The Bodies Left Behind", "Dead To The World", "Living Dead In Dallas", "Dead As A Doornail", "Promises in Death" "Chosen To Die", "Definitely Dead", and "Altogether Dead".

The remaining 8 of the 20 best sellers didn't bother to include "Death" in the title, but don't despair, it's there. You could chose between "The Assassin" (subject obvious), a book on "scandalous deaths", or one each on death from lung cancer, a killer, a dead lover, a dead friend, the death of a child from acute promyelocytic leukemia, a string of dead medical tourists, and last but not least - a book that brings Elvis back from the dead to help investigate some mysterious deaths. Now at Halloween and moving into the darker, more appropriately morbid time of year, the media is naturally out of step so the mass market fiction list looks slightly more upbeat -- though Death still holds its own.

Until the Smell of Death Do Us Cart You Away

So what's a science writer do in The Demon Haunted World of deathly news and entertainment preoccupation? Science journalists struggling to work within this dreary paradigm last summer published versions of "The Smell of Death", a story about experiments on bugs by scientists at McMaster University.

Previous research had showed that noxious chemicals expelled by some animals upon death repel their live companions. It's true. Necrophoresis is the term for the behavior of ants and bees when they move their dead away from their nests. Scientists such as Henry Christopher McCook in 1879, E.O. Wilson, in 1958 first documented necrophoresis. Wilson showed that worker ants moved the dead bodies out of the living spaces, and the ants and were motivated by something other than the untidy look of their comrades carcasses strewn about the nest.

To investigate, Wilson's team sprayed what I'll call "eau de ground up dead ants" on live ants, and observed the ants move their perfumed but live fellow ants away from the nest as if they were dead. Following from that observation, researchers learned that the ants expelled a specific scent when they died that other ants of the same species could detect. Wilson determined that chemicals called oleic acids motivated movement of the dead bodies by their fellow worker ants. Scientists than discovered that while bees and ants remove their dead, termites merely avoid their dead -- they're necrophobic.

Building on a century of research on "necromones" then, the McMaster University scientists dispersed necromones among insects such as caterpillars, which aren't known to expel their own dispersants but do aggregate like social bees and ants as well as the semi-social termites. Their experiments showed that the fatty oleic acid compounds also repelled woodlice and pillbugs. Since necromones seem to effect multiple species, the scientists now suggest that the death chemical is common across many species.

Programmed Cell Death -- Upbeat, Hopeful, Vital

What else could scientists write about? Programmed Cell Death (PCD) springs to mind. Not only does it have "death" in the title, like all the best selling mass market titles, but it's actually vital to life and therefore a rather hopeful, non-dreary subject. PCD occurs in plants and animals, yeasts and bacteria. The human body creates more than a thousand billion of cells and just as many die through PCD, a carefully orchestrated event which allows some cells to be destroyed through a process that assures that healthy cells proliferate. PCD is different than necrosis, when cells die due to blood loss or insult. There's a bounty of research on PCD and it has it's own journals -- enough reading and writing that could see us well through the winter months and into spring.

Although the proliferation of cell death research and understanding is relatively recent, in the 19th century scientists noticed changes in the cells during insect metamorphosis and tadpole development which suggested cell death. Although early research focused on phagocytosis, in the mid-20th century evolving technology provided scientists with more sophisticated microscopes and histologic techniques which gave them a clearer view of cell processes. In their 2001 history of PCD in Nature Review Molecular Cell Biology¹, Richard A. Lockshin and Zahra Zakeri, describe how the 1960's at Harvard, afternoon teas attended by Carroll Williams' lab members served as humorous and informative exchanges for "ideas of the day", and in time coined the term "programmed cell death".

In 2002 the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston for their discoveries concerning "genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death." The researchers used the model organism nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study cell death and established for the first time that certain genes control cell death. That there were genes controlling death showed that cell death is an integral part of development, not an accident.

Apoptosis (from the Greek word "falling off") is the most commonly studied form of cell death, although there are others. The most common example of cell death is the development of hands and feet, which start off as spade-like clumps of cells, then through apoptosis of the cells in-between, the fingers and toes emerge. In the developing brain millions of nerve cells get "pruned" through apoptosis to assure that proper connections are made. For instance in the development of the retina in the eye, 90% of certain types of cells die. Rather than being limited by cell biology techniques to observing cell death, scientists can now also use molecular biology techniques to understand specific proteins and genetic processes involved in regulating cell death.

When cell death goes awry, the repercussions are serious. In cancer, the cell death pathways malfunction and too many cells are allowed to proliferate. In Parkinson and Alzheimer diseases, cell death pathways allow the destruction of too many cells. Now scientists are zeroing in on specific proteins or pathways that could be altered to prevent aberrations in cell death that result in disease. From not knowing that cell death was an important part to living organisms, scientists are realizing how much it dominates life - sort of like the paperback mass-market fiction list.

¹"Programmed cell death and apoptosis: origins of the theory" 545-550 (July 2001) | doi:10.1038/35080097

Superfreakonomics authors Levitt and Dubner make it out like solving global warming is no more complicated than cooling off on the patio on a hot summer day. First, someone else puts up the umbrella, then they unwind the hose and spray all the kids so they stay cool. This may sound good to you, but it's not logical, despite what the Superfreaks insist. They're appealing to your laziness, your ennui, your fear, and your cynicism, all in the name of books and businesses that you don't hold stock in. Do you but it?

Daily Show Economics

When Steven Levitt appeared on the Daily Show to talk about their new book and the giant umbrellas that could be used to ward off climate change, Jon Stewart apologized for the collective response by scientists to Levitt and Dubner's unscientific treatment of climate change. Not only unscientific, dismissive too: Levitt told the Guardian "We could end this debate and be done with it, and move on to problems that are harder to solve", (hat tip Curious Capitalist).

Stewart commiserated to the criticized Levitt: "I'm sorry you're taking so much shit for it". But Stewart let his Daily Show audience down. For one, "Superfreakonomics" disappointed Freakonomics fans, especially those devoted libertarians and contrarians, who, though often delusional, generally manage at least a modicum of realism about climate change. Daily Show fans were also surprised that Stewart was so sympathetic to Levitt.

But if people were dismayed with The Daily Show's dismissal of climate change, they haven't been paying attention. Stewart isn't always smarter 'than that', if smarter doesn't fit the particular formula-funny he runs. Note how Stewart barely batted an eye when Levitt offered his other offensive assertion, that prostitutes should retain pimps in order to earn more money. It's true, shrugged Levitt, as if nothing can to be done because the invisible hand has sealed womens' fates the world over -- as if he didn't just twist up that statistical interpretation to get people tittering and buying books.

"The heroes turn out to be the pimps", he said. Shrug. "Get rid of the moral part" he insisted, and you have pure unadulterated economics, that's what we're about. Jon jested. Hahaha, heeheehee. Levitt shrugged again. Then the two entertainers moved on to climate change and the irrationality of environmentalists.

When Your Advertisers Are Auto Companies?

And trashing "environmentalists" isn't new territory, either, for Levitt or for Stewart. The Freakonomics blog has argued repeatedly that recycling makes little sense. The Daily Show host has previously criticized actions to lower carbon emissions, for instance "Auto-Neurotic Gas Fixation", May 20, 2009. At the time, Obama had just announced his intention to set new, ambitious CAFE standards for gas mileage. Stewart chastised him for it: "Dude...Obama...don't blow your load on mileage baby, save it for when the Chinese invade."

Stewart said that gas efficient cars, being smaller, put people "in harm's way because they're in a lighter vehicle", that "safety" was a "valid", "reasonable concern". A nod to all the automobile companies that advertise with Comedy Central perhaps? Or ignorance? You decide. We thought that this ancient Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) argument died back in 2007, once people thought through their elementary math and physics and realized that yes, if you run your Prius into a Hummer, you may get hurt, but the more Priuses on the road, and the fewer Hummers, the less likely you will be to run into a Hummer, therefore less likely you'll get hurt. Alas, there we were in the spring of 2009 and Jon Stewart was giving us his schoolboy version of the old auto industry fueled CEI argument.

Coincidentally, at the time -- April/May 2009 -- car sales had recently dropped to their lowest point in thirty years. A flurry of editorials pronounced the danger of small vehicles and so Stewart fit right in with The Wall Street Journal which droned on about about the "lethal effects" of CAFE standards and light vehicles. Lesson? Comedy Central is not always all that "progressive" people - really.

Just When You Thought Superfreak was Finally Gone

So Jon Stewart's accommodation to Levitt's argument isn't a surprise, nor is Superfreakonomics' bid to attract attention by rousing populist appeal. As the sequel to Freakonomics (which admittedly never did it for me), SuperFreakonomics seems to run aground the way many movie sequels do -- Rocky V, Clerks II, Caddyshack II... While maintaining sufficient audiences to grind through talk-shows, stimulate blog chatter, and generate pay-out, the authors deeply disappoint fans.

Here's a collection of about 90 blog links that criticize Chapter 5 of the book. They call the authors on many points, for instance:

• Of distorting the science and misquoting scientists - From an atmospheric scientist (Ken Caldeira) in response to the book's quote - "Carbon dioxide is not the right villain": "I don't believe I said anything remotely like that...we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide...I do see CO2 as the problem...it's like if you got shot by a bullet and you said, well, it wasn't really the bullet that was the problem, it was just that I happened to have this hole through my body..."

• Of distorting science consensus - From many economists: "it is terribly misleading that the two scientists you quote are BOTH skeptics. What are the odds of that? Probably a billion to one, so my unavoidable conclusion is that you are deliberately trying to cast doubt on the scientific consensus."

• Of presenting facile, improbable solutions to climate change like pumping SO2 into the atmosphere with a giant hose - From scientists: "'..thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, 'Now that I've got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.' It's crazy.'"

• Of deceiving the American public - From a congressman: "We have seen a similar effort to hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment...I want to note a book...that basically said or asserted we don't have to control CO2..They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford...Which is an absolute deception."

Like the Daily Show, the Superfreakonomics authors have a history of distorting reality.

Stripping Away Moralism and Giving You Freedom: The Ruse

As I wrote above, what Levitt claims, is that he simply "strips away the moralism" - then, all you have is the economics and prostitution, or economics and climate change. Glib. This is not uncommon rhetoric in economics, politics and public policy -- the ultra-rational, just do the math approach. It's used, for instance, to justify radical cost-benefit-analysis, where people argue that you can put a monetary value on everything - the price of one member of an endangered species, the price of the life of an old person, the price of the life of an infant, the price of a chemical to an industry - and otherwise complicated policy decisions fraught with difficult ethical choices can be reduced to simple math. Voilà.

The problem is, when the authors decided to write that prostitutes are better off with pimps then dug up some statistics to support that assertion, they made a moral decision. First Levitt and Dubner had to decide that this particular slant on prostitution was what they wanted to focus on, then they had to cherry pick some "data" to support it. Similarly, as we wrote in an earlier post, deciding that a male mule deer is worth $525.50, whereas a female mule deer is worth $163, while a just plain deer is worth $1, is not a decision without "moralism".

Moral sentiments are part and parcel of human decisions. Numbers and words that appear in print on a piece of paper or screen in front of you came from a formula or process derived by a human, based on that human's views, perceptions, expectations and desired outcomes. It didn't come from some superior amoralistic all-knowing power, intent on providing answers and comfort to confused humans beings -- despite what people may try to convince you.

Ironically, by asking his audience to "strip away the moralism", Levitt is appealing to ethos or pathos, but certainly not logos. He's saying -- be logical like me, I'm being logical. Shrug. But he's dismissing tons and tons of scientific proof of climate change and the need to decrease emissions as pathetic "moral" arguments (ethos), when those scientific studies are actually the logical ones (logos). He's appealing to his audience's laissez-faire tendencies, their desire to do nothing, their habits not to change, their pathos.

The Ploy: Technology will Suffice in Lieu of Action

Then, offering the equivalent of the old, chintzy plastic prize at the bottom of the box of Crackerjacks, he gives the audience something to grasp on to in the impending and threatening flood of unpleasant scientific reality, although again, it's not logical. Levitt insists that there's a simple scientific solution to solve the problem. Of course, there is no technological solution. The authors offer untested pie-in-the-sky idea that many, many scientists find problematic.

But this is what we all want to hear, right? The irrational, busy, lazy or pathetic side of all of all of us wants to be assured that electronic records will solve healthcare failures, that tsunami warning systems will prevent catastrophic losses, that ankle bracelets will prevent recidivism, that massive fences along international borders will prevent terrorism and drug trafficking, and that electronic surveillance will prevent crime. But giant garden hoses suspended up in the sky, are not even in the realm of feasible technical solutions. Yet we're so happy to slough off responsibility that Jon Stewart, although he's a modern icon of cynicism, doesn't even bother to ask questions.

Levitt plays to the audience's sentiments perfectly, first by laughing off science and scientists who present scary ideas as flimsy moralistic hogwash, then by presenting his very own special version of "science". I'm the logical one, he says, but I'm not dorky like a scientist.

His flavor of rhetoric is commonly used by those who oppose scientific evidence because it presents the type of science society likes, that which solves our problems, but is seemingly stress-free, simpler to understand than Tivo, and doesn't require you to have liked high school science. Therefore Superfreakonomics presents magic "technology solutions" in terms your average barbecuing Joe (if there is such a thing) will know and like.

According to them, solving global warming is no more complicated than cooling down on a hot summer day on the patio. First someone else puts up the umbrella to shield you. Then a kindly neighbor unwinds the hose and sprays away, and all the kids stay cool. Sound good? But its not logical. It's doesn't strip away moralism. It doesn't give you freedom. You do have to worry about global warming, you may have to change your lightbulbs. Superfreakonomics appeals not to your logical side but to your laziness, your ennui, your fear, your cynicism, all in the name of books and businesses that you don't hold stock in.

The Solution

This isn't to say that we don't need technology, quite the opposite, technology is imperative to global warming attenuation. But it's not the only effort we need, we need to conserve and to decrease emissions also.

Underlying Superfreaks' argument is the contention that people won't change. And true, people tend to squirm and stall when pressed to adjust, as we noted in "Sea Change or Littoral Disaster", Cars: Buying Cognitive Dissonance", Science Communication, Communicating Climate Change, and Climate Change, Fueling the "Debate", "Curvilinear Thinking on Climate Change", and other posts. But Real Climate's good point is that - people will change with the right incentives. People can work collectively for the better, they don't need a solution to be imposed from nigh. They do have a long history of employing morals as well as logic to solve problems, both are good, both are necessary. And given all that, it may simply be immoral for Superfreak authors to distort the truth of climate change and insist on selling implausible solutions.

• "Beyond Yottabytes" -- The NSA Will Know Who's Been Naughty and Who's Been Nice: The New York Review of Books reports on the government's information quest:

  "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report..."the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named."

  NYRB continues: "Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be--or may one day become--a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story."

• FedThread: FedThread A newly launched Federal register where you can annotate documents, customize feeds, and search the Federal Register back to 2000. Not to be confused with Threadfed, an embroidery site.

• Health Map: Allows you to see various outbreaks like H1N1, and recalls like salmonella, by geographic area.

• Open Access How-To: SPARC issued a guide for publishers wanting to support open access, along with supply and demand side revenue models.

• Government is an Arm of the Banks: We know that the banks have a phone line to Tim Geithner. But in case you doubted the effect of that on bank behavior, or if you trusted there were no future implications of that relationship for regulation, watch Bill Moyers' show last week with Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (Ohio-9) and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Don't read the transcript. Watch the show.

• Telecoms are Agencies Within The Government?: The banks aren't the only ones with a disconcertingly close relationship with the White House. Wired reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is investigating the influence of telecom lobbying on the Justice Department's coup of winning retroactive immunity for AT&T and others accused of spying on citizens. EFF requested related documents under the Freedom of Information Act and the government refused, arguing that the documents were protected because they were "intra-agency", that is, telecoms were an arm of government.

  Last month U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White reversed that decision, ruling for the EFF that the Justice Department was obligated to release the names of telecom employees who contacted the Justice Department and White House.

• Is Transparency Is Over-rated? Is Lessig The Fifth Column?: Lawrence Lessig used to argue that culture needed to be free. People should be able to mash it up, he said, make what they wanted out of songs and books and writing. He founded Creative Commons, whereby people can use your work for free, with attribution if they feel like it. He started what turned into the Google Books settlement when he legally challenged copyright laws by pursuing the release from copyright of "orphan" books. At the time, he was at Stanfords' Center for the Internet and Society, funded by 2 million dollars from Google.

  Now Lessig is pursuing a different cause while he is at Harvard and on the board of the excellent Sunlight Foundation (biased, maybe, but I have no stakes), which funds projects to make government more transparent. Paradoxically, perhaps, Lessig argues in The New Republic this month that transparency is dangerous because people have short attention spans and mashing up the data will connect money to politicians in seemingly nefarious ways when in fact none may exist. The citizens, simple as they are, will become cynical, and government will fall apart. Something like that. The Sunlight Foundation disagrees. More later.

• Google's Fast Flip: You can browse multiple sites simultaneously. Small print. To note: Google chooses which sites participate.

• States Can Sue Utilities: States had tried to sue utilities for being a "public nuisance", releasing CO2 which creates global warming and the court had ruled against them. Now, as the NYT reports: "a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that eight states -- California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin -- as well as New York City and three land trusts could proceed with a suit" against American Electric Power, Southern Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and Cinergy Corporation, all large coal-burning utilities."

• Economist Changes User Access: The Economist will remove much of the online content for perusal by non-paying subscribers, including the Table of Contents of the print edition - clever. Subscribers will get access to an audio version, archives and all content.

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Image from Wikipedia Commons

Now, at PNAS Three Papers in Question:

The science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers special publication privileges to members of their Academy, a group of elite scientists chosen by other esteemed scientists based on their unique contributions to science research. Now the editorial board has retracted some of those privileges in light of papers that recently appeared in the journal.

Nature News reported on a "row" caused when PNAS published research that didn't meet the journals' standards for peer review. The dispute is now heating up. The controversy began in August when one article published on-line at PNAS forwarded a theory by author Donald Williamson, all about what he called "larval transfer hypothesis".¹

Williamson suggests that the process of metamorphosis, whereby larvae turn into butterflies, arose when butterfly Leptidorae larva "mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms", as Scientific American put it (funnily twisting agency). Velvet worms Onychophora look like larvae but have completely different life cycles -- they don't turn into butterflies. According to Williamson, evolutionary transfer of genetic material causes butterflies to have essentially two lives, one as a worm-like larva, and one as a butterfly.

But there are problems with the theory. First, he offers no proof, just a "testable" hypothesis. And while interspecies fertilization is not unheard of within the animal kingdom, velvet worms are too distinct from butterflies to make this feasible, say scientists. The sperm could not fertilize such a distantly related egg and produce a viable embryo, and even if it did, it wouldn't "explain the process of metamorphosis".

Less charitably, scientists said that the paper was better suited to a a tabloid than to a science journal, and called the paper "absolutely ridiculous". They also scoffed at his attempt to show the "superficial similarity between adult velvet worms and larval moths and butterflies" with "very poorly reproduced line drawings that really need to be seen to be believed".

In short, the August PNAS paper brought a torrent of harsh criticism for the octogenarian's ideas. Moreover, while some people tolerated Williamson's submission as an attempt to generate discussion, nobody thought that PNAS should have published such a speculative paper. Scientific publishing is very competitive and many scientists who produce worthy research with real results are summarily rejected from high profile journals like PNAS. So how did the research get published, they asked, incredulous? The tale gets even more interesting.

When Push Comes to Shove

Shortly after Williaimson's PNAS article saw daylight, Scientific American published an interview with evolutionary microbiologist Lynn Margulis, an editor at PNAS who shepherded Williamson's work through the peer-review and publishing process. In recounting her story of how the paper got published, Margulis mentioned that she had been trying to publish the work for twenty years. After convincing Williamson answer how the worms fertilize caterpillars -- rather than the more conceptually challenging idea that worms breed with butterflies, she told SA it took 6 or 7 peer reviews before she got 2 or 3 that were positive enough to push the paper through to publication. More eyebrows raised in the science community.

It turns out that Lynn Margulis "communicated" Williamson's paper to PNAS, a method of publishing offered to Academy members that differs from "submissions". Via this method, members can suggest for publication papers by non-members, along with reviewers selected by the member. PNAS recently announced it will eliminate this "Track I" publishing in 2010. In the meantime PNAS editors will not publish Williamson's paper in print edition pending further discussion with Margulis about the review process.

But now it's not just that paper. Another PNAS paper by Margulis and co-authors that's being questioned apparently proposes a treatment for Lyme disease that's "800" times more effective than doxycycline -- "it is very important to get this paper published", co-author Oystein Brorson told Nature.

A third paper in question is a computational biology paper by an adjunct professor of the Margulis lab. PNAS has asked Margulis to withdraw that paper because of problems with the methods. Margulis told Nature she would do no such thing, and when asked in turn for comment, PNAS told Nature: "We don't want to respond to any questions or complaints she [Margulis] has through the media." Sounds like more entertainment is forthcoming.

The three PNAS papers all circle themes that Margulis has been pursuing for decades -- Spirochetes, desiccation, spores, symbiosis and more symbiosis than you'd ever believe, and disease. Is the recent spate of publishing from the Margulis camp a final push for these ideas? And even more controversial ones?

Another 2009 paper has been published on-line in the (less well-known) journal Symbiosis (another journal that Margulis edits), by the same authors -- Hall, Brorson, Margulis and others. This "position paper" proposes that antibiotic treatment of Lyme and Syphilis, both caused by Spirochetes, induces the formation of cysts, or "round bodies", that then revert to their original Spirochete form in a favorable (antibiotic free) environment, causing secondary infections, long-term human symbioses, and compromised immunity.²

Although the abstract is pretty straight-forward, the paper quickly leaps out on a limb to suggest that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by Spirochete round bodies. Again, there's no evidence. The authors draw tenuous connections between quotes made by public health officials after a 2007 HIV vaccine trial, and their own round body theory of AIDS. They reason that HIV seems not to infect heterosexual partners as much as men who might be infected with syphilis but not fully treated with antibiotics even though medical professionals say they are. So the authors have an idea:

"Is the situation [AIDS] better described as an obligate and ancient symbiosis where the bionts (spirochetes and humans) are integrated at the behavioral, metabolic and genetic level rather than a new viral infection such that HIV equals AIDS? ...We urge that the possible direct causal involvement of spirochetes and their round bodies to symptoms of immune deficiency be carefully and vigorously investigated."

So then HIV might not be caused by a virus but by Spirochete round bodies. See? Someone test this right away.

Forget Crabs, Look Out For Round Bodies and Symbiosis

Margulis told Nature her attitude about the three PNAS papers in question: "If they definitively reject these papers I will make it very clear to the reading public (because they make it clear in their anonymous letters) that, as usual, they don't like my ideas." Two years ago, we posted on Margulis's controversial ideas and public relations skirmishes. Our post followed her debut on PZ Myers blog, where unchallenged, she forwarded her idea that HIV didn't cause AIDS. If HIV causes AIDS than why doesn't NIH write back to me, she asked? We wrote:

"Margulis relishes controversy and slings mud far better than most people, a well-honed and essential skill....[but] famously, despite her formidable offense skills, she forever portrays herself as someone who has been pushed in a mud puddle."

The PNAS controversy is interesting, although it wouldn't leap out at everyone so much if the papers in question weren't so blatantly ludicrous. PNAS's publication "favoritism" is far from unusual in the science world. And really, Margulis has been publishing these ideas for years, drawing connections based on thin research (often foreign, often Russian, somehow lost on Americans), and asking the science community to run some experiments to test her ideas. In our previous post we talked about her theory of Spirochete symbiosis forming nerves (remember "behavior" from the quote above?):

"Think of the nerve as coming from what had formerly been a bacterium, 'trying' but unable to rotate and swim. Thought involves motility and communication, the connection between remnant spirochetes. All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology."

"All I ask". That was in 1991. But the gulf between what she "asks" and a warm reception from scientists has grown as science has advanced. Williamson is an 87 year old retired scientist, who himself is no stranger to forwarding controversial ideas. Sketched drawings weren't so ludicrous 60 years ago when he was starting. But now, the idea that a paper could simply describe what you see, like generations and generations of cell biology papers before us, seems ridiculous. As an educator at Princeton said recently, "The days of sort of naturalistic walking around and looking at flowers are long gone". (Look at the emphasis on clinical description in this excerpt from a ptomaine poisoning paper from the early 1900's. Williamson was a scientist not too long after that.)

Margulis has always published in PNAS. Some of the labs' older papers have similar themes and a little research. But it's a different world now. Margulis still has the prestige to gather a cast of characters around her in symbiotic relationships, to continue to push ideas out, and to entertain admirers like PZ Myers and his followers. But while her fame draws admirers and moths it also draws vipers, many of whom are now online.

PNAS claims they were going to change their Track I policy anyway. OK, sure, but no doubt the deluge of online criticism didn't tempt them to tarry with the announcement. Just as high tech science has redefined what a good science paper looks like, online science criticism has become blood sport. And that's a good thing, don't get me wrong. But imagine what would we'd learn if all papers and journal publication policies got such a thorough raking over?

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¹ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis Donald I. Williamson, Communicated by Lynn Margulis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, July 24, 2009 (received for review May 19, 2009)

²SYMBIOSIS Vol. 47, No. 1 (2009) Position paper. Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of "the great imitator"? L. Margulis, A. Maniotis, J. MacAllister, J. Scythes, O. Brorson, J. Hall, W.E. Krumbein, and M.J. Chapman

• 2nd Hand Smoke Bans Reduce Heart Attacks: According to two analyses of combined study data on second hand cigarette smoke, town or community enforced smoking bans reduce heart attacks by 17% after one year, and after three years the number of heart attacks decreases by at least 26%. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology published one analysis. UCSF researchers analyzed the same data and also found a 17% decrease after on year, which after three years became a 36% decrease in heart attacks. The journal Circulation published the UCSF results.

  While states and communities have increasingly enacted smoking bans, the tobacco industry generally rejects regulation. As John Singleton, spokesman for Reynolds American told the Wall Street Journal: "Our current position is to let the market take care of the issue". (09/21/09 "The Case for Bans on Smoking") On this argument however, the tobacco industry's reasoning might be losing sway. Smoking bans are catching on the world over, even in hard to imagine places like the country of Turkey's bars and restaurants.

• AIDS Trial: New Results, No Answers

  Scientists stopped the last clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine in 2007 when results showed the vaccine increased the HIV infection. They vowed to reconsider their strategy toward AIDS, especially with regards to clinical trials. Scientists postulated that the flush funding environment and political pressures pushed trials forward too quickly. Now the sometimes exasperating path of scientific research has taken a new turn in AIDS research and scientists have a new quandary.

  A recent HIV clinical trial in Thailand testing a combination of two drugs that had previously failed in clinical trials showed tenuously positive results. The US Army, National Institutes of Health, Thai Health Ministry, and Sanofi Aventis collaborated on the trial, giving vaccines to 16,400 volunteers who were not considered high risk. The new project combined AidsVax, an HIV derived protein, with Alvac HIV, a genetically engineered canarypox virus that contains HIV genes. 51 of the vaccinated individuals contracted HIV and 74 of the unvaccinated individuals became HIV positive, which translated to about a 30% prevention efficacy rate. Though this vaccine is a long way from being considered successful, scientists are buoyed by any news that's positive. The trial suggests that this vaccine could be effective if it were improved.

  The quandaries: First, scientists don't understand how two failed drugs add up to something that looks better or vaguely successful. Second, how and why does the combination vaccine prevent the symptoms of AIDS, if it does, without lowering the viral load -- the amount of HIV measured in the bloodstream of infected individuals? Perplexing. More research needed.

  Treatment is expanding but without prevention of HIV transmission, AIDS will remain a losing battle. So for now, "ABC", abstinence, "be faithful" (limit numbers of partners), and condoms, remain the best HIV infection prevention techniques. The good news for researchers maybe is that perhaps AIDS vaccine research has been kept alive.

  Acronym Required wrote previously about AIDS in Preventing HIV/AIDS: Back to the 1980's, New Directions for AIDS Research Funding", Mbeki's AIDS Legacy and Ours, Public Health, AIDS, Mbeki and the Media, Zimbabwe: Hopeful News for HIV/AIDS Prevention?, Burma and AIDS - Politics Rules", South Africa: Peddling Beetroot, Courting AIDS, and others.

  October UPDATE: Further statistical analysis of this trial showed that the results weren't statistically significant.

• Flavored Tobacco Banned: This week the FDA enacted the law banning flavored cigarettes. The ban does not include menthol cigarettes. Altria Group, formerly Phillip Morris, favors the ban, and not coincidently, is marching ahead with acquisitions to solidify its market leader status in smoke-free tobacco products and also expanding its international tobacco holdings. We previously wrote about the cigarette regulation in The FDA and Cigarettes.

• FISA in the Obama Administration: With part of the USA Patriot Act up for renewal, the House is debating intrusive pieces of the legislations that allow privacy intrusion by wiretap, allow the government by access to business records, and allow surveillance of "lone wolf" suspects who have no known links to terrorists.

  One of the more controversial features gave the FBI authority to deliver National Security Letters to businesses and demand information about individual customers. The Letter recipients are ordered to be completely mum about receiving the Letters, meaning they can't tell their spouses, never mind their customers. Critics charge the National Security Letters provision of the Patriot Act violates the First Amendment. According to the Washington Independent's coverage of yesterday's House Judiciary Committee Hearing, this provision has been widely used and abused by government officials.

• Network Neutrality The FCC upheld the principle of network neutrality this week. FCC chairmain Julius Genachowski's "open internet" is now online, along information, public outreach and requests for comments on broadband and the internet. The FCC site is one of the better ones, sharing and soliciting information on broadband and networking as the agency looks to deploy technology more widely and efficiently across the US for uses like healthcare and "telework".

  Of course, in opposition to network neutrality, a coalition of conservative legislators called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), criticized the principle. Not surprisingly, the group opined that "the market" should be allowed to assure openness unfettered by government.

• PG&E Leaves US Chamber of Commerce: The Northwest energy company PG&E has left the business association, citing the group's refusal to reconcile its rhetoric with the facts of global warming.

• Born Free: "Nature Communications" will begin accepting submissions to their new open-access "born digital publication" in October 2009. The first issue will be published in 2010. According to the press release from Nature Publishing Group (NPG) "authors will be able to publish their work either via the traditional subscription route, or as open access through payment of an article processing charge (APC)."

  "New Scientist points to a "puzzling passage" in the press release, where NPG explains that the new journal will publish papers from all science disciplines "of the highest quality, without necessarily having the scientific reach of papers published in Nature and the Nature research journals." To understand, New Scientist followed up with Ruth Francis, NPG spokesperson, who said that Nature Communications will, as New Scientist put it, "feature research that is more focused and less generally applicable than work that typically appears in Nature" from "fields that aren't covered by the [Nature] research journals".

  The journal will be peer reviewed, NPG stresses in its press release. It will employ a "rapid, yet rigorous, peer-review process", meaning "efficient peer review with fast publication", that is "rapid and fair publication decisions based on peer review, with all the rigour expected of a Nature-branded journal". So...Nature Communications, not to be confused with "bulk publishing of low-quality papers", which, as we noted, caused such a stir last year. Nature has long explored open-access publishing. We look forward to the new journal.

• In the Beginning...Mini-T: Before Homo sapiens, before meteors annihilated Tyrannosaurus rex, before that massive dinosaur bounded over the earth, a smaller, similar looking dinosaur existed. Raptorex kriegsteini had 1/90th the body mass of the ~2.5 ton T.rex and lived about 65 million years earlier. A raptorex fossil found in China had the same body features as T. rex and scientists think that the specialized predatory morphology -- large jaw, small front legs, powerful back legs -- grew larger in future generations, evolving to become T. rex. The photo is of a T. rex is from Wikipedia Commons.

New Science Journalism: Futurity formally launched September 15. Futurity, not to be confused with "Singularity", is a collective on-line publication effort by leading research universities. The universities will promote their science accomplishments and fill the gaps of dwindling newspaper science coverage. Articles will be submitted by members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), with Stanford, University of Rochester, and Duke leading the effort. Critics point out that aggregating news generated by University PR departments (20% fact, 80% big story?) won't provide readers the same unbiased perspective as proper journalism coverage. True, but we can't ignore the fact that a significant amount of science coverage consists of press releases anyway.

• Swine Flu Fallout: The H1N1 pandemic not only causes havoc for humans who fall ill, college campuses trying to manage the illnesses, and health workers. The pandemic effects society and economy in ways you don't necessarily think of. Consider, for instance:

  1.) Egypt can't keep up with its street garbage. As we wrote earlier this year, Egypt set out to kill all the pigs in the country, an unwarranted action. Many belonged to Christian herders whose pigs cleaned the streets of millions of tons of organic waste per year. Now parts of Cairo are knee deep in garbage.

  2.) Pork belly futures, which fell from 89 in April 2009 to 40 in August 2009, have now rebounded to their previous high.

• A Chance To Recalculate the Bush Ozone Ruling?: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last week that it would reexamine the standard set by the Bush administration for ozone which had motivated states to sue the EPA. Ozone is a health hazard at certain levels, and in 2008, the agency set a new standard at 75 parts per billion (ppb), down from 84 ppm. The EPA heralded this as a life-saving improvement, but according to science advisors of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), only 60-70 ppm will prevent deaths.

  Susan Dudley headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in 2008 when the Bush administration decision was made. OIRA influenced the outcome of Bush's ozone ruling by sending a series of memos to the EPA impeding the ozone ruling and killing a secondary standard which would have triggered certain safety measures in some weather conditions. We wrote last year how Susan Dudley had argued on behalf of industry prior to her tenure at OIRA, that "smog was beneficial because it protected individuals from ultraviolet radiation, and that since asthma rates were associated with poverty, a smog ruling would have the 'perverse effect' of costing communities money, which would in turn increase poverty and asthma." Her's was a twisted cost-benefit analysis.

  Now Cass Sunstein heads OIRA. According to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the EPA has calculated the benefits to society from the now thriving environmental industry and determined that those monetary benefits outweigh the costs of the standard. So is cost-benefit ok when the outcome favors the politics you prefer?

• Team Players: Researchers at Oxford University published a paper in Biology Letters reporting that more elevated endorphin levels associated with team sports like rowing than single player activities.

• Justice Department On Proposed Google Books Settlement The Justice Department said Friday that the settlement needed changes to address copyright, class-action and antitrust issues, and urged the Federal Court to reject the settlement. However, the government added that current discussions between the parties were productive and should continue.

• EPA and NHTSA, Together At Last, Overlapping: The EPA also proposed new carbon dioxide emissions this week, in concert with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The new rule would lower fleet standards to 35.5 mpg by 2016. As well, cars would be allowed to emit 250 grams of CO2/mile by 2012, as opposed to the current rule of 265 grams of CO2/mile. The Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, Inc. (AIAM), and Senator Markey praised the agencies for their collective effort.

  A coordinated effort from the two agencies that oversee automobile emissions and mileage efficiency has long been a goal of industry and policy makers, though a goal sometimes cynically pursued. We also wrote about EPA/NHTSA overlap here and here. The standards will cover model years 2012 through 2016, and as the Obama administration bills it: "the automobile manufacturers would be able to build a single, light-duty national fleet that satisfies all federal requirements as well as the standards of California and other states."

• Migraines: McCain's Bane: Cindy McCain is heading to Congress, reports the New Yorker, to lobby for money to study migraine headaches. And you thought perhaps you'd heard the last of McCain science research jokes? She told the American Headache Society (AHS):

  "For the first time in my life, I'm going to go to Congress, and I'm going to be tenacious and be forceful and be honest and tell them that it's time. If you can give five million dollars to study flatulence in cows and its effects on the ozone layer, you can give me some money for migraine research."

  Migraines are, of course, a debilitating problem -- that's no joke. As McCain details in her talks, migraine headaches are sometimes set off by "triggers" -- foods like chocolate, or particular odors or chemicals. McCain reports that her company's beer, Stella Artois, contains sulfites "out the wazoo" that trigger her headaches. Travel is full of trouble. Sometimes a perfume bottle breaks and the debilitating noxious fumes cause her to repack her bags and fly home. Foreign food smells prove treacherous too, she says: "...like...forgive me, but the scent of cooking dog"

  She didn't say which countries serve the offensive "dog", often a subject of nasty rumors, or how one can tell that it's not chicken, water buffalo, or frog. But fortunate she is then, that her role is the ambassador of headaches not the ambassador of smoothing international relations with her would-have-been President husband.

Everyone has an opinion on newspapers or the demise thereof -- us too (here, for instance. Sometimes the opinions are confusing. BoingBoing, for instance, generally writes that the news should be free, (along with music, movies, books) -- free, free, free. But then they publish "Free Parking Costs a Fortune", on the hidden costs of downtown suburban parking. Labor and resources for this free, costly, but not labor and resources for that free? Confusing.

Offering a different kind of confusing, Michael Moore harangues American newspapers (video, YouTube) for "slitting their own throats". He says that in the rest of the world newspapers support themselves with subscriptions: "they know that in order to keep circulation up they better put out a damn good newspaper".

Let's see, in the UK there's BBC -- scary public option, FT Group, part of Pearson and not dependent on the little pink paper, the Guardian and of course the Mirror, the Sun, Star...and others of their ilk. Are they thriving?

In the UK, publisher Archant had 61% drop in profits for 2009 through June. UK's Independent News and Media (INM)-- had a 3rd quarter 2008 drop of 99%, and News Corps -- with Australian, UK and US papers, a 97% drop in the same period. The Guardian profits have plummeted. Germany, France and the rest of Europe? All declining profits.

Moore's story for the demise of American newspapers but not any other country's is catchy and his voice rises to a booming crescendo as he unveils the familiar scapegoats: Republicans and capitalism. He says that newspapers supported Republicans who cut education therefore increasing illiteracy which decreased numbers of newspaper readers. But it's too pat. There are many factors contributing to the decline of newspapers but its not the fault of the Republicans. And is it any more than fantasy to think the rest of the world's wired that differently?

Update: 9/11/09: Cass Sunstein, subject of the note below, was nominated to the OIRA post. The list of Yeas and Nays from yesterday's vote is here.

• Scientist says Nerds are Happy: The New York Times Sunday op-ed section featured advice from educators to students. Nancy Hopkins wrote:

  "Passion is the mysterious force behind nearly every scientific breakthrough. Perhaps it's because without it you might never be able to tolerate the huge amount of hard work and frustration that scientific discovery entails...For the next four years you will get to poke around the corridors of your college, listen to any lecture you choose, work in a lab...You may be the person who constructs a new biological species, or figures out how to stop global warming, or aging. Maybe you'll discover life on another planet..." More here.

• China Surges Ahead With Solar: Inner Mongolia in China will be the location of the world's largest solar facility. China is working with the US company First Solar. The new solar farm is due for completion in 5 years and will generate 2 gigawatts of energy by 2019. Plans are also in the works in India and the US for other giant solar facilities.

• Awesome Hubble Photos: NASA upgraded the 19 year old Hubble telescope this summer and released photos that showed impressive improvements due to the upgrade. Compare the Omega Centauri starfield from 2002 to a recent one taken after the scientists completed the Hubble renovations. The photo to the left is a from the planetary nebula NGC 6302 -- a dying star in the middle -- also known as the "Butterfly Nebula".

• Phoenicopterus ruber falsus: Madison, Wisconsin has named the pink plastic flamingo the city's bird, in honor of a college prank from 30 years ago which Alderwoman Marsha Rummel said "signifies something that makes us a very special place" and "captured in our imaginations forever." Why worry about endangered species when there's plastic so real politicians lose their minds?

• Constitution Day: Federal law now requires that schools receiving federal funding offer an education day to celebrate the signing of the Constitution. September 17th, which used to be called Citizenship Day, was renamed Constitution Day and the education requirement added to the 2004 Omnibus Spending Act by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Wikipedia suggests that the holiday began as I Am American Day, a May holiday designated by Congress in 1940 after being championed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Now that newspapers are dying and some Americans are going cuckoo, it seems like a fine time to reinvigorate the holiday. It's a shame that some hosts on certain television networks aren't required to take a refresher course.

• Nudge in Action Despite Opposition to Sunstein: We previously wrote about the preposterous protest of Cass Sunstein's nomination not because of his cost-benefit analysis views (.pdf), but because hunting enthusiasts fear he's too enthusiastic about animal rights. They continue to foam at the mouth oppose his nomination for the same ill-conceived reasons we noted before. But yesterday, despite efforts of Glenn Beck to derail the Obama administration and move the "conversation" to the right towards McCarthyism, Democrats pushed Sunstein's nomination forward.

  Even as opposition foot-dragging continues (an anonymous third Senator has apparently placed another hold on the nomination), Sunstein isn't languishing idle. With more two books published since his nomination, his influence can also be seen in Obama administration policy changes such as the retirement savings plan changes, announced by the President on Labor Day.

• Media Wars: A number of "11th-hour filers" are challenging the Google book deal, including Germany and France. The head of the US copyright office expressed reservations. At a recent Google Books conference, James Love said that Google benefits from people's perception that if Google makes it it must be free and good, and if it were called (I paraphrase) AnyOtherCorporation Book Deal, it would have never progressed this far. People aren't consoled by the Google image as the lovable, do no evil, benevolent adopter of just a small number of orphan books. But was copyright really meant to extend life plus 70 years? In the interest of the public, hopefully they'll settle on the "right" book deal.

• Clues to Potato Blight: Scientists collaborating from 36 institutions across the globe completed sequencing the water mold responsible for late blight and the Irish Great Famine of 1840's-1850's. Phytophthora infestans consumes the plant's leaves and tubers and just as it wiped out potato crops in the 19th century, today the mold causes ~$6.7 billion dollars of damage annually to tomatoes, potatoes and other crops.

  Researchers identified genes that may help the organism evade scientists fight against the costly blight, and also found that about 75% of the genome contained repeat sections of DNA called transposons. Transposons duplicate and jump from one section of the genome to another, where they can disrupt genes and introduce mutations. This could allow the organism to adapt and evolve more quickly and continue to cause havoc in potato crops despite scientists' best efforts to engineer blight resistant crops.

  The part of the genome that contains the transposons also contains genes that code proteins responsible for virulence. Researchers theorize that the instability of this greatly expanded and rapidly changing part of the genome gives P. infestans its lethal power. The sequence data will help scientists understand the mold in order to prevent the destructive blight. Nature published the report: 9 September 2009 | doi:10.1038/nature08358.

Summer Politics: Cut and Dried

On the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, people reminisced about large public gatherings in open spaces. Central Park used to be a mecca for such events. On June 12, 1982, a million people assembled in the park to protest the nuclear policies of the Reagan Administration. People traveled to NYC they did so because they considered it a visible celebration of democracy, a patriotic way to send a message. Shortly after they convened, Reagan opened nuclear arms talks with the Soviet Union and the Cold War waned. To date, that Central Park protest remains one of America's largest.

New York City's study, released this month and conducted by soil scientists, plant pathologists and groundskeepers, suggests limiting the use of the Great Lawn in Central Park to 55,000 people for safety reasons and to protect the grass. The Great Lawn cost millions to restore, but the decision rankled some. A lawyer for the Partnership for Civil Justice told the NYT: "We would call it junk science except that it's not science". Rather she said, the report supports: "a political declaration of intent by the mayor to limit free speech rights by New Yorkers."

Grassroots Change

Central Park historian Sarah Cedar Miller once told a reporter: "Parks are a gathering ground and where democracy happens. Literally, the grassroots happen on the grass." ¹ Barack Obama has often talked about the importance of grassroots action to motivate change, though he hasn't been explicit about the turf. In "Dreams From My Father", he wrote about his decision in 1983 after graduating from Columbia College to become a community organizer:

"....There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."

Twenty-six years later Obama resides in the White House after campaigning on a platform of Change. In his acceptance speech he attributed his victory to a strong grassroots campaign. He assured his supporters that corporations wouldn't have all the seats at the table and urged them to continue the grassroots fight for the causes he would champion during his presidency.

Grassroots From the White House?

But of course Barack Obama also won the presidency because his campaign implemented well-organized fund-raising which corralled large donors and bundlers. Now, as constituents, stakeholders, and lobbyists wrestle over American healthcare, headlines detail the president's efforts to appease these interests.

Last week, we heard news about the executive branch's concessions to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). These agreements supposedly involve White House concessions like opposing drug importation, in return for a hazy promise from PhRMA about "up to" 80 billion dollars in cost cuts. Last weekend Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius asked people not to focus so much on the public option, leading the media to think the public option is off the table.

All this leaves grassroots Obama supporters to wonder, who is occupying the seats at the table? But wonder though they might, when it comes to healthcare, Obama's 13 million strong grassroots organization remains busy with their busy lives. Who among them has time, attention, or money to speak out on each of the plethora of issues that the Obama presidency tackles? Furthermore, if the president's supporters did have time, and knew what they were supposed to be rooting for -- a viable public option, details to the proposals, direct answers, and available talking points -- how would they express their interests? Are we really even a "grassroots" kind of country anymore?

Is It Astroturf or Have We Changed?

Public protests and large gatherings of past decades can't be idealized. They've always been contentious affairs, with riot police, shootings, covert and overt suppression. There was a certain community achieved by those Central Park protesters in 1982, who all gathered in one place to express the collective hope for a safer better, world. But that was almost three decades ago. A different place and time, when, as some New Yorkers say, Central Park was overgrown and scary and New York invited anyone to occupy the space to keep worse elements at bay. Today, large protests are not necessarily seen as viable options to petitioning government. The Department of Defense recently labeled protests "low-level terrorism".

Perhaps businesses that surround Central Park wouldn't appreciate their view being a bunch of protesters with idle time on their hands agitating against ideas that challenge the premises of the business deals their executives negotiate at a frenzied pace eighteen hours a day. They may want to assure that their backdrop is lush, peaceful, untrammeled grass as far as the eye can see, a copacetic business environment. But does an insistence on pretty lawns discourage the public's inclinations to join a peaceable protest? To express views about the government?

Perhaps grassroots protest is a bygone era and nothing is lost by limiting people's right to protest on public greens. Even those who traveled up to Woodstock write about the event forty years ago for the NYT with detached amusement, as if obliged at a family gathering to watch sibling antics on a scratchy home video before quickly snapping that dusty box shut.

A manicured law is an asset too. And determined agitators can always be relegated to highways or still unkempt DC malls. If in 2009 public protests are limited on Central Park's Great Lawn, perhaps they will continue to flourish at "town halls".

Townhalls -- "A Dip In A Cool Stream?""

Town halls, afterall, can be an idyllic way to exchange ideas. Obama wrote about his experience when he was an Illinois State Senator in "The Audacity of Hope":

"One of my favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings....And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing I see hard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time with them is like a dip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for the work I have chosen"

You may say that today's town halls are a quite different brand of love-in than Obama's. Today, there may be some heart-felt questioning, but disenchanted Americans drown it out by ferociously confronting their representatives about strange apparitions they've concocted pertaining to government. Now they decry the scurvy of government run healthcare. Next week they may be yelling about jobs the upcoming the energy bill.

Fox News insists that this "anger's not 'manufactured' it's REAL". However, others say that corporations, perhaps even oil companies, are contributing to town-hallers' messages against change. No matter, it's a different beast from the cool stream Obama described. Some representatives may be wanting to shower after the events.

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says the Democrats running town halls can handle it, but they need to "know the difference between grassroots and Astroturf." Television news, however, does not necessarily differentiate between Astroturf and the more plebeian, grassroots protests, it duly broadcasts discontent. To us, it seems that whatever was The Matter With Kansas has gone both viral and national. Unfortunately but importantly, whatever the source of townhall agitation, everyone's paying attention to it.

TV Cameras on the Ruckus -- The Limits of Technology

The internet remains an alternative grassroots medium mobilized to good effect by MoveOn.org and the Obama campaign. But even if Obama's grassroots organization were to see fit to mobilize and use the internet to it's previously powerful effect, it would be a quiet effort.

As Obama said last week "TV loves a ruckus". Email campaigns don't attract television cameras the way even the smallest collection of agitated people waving scrawled signs do. Face it, that's why businesses oppose 200,000 people gathering in Central Park and why some send people to town halls. Even if we had a million emails it still couldn't make a televisable ruckus.

Woodstock is overrated, they write forty years later. Too much mud, not enough sandwiches, and mind-boggling traffic jams. But how will current brand of town hall protests look forty years from now? If pundits and participants don't think back fondly on Woodstock today, how will they recall the shouted, spit-laden confrontations from people insisting that healthcare reform is facism, death panels, and communism all wrapped up in one ideologically impossible hairball of anti-reform? Not "Change!" or "No Nukes" -- but "No-Change!", ie: "Long-Live the Uninsured!" -- delivered with a swagger that only a pistol strapped to one's leg can insure?

I'm not trying to idealize the old, flowers in your hair days that I didn't even live through. But is something lost if we've reached an age when the TV news may never capture a million people gathered in a park with a vision of a changed and better world? When "Astroturf" -- always capitalized for the always capitalist world, and working mostly to prevent Change and progress -- is for all intents and purposes the only "grassroots" we know?

¹ Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 17, 2005

OIRA Chief Job Requirements: Letters, Meetings, Farm Tours

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) recently placed a hold on Cass Sunstein's confirmation to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA resides within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and was established by Congress in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980(PRA) for oversight tasks like reviewing and setting standards for Federal regulations.

OIRA has a mixed reputation due to its expanded role in "the catbird seat" (.pdf!) over government regulatory policy. Progressives point out the agency's successful efforts using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to delay environmental and public health regulations and to impede agencies like the EPA from improving air quality which threatens the health of Americans.

While CBA can be a useful tool for helping to evaluate regulatory impact, critics like Rena Steinzor of the University of Maryland's Center For Progressive Reform have written prolifically in opposition to the flavor of cost-benefit analysis previously applied by the OIRA and championed by Sunstein. Sunstein's books and papers contain ample examples of how CBA can be used to stifle progressive regulation, and progressives fear that Sunstein could continue the trend set by previous business friendly OIRA administrators John Graham and Susan Dudley.

By all accounts, Sunstein is the perfect choice for conservatives. He's even endorsed by conservative mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and lobby groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Yet oddly, it's not progressives concerned with CBA, but conservatives like Chambliss and Cornyn who are holding up the nomination by promoting fears that Sunsteing will restrict hunting and agriculture.

According to The Hill last week, the move has probably delayed the Obama administration's regulatory review document due two months ago. The late arrival of the review document concerns liberals who question the president's commitment to government transparency and also agitates parties like the regulation allergic American Chemical Council.

Contrary to Sunstein's refusals to to meet with some journalists and progressives until after his confirmation, the nominee met with Senator Chambliss to assure him of his intentions and to be toured around some farms. Sunstein also wrote the senator a letter including "strong statements", as Chamblis put it, like: "if confirmed, I would not take any steps to promote litigation on behalf of animals". That letter apparently doesn't satisfy Senator Cornyn. Nor do Sunstein's words at his confirmation hearing last May when he thoroughly addressed the hunting and animal rights questions asked by Senator Collins (R-ME).

Hunting v. Cost-Benefit Analysis

In OIRA -- How Will it Evolve Under Obama?, written prior to Sunstein's House confirmation hearing, Acronym Required noted the proliferation of internet chatter suggesting that Sunstein would ban hunting and/or somehow restrict freedom of speech on the internet. Drawn from subjective readings of his work and comments, these ideas can be easily dispelled by purusing the Sunstein corpus. Therefore we never expected the paranoid musings of various hunting and meat interests to be given serious consideration at Sunstein's hearing. Sunstein's confirmation hearing proved us wrong.

At his hearing, admiring Senators on the committee voiced their approval of Sunstein to lead the OIRA. They all breezed through questions about how regulatory matters would or wouldn't change under a Sunstein's OIRA leadership and skirted over cost-benefit analysi. The nominee provided careful, footnoted responses. He repeatedly drew a line between his "academic writings", and actions he would take as the head of the OIRA.¹ On animal rights Sunstein said that he would "follow the laws" -- for instance the EPA laws in the case of the Endangered Species Act. Compared to his nuanced answers about cost-benefit analysis then, his views on hunting seemed clear and unequivocal.

Sunstein told Senator Collins (R-ME) that he would not ban hunting, which the "2nd amendment protects". He said previous comments were provocations that did not "reflect my personal views". Hunters were the "strongest environmentalists and conservationists in the United States, and it would be preposterous for anyone in a position like mine to take steps to effect their rights or interests", he said. Collins thanked him for his "strong statement".

Bounties for Bambies

Cornyn could watch this testimony to abate his fears, or read Sunstein's letter to his colleague Senator Chambliss, or read some of Sunstein's other work. For instance in his paper "Predictably Incoherent Judgments", with Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade and Ilana Ritov (June, 2002: Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 6), Sunstein et al argued that people "in isolation" make incoherent moral or legal judgements that lead to excessive jury awards, unreasonable public good valuations and ill-considered civil fines.

To overcome such "predictably incoherent judgements" the authors suggested using systems such as that devised by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to "establish values for injured or destroyed fish, birds, and animals." The system would appeal to those who like empirical data, but defied scrutiny. For instance according to their scoring system, "a score of 0-3 for 'eight scoring' criteria" gave a "total criteria score". That score was then multiplied by a "weighting factor" decided by the "demand for the species". Endangered species (those higher in demand, apparently) and threatened species got and extra $500 or $1000. Sunstein et al expounded:

"The particular judgements may seem a bit arbitrary; why is an elk worth $1, compared to the $1050.50 penalty for killing a loggerhead turtle? What is important is that the Texas provision actually offers an answer to this question, one that is relatively transparent to the public, and one that ensures that the various values line up with one another along the stated criteria".

So the arbitrariness of the values seems not to bother him, as long as there's a number. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department assigned "Mule Deer, M", a value of "$525.50", "Mule Deer, F" a value of "$163", and just plain "Deer" a value of $1. Indeed, the numbers make the valuations little more than a calculator exercise, but in the end, the numbers are the product of a value system that's obtuse and arbitrary.

To the point of this post, though, does someone who endorses this system as a "remarkable approach" seem like someone who would get overly emotional about deer and elk hunting?

In a 1999 Stanford Law Review article "Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation" Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein portrayed environmentalists as misinformed yet powerful fringe groups: "subcommunities whose members interact primarily among themselves", who were susceptible to a biased media and prone to exaggerating risks like industrial waste. These "subcommunities" were sentimental about deer and underestimated the risks they posed: (Vol. 51, No. 4 (Apr., 1999), pp. 683-768). The media, too, were irrational about the environment. The authors wrote:

"Whereas the electronic and print media are replete with reports of industrial waste dumps, they seldom pay attention to the traffic injuries and deaths caused by deer herds that have grown fifty-four-fold since the 1940s because of hunting restrictions, lack of predators and abundant new habitat. As a consequence, many people who consider environmental contamination an omnipresent and devastating danger, think of deer as the affectionate, harmless, and vulnerable animals portrayed by Walt Disney's moving fable Bambi." (emphasis mine)

Again, we'd question whether someone who portrays environmentalists as bewitched fanatics full of Bambiesque fantasies strikes you as a someone who would march up to your tree stand at 6AM, and order you down from your hunting perch and confiscate your gun?

Cass Sunstein = Melancholy Jack?

Despite his explicit letter, testimony, and writings, Chambliss and Cornyn choose to portray Sunstein as some Melancholy Jacque, the character in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" who weeps over a slaughtered deer and whose mournful sensitivity disturbs the hunting party. Hunting enthusiasts issue dire warnings about a probable Sunstein nomination. Publications like the Cattle Network and Pork Magazine ruminate about Sunstein's "radical" notions. Ammoland.com joins in.

Despite the craziness, there is a twinge of reason here. Sunstein describes himself as a legal "pragmatist", and he may also be pragmatic when selecting different points of view for liberal versus conservative audiences. Both conservatives and liberals are a little nervous about which way he'll lean, and with reason, since you could interpret his positions in different ways. Despite his pro-environmentalist statement in his confirmation hearing, his portrayal of them as "subcommunities" prompts the question: what does he really think about environmentalists?

Despite the apparent flexibility of his views, however; much liberals dismay, he's always been rock-solid consistent about the advantages of using of cost-benefit analysis to value life. A deer, it seems, is simply a commodity. It's ironic, then, and not necessarily the best omen for some species, that liberals can't be credited as the loudest complainers in the current fray.

And what are Chambliss and Cornyn up to, isolating what Sunstein calls "provocations" on animal rights, to hold up his nomination? "He is about as good as you can hope from this administration" David Mason, a visiting senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told The Hill. What's their beef? Their complaints definitely attack the Democrat administration and move the center to the right.

Availability Cascades?

In their paper, Sunstein and Kuran explained the reaction of residents of Love Canal to the crud bubbling up in their backyards with the term "availability cascade". Humans develop irrational fears which are not based on evidence, they say, and those harebrained ideas spread contagiously among other susceptible individuals. These humans therefore don't fear deer as they logically should, but build unreasonable paranoias about toxic waste dumps. Sunstein often portrays environmentalists as caught up in availability cascades.

Considering the bounty of evidence against their claims then, are Chambliss and Cornyn, our elected representatives, along with hunters and agriculture interests swept up in such an availability cascade? Or perhaps Cornyn wants his own meeting, his own letter, to lead his own farm tour, or to extract some additional promises, and when Cornyn is satisfied, the next conservative Senator will step up with his own cabal of clamoring agriculture interests and batch of factory farmers. Or perhaps it's just simple Obama opposition. Or something else, we don't know.

In our last post on Sunstein, his nomination seemed a cinch. So much so that we suggested that people who were interested in public office could write both liberal and conservative views to baffle audiences looking to pinpoint ideological leanings. But we might revise that opinion. Sunstein, at least in the short run, seems destined for more meetings, more letters, and some tramping around agricultural production farms in hip boots (No? A suit?). So perhaps we'd suggest espousing more neutral views. All this must be a tedious distraction from the work of (officially) running OIRA and generating cost-benefit analyses. And maybe all on account of availability cascades?

-------------------------------------

¹ Acronym Required wrote about the similar line that Sunstein proposed for assessing John Roberts' record prior to his nomination.

Acronym Required's not entirely neutral on agricultural practices in the US, as we've scribbled about here, and here, and here, and here. We've also written periodically on OIRA, for instance here and here, and here, and here.

• China Delays Censorship Software

  The New York Times reports that China will delay their rule requiring all new PCs to come installed with the Green Dam Youth Escort" censoring software that we wrote about earlier this month.

• EPA Grants California Waiver

  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted California the waiver the state has long sought which will allow it to set emissions standards that are stricter that the federal government's. We wrote about this in several posts including "Clean, Clear Air, Nothing To See Here, Drive Through Please".

• Bisphenol A in the NYT and Journalistic Fence-Sitting That Must Hurt

  Yesterday we wrote on Nicholas Kristof's NYT report about disturbing research on endocrine disruptors. We discussed what we called 50-50 science journalism, where you erode your science article by giving credit to the "other side", which could be a global warming denier, for instance, or the chemical lobby.

  Another way newspapers can practice balanced journalism is when a publication like the New York Times or the Economist or LA Times runs conflicting articles to appeal to all paying advertisers. For instance John Tierney's column in the NYT today, written by Tina Kolata, quoted Stats.org to deny the dangers of bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor. Stats has the opposite (and incorrect) science information, which conflicts with what Kristof wrote yesterday. Thus the NYT gets 50-50 coverage, for all of those science deniers it wants as subscribers.

  Both Stats and Tierney are solidly in the science and environmental deniers camp. We wrote about John Tierney's denialism in "Scientist Columnists Sell You Short". Tierney has long expressed his devotion to bisphenol A -- "if they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry [my Nalgene bottle] from my cold dead fingers", he wrote last year. Tierney routinely comes out against science.

  Acronym Required previously wrote about Stats in "Yotta-Yotta-Yottabytes: Content Makes Kings, Print Dies", and various posts on bisphenol A. Stats, as reported here by Sourcewatch, claims to be a "non-partisan" think tank, but they are funded by conservative sources and consistently produce reports that fly in the face of science.

• Climate Bill's Mixed Reports

  The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill passed last week by Congress received mixed reports on its predicted effectiveness. The National Resource Defense Fund sent an email screaming euphorically, "Well, we did it! And we did it because millions of people like you made their voices heard on Capitol Hill."

  On the other hand, Clive Crook, who we previously highlighted for his climate denialism, had an opposing opinion. Read his "The Steamrollers of Climate Science", for instance, in which he wrote that the IPCC report on climate change was biased, and what the world needed was some opinions from people affiliated with the Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (all funded by ExxonMobil). You'd think from that you'd know where he stood.

  But Crook, climate science denier last time we looked, said yesterday that the President was being too weak on climate change. Accompanied by a cartoon of the president ripping open a Superman t-shirt to reveal a cute little Hello Kitty figure, Crook said:

  "The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself."

  Conservatives argue that the climate bill will negatively effect the economy for a very small pay-off, whereas some environmentalists argue that the cap-and-trade regime proposed will not work, that there a giant loopholes, and that coal gets too much of a boost from the legislation.

  RealClimate, for its part, is taking a break, a little bummed out about the Groundhog Day aspect of the internet, where you explain the science that all the deniers deny, then they pop-up again. How true, though more a game of Whac-A-Mole than Groundhog Day perhaps. Tenacity wins.

  Joseph Romm of Climate Progress weighs in favorably on the bill.

Guns and Money

In Johannesburg, South Africa, supporters of presidential candidate Jacob Zuma celebrated by leaning on horns, blowing whistles and waving flags, after the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) dropped 16 charges against the African National Council (ANC) front-runner. Prosecutors had accused Zuma of taking bribes via Schabir Shaik, his adviser who connived with French arms company Thales International (Thint) to win military arms deals from the state.

Deals with the French company worth several billion dollars were in the works in 1999, when investigators began to look into the details of the transactions. The arms company apparently worked through Zuma's financial adviser Shaik, and recruited Zuma to interfere with the investigation. Zuma, who served as deputy president under Thabo Mbeki, had faced corruption, fraud, racketeering and money-laundering charges.

In 2005, Schabir Shaik was found guilty of corruption and sent to prison to serve several concurrent sentences amounting to 15 years. In 2005 President Thabo Mbeki dismissed deputy president Zuma after the high court found Schaik guilty. The judge in the case noted the "generally corrupt" relationship between Zuma and Shaik. After serving 28 months of his sentence, mostly in private hospitals, Shaik was released on a controversial medical probation last month.

Upon hearing the charges were dropped against Zuma, hundreds of supporters danced and sang to Zuma's theme song, "Bring Me My Machine Gun", an apartheid era rally song.

Who Needs Lawyers?

Zuma's popularity assures broad support for his election April 22, despite his ripe court history, not only on account of the the corruption charges, but also because of a rape trial in 2006. Zuma's comments during the rape trial included the assertion that he had showered to protect himself from contracting AIDS from the woman who accused him of rape, and that he knew that the woman wanted to have sex because of the type of skirt she wore. His comments incensed those who care about public health and women's rights. As deputy president under Mbeki, Zuma served as the head of South Africa's National Aids Council and the Moral Regeneration Movement. Zuma was acquitted of the rape.

People anticipated the charges would be dropped, and now expect Zuma to win the presidential election. But the corruption case hovers in the background uncomfortably. The case dragged on for years before wiretap tapes and transcriptions emerged which seemed to show a politically motivated plot on the part of the investigators. The case against Zuma fell apart on technicality, but the prosecutor pointed out that his decision: "does not affect the substantive merits of the case against [Mr] Zuma". Some people believe the charges will taint the South African democracy, not to mention the presidency of Mr. Zuma.

Thabo Mbeki dismissed Zuma as his deputy president after Shaik was found guilty, and Zuma was never found guilty of corruption charges. Interestingly though, Thabo Mbeki habitually railed against pharmaceutical companies who offered AIDS drugs by accusing them of being "like marauders of the military industrial complex who propagate fear to increase their profits". Of course, while thousands of Mbeki's compatriots died of AIDS, Mbeki denied the viral cause of AIDS and pursued various themes to produce AIDS drugs in Africa. During this time, while Mbeki refused to treat AIDS patients, under his administration billions of dollars of South Africa's wealth was going to foreign weapons manufacturers.

Strong-Arming Countries -- Oil For Planes

In the scheme of things, the bribes that Jacob Zuma accepted were not a big as bribes can get. Starting tonight, Frontline will air a one hour special titled "Black Money", a documentary on international corruption by military corporations. "Black Money" is based on the work of Guardian journalist David Leigh, who has been reporting on BAE corruption across the globe for more than five years. Last year Leigh wrote about BAE bribes to South African, in which BAE pressured the country to buy war planes at inflated prices. Chippy Shaik, the brother of Schabir, worked in the defense department and helped secure the deals.

"Black Money" focuses not so much on South Africa, but on BAE's bribes and the web of relationships between Britain, Saudia Arabia, and the US. BAE devised complex deals to secure £43bn in arms deals with Saudia Arabia. When British investigators at the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started digging into the deals and Britain's part in them, Saudia Arabia threatened to break off collaborations with Britain against terrorism. Tony Blair's government abruptly curtailed the investigation.

"Black Money" follows the kingpin role of Saudia Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudia ambassador to the US, who benefited handsomely from the bribes. At one point Bandar retorts to the interviewer who probes about the multi-billion dollar deals: "So What?". Filmakers also interviewed former US FBI director Louis Freeh, now a private lawyer and consultant to Prince Bandar also appears "Black Money". He admits that money transfers amounting to $2 billion dollars flowed from BAE in Britain to the US bank accounts of the Saudi prince, but Freeh denies that Bandar accepted bribes. While acknowledging that the complicated deals and payments were set up in part to avoid congressional scrutiny Freeh retorts that the commingling of Saudi accounts is none of the US's business. The narrative and exchanges portrayed in the show "Black Money" add up to no more than "reckless allegations", says Freeh.

Has globalization and unfettered money exchange made the the world as callous as "So What?" and as compromising as Louis Freeh? Corruption is a globalized problem, with some of the biggest victims being the poorest countries, like Bangladesh. Of course all citizens of all countries pay for privileges of the lawless few at the top. The US is perhaps not as corrupt as Saudia Arabia nor is poor as South Africa. But while Africa and Europe and the Middle East and Asia see plenty of corruption, the US has its fair share of nefarious deals and Seawolf-like contracts made in the name of business by self-interested companies, lobbyists and politicians. Even now, as the Obama administration announces the military budget and certain key legislators obstruct the administration's goals to protect their states' prized military contracts, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that the US has its own solid brand of backroom dealmaking and military procurement malfeasance -- not to mention a faltering healthcare system.

The Demise of the P-I, or Happily Alive for Forty Extra Years and Counting?

A string of recent newspaper closings has precipitated another flurry of worry and pontification about changes in media and reporting. The outpourings have come in waves, and now papers in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago threaten to shut down their presses. The closing of the 150 year old Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News print editions last week motivated the latest phase of hand-wringing.

Yes, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I), is 150 years old, but it's a shame more people don't mention the events surrounding the paper's demise. Should we really think of it as a demise? Or simply a change in format? The P-I hasn't been quite right for some time. By 1981 the paper had been posting losses for the previous 12 years. That year the P-I penned a joint operating agreement (JOA) with the competing city paper, the Seattle Times. Management structured the agreement under the anti-trust exemptions set up by the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. The goal of the act was to keep to more than one editorial board in cities where one paper might have made more economic sense given the costs of printing and circulation.

Under the Times/P-I JOA agreement, the P-I was the morning paper, and the Seattle Times the evening paper. The Times stopped printing its morning edition and the Sunday paper carried a joint masthead. The business and operations of both papers -- printing, circulation and business functions -- were performed by the Seattle Times.

Opposition to the JOA was fierce, and included P-I employees, advertisers, readers and other local publishers who for two years challenged the proposed JOA in courts. In 1983 the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the JOA between the Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I went through. But the animosity between the papers was famous and no one should be too surprised at the closing of the P-I given the combination of economic downturn, turmoil in publishing, and the paper's already disadvantaged place in the city's newspaper hierarchy.

We could look at the P-I's switch to the internet in another way, cold-hearted as it may seem: The P-I managed to stay afloat despite being less than whole since 1969 -- 40 whole years. Denver's Rocky Mountain News operated under a similar agreement with its sister city paper before it also closed last week. Both papers will continue to publish on-line.

Many factors converge around the unfortunate swoon of the newspaper industry, including a decrease in readers and print advertising, a bad economy, and greedy owners who took over papers determined to profit mightily. Cuts and bad news coverage on the part of newspapers accelerated the downward slide, as did competition from online media. Will the economics of newspapers, which has been in flux for the last half a century finally motivate new models of investigative reporting? Or will entrenched newspaper publishers stall progress by laying the blame for their failings squarely on online media?

Fact or Fallacy? Bloggers Who Hate the Mainstream Media and the MSM Who Hate Them Back

This perennial conflict, of online media "versus" newspapers, was perhaps precipitated by internet denizens, who threw plenty of taunts to the mainstream media. I've always loved newspapers and magazines like Scientific American and am still unable to accept my Blackberry as quite the right vehicle for always getting the news, so I've felt the ire of my paperless friends. I've even shied away from gatherings like the YearlyKos Convention (now Netroots), where the scorn for print media was so great that this newspaper reader feared being caught with traces of newsprint on my fingers and hauled out to a dark alley by savage commenters who would mete out some bitter end. My print media sentiments are nothing but sentimental hogwash to some, and those people sure aren't shy about letting people know their opinions.

Print media in turn, reacted to online media with various degrees of denial and acceptance that differed for different papers. On September 20, 2005, for instance, the Financial Times ran an article about an expat named "Hemlock", who blogged from Singapore. The entire article, "Hemlock, 'the obnoxious expat' BLOGGING" talked about the blog, but the closest FT got to mentioning where you might find "Hemlock's" site was this sentence: "His website's location on the geocities network..." No URL. Where, why? Clueless or purposefully obtuse?

A year later, the FT became more inflammatory and its writers began expressing scorn and derision for blogs -- perhaps fear masquerading as bravado. In 2006, the paper ran a series of articles with titles like "The Fallacy That Bloggers Have Replaced Real News Hounds." (March 22, 2006.)

One 4,445 word magazine article laid it all out in its title: "Time for the Last Post: The Evangelists Say That Blogging - Instant, Democratic and Cheap - is About to Finish Off Newspapers and Make a lot of People Rich. They're Wrong. Most Blogs are Boring, Overblown and Don't Make a Penny." (Yes, that was the title). If it was on HuffPo it would have been 70 pixels high. In his February 18th article, Trevor Butterworth panned blogs and the "revolution" (his quotes) they rode in on: "...[W]e must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor." The reason the blogging "revolution" seemed to be thriving, he said, was because it was uniquely American:

"In many respects, the American media in all their stuffy isolation brought the bloggers upon themselves... In contrast to the British and European media, which had their origins in the Enlightenment and the belief that journalism was a forum for debate and argument - even philosophy, according to David Hume - the American press is a 19th century creation animated by the pursuit of fact."

"Blogging - if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising - brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise. Which is great. But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet."

As it is, books like Burns's, not blogs or newspapers, often provide superior accounts -- more detailed, contextual, and accurate. Eric Burns provides details of American journalism history in his book "Infamous Scribblers", and the detailed facts refute Butterworth's version.

The "Enlightened" European Broadsides

In the 1600's London broadsides issued the same sort of sensationalism that dominates todays news, complete with titles like "Sir Walter Raleigh His Lamentations!", and "No Natural Mother But Monster." The predecessor to broadcast journalism in those days came from "running patterers, who would run through London streets yelling news. The patterers would take opposite positions on street corners, each yelling their news louder than the other guy's. Not quite the enlightenment that Mr. Butterworth recounts is it? This is how newspapers in Europe started.

The earliest American paper printed was called Publick Occurrences, and was published in Boston. Benjamin Harris, a publisher who had been jailed in London for printing seditious news, abandoned his newspaper and sailed to the other side of the pond, where he started Publick Occurrences in 1690. The paper printed stories about hangings and rapes and other eye-catching drama. One tale recounted by Burns was an "international" story of a French King who "used to lie with" his son's wife. And, in a sort of predecessor to blogs, the Englishman's Publick Occurrences ran for three pages with the fourth page blank so readers could add comments and their own stories before passing it on. Enlightening?

While Burns documents the ignoble history of journalism, he also points out that the Federalist Papers were first published in the New York Independent Journal. Thomas Paine, John Adams, John Dickinson, and John Peter Zenger, also published in American newspapers.

Based then, on some false premises, Butterworth concludes:

"Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

Having perused the offerings on British news stands, I opine that British papers even today remain far from enlightening, yet at the same time you can't deny the bits of truth in Butterworth's assessment. But to put his take in proper perspective, consider that Trevor Butterworth is a researcher at Stats.org, a controversial organization that promotes so anti-science opinions, which is funded by conservatives (and well as advised (with all due respect) by dead people (RIP)). Stats.org apparently doesn't necessarily always get its facts straight and definitely sides with (or some say shills for) industry on issues like bisphenol A, alcohol advertising, and global warming. More to the point, however, Stats.org now has its own blog and Butterworth also contributes to the Huffington Post. So perhaps since his diatribe, he's come round on the blogging "revolution"?

Mediating the Blogging/MSM Landscape

More internet savvy than the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle published about 45 articles covering blogs and bloggers back in 2005-2006. For the most part the articles tracked the rising blog phenomena, with only sporadic jabs at the medium. One editorial, on March 13, 2005, astutely titled "It's not Whether Blogger's are Journalists, it's Which Are", concluded:

"To flatly say "no" [they're not journalists] leaves out a universe of those who find news, challenge our thinking and otherwise breathe oxygen into the democracy -- in itself a pretty good definition of journalism...It's a big tent. Why shouldn't there be room for bloggers?"

Dick Rogers point seemed as wise 4 years ago as it does today. Blogs come in all shapes and colors. Journalists are far more accepting of blogs then 4 years ago -- they quote blogs and cue off blogs for story ideas. But many in mainstream media can't let go of the idea that MSM is superior and that online media should conform. Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote last week:

"The truth remains: You pick up the Times, the Post, the Chron -- or read their online products -- you immediately have an anchor, some credibility and authority, not to mention a sense of place and context. In whatever you read, you know there has been, at minimum, some real editorial oversight and integrity of product borne of trained, experienced editors and writers who, believe it or not, still value accuracy and truth above all else."

Morford presents an idealistic view of the present state of newspapers. Mainstream media may have fine intentions, great journalists and editors, some fantastic articles, and a few worthy publications. But just as often you get misinformation, meaningless or misleading press releases posing as news. Just as often the end product falls far from the rosy goal. All of this motivates bloggers to blog.

It's not simply a case of one side and the other. Robert Scheer, who worked for the Los Angeles Times for almost thirty years, talked to Democracy Now last week about his impression of the traditional news media in a larger conversation about the AIG bailout. He refuted the idea of a golden era when everything in print was good, pointing out that the regulatory changes that led to the current financial tsunami went uncovered for decades by the business sections of papers:

...The good old days were not so good for mainstream journalism, and certainly not when it came to covering business stories....Much of the reporting was done by press releases.

...I saw very few mainstream reporters there. There was no critical reporting of those stories. They basically went along with what the lobbyists want. Bank of America and the other banks spent $300 million that year getting the legislation--their license to steal, in effect--and it was not covered. The Telecommunications Act was not covered.

... [B]usiness reporting has been a scandal. Why? Because the same people who own the newspapers benefit from the tax breaks, benefit from the loopholes. They're on the other side. I mean, General Electric, which is in trouble, after all, owns NBC. So these are not pristine owners. There are some exceptions of some families that have tried to do a good job, but in the main, the people running media in America, who own it, benefit and want the kind of deregulation of the whole business community that has brought us to our knees.

One could take exception to Butterworth, of Morford, or Rogers or Scheer, depending on your point of view, but they all have one point in common. Who will pay for the hard work that's behind the scenes of reporting, as newspapers disappear? One hundred visits to an FDA panel meeting may bore a reporter to distraction, but the small details reported from each FDA hearing make history. Not all news warrants 70 pixel font. Does that make it less worthy of reporting?

But why constrain the argument to the birds in hand? Why make it just about bloggers and newspapers? Why do we jump so quickly to conclude that today's state of online media represents the final model, then proceed to criticize it as though this were a true give? Bloggers will accept criticism for many things, but maybe the current online paradigm, typos and all, is only an intermittent solution to the many shortfalls of mainstream media.

Content is King For Some -- The Aggregators?

Just as Rogers did 4 years ago, Conde Nast's, Portfolio questions the finger pointing between mainstream and online media. The blog quotes Time magazine, who asked of Arianna Huffington, in a somewhat complementary but snarky article about the Huffington Post: Would she be able to continue networking successfully with print media while "killing their business?" Was she bucking for a lawsuit Time quoted one commentator?

Maybe HuffPo isn't to blame here, suggests Conde Nast. Just as Craigslist wasn't to blame for downfall of newspaper advertising, Rogers says, "Huffpo, Craigslist, Craigslist, Huffpo -- can't we all just agree to blame Google?" I think he has a point, the greatest aggregator is Google. Aggregators are great for a blurb and a link. But most online aggregators live for advertising and ever more advertising. Is there an obvious endpoint?

• If you're the Huffington Post with 3,000 bloggers, 6,000 is better -- and free content from the New York Times and everywhere else would be better still. Why link if you can get away with posting the whole article? (HuffPo links, others post the whole article)
• If you're a pharmaceutical company there's little cost to data mining research if journals are free like PLoS, so won't you keep demanding more data, cheaper.
• If you're a publishing company of any sort, more content means more money.
• If you're Google, all the world's webpages might be fine, but expanding the index to include all the world's books is even better. Including all the world's health information produces still more profit.

One can't deny that search technology is great and that we each benefit a small amount. But the people who are pushing for more free content are those who stand to benefit disproportionately to any individual's expected benefit. On the other hand, we wouldn't blame Google for replacing desktop computing with better accessibility to the "World Wide Web", or blame Microsoft for the end of punchcards and mainframes. Open source science publishing means free science news, so why complain?

Perhaps this well worn logic resonates, but should we examine more closely what we lose with "free"? First, we all pay. Users pay in ways some may never know. They pay for "Search" by viewing advertising and by yielding unknown amounts of privacy.

In a world of penny payments via advertising, based on the dying model of newspapers, what do content providers get?¹ Why does the idea that "content yearns to be free", apply to the millions who produce content, when content makes kings of those who aggregate enough of it? Is this really the democratic model? Some claim, yes. Others say transparent government and companies would provide the data that newsrooms used to collect, leaving journalists to less mundane tasks. Theoretically, yes, that would work, and we're all holding out breath.

Today, rather than pushing new models in an industry that's still very much in flux, many of us are embracing the current flawed model built on the newspaper's own advertising model. On the web, successive aggregators each gain a little more profit then the content feeder below them. CondeNast makes some money. HuffPo makes a little of of CN's content, then Google makes so much more advertising revenue off HuffPo and CN.

If the road ahead continues to be corporate expansion at all costs, will this model stimulate the same monopolistic behavior which took down newspapers and banks? Can't we do better? Why enable those who can snap their fingers and data-mine yotta-yotta-yottabytes² of information for patent-worthy or publishable tidbits to enrich themselves, when their wealth accumulates so disproportionately to the actual producers of the data? Is this yet another pyramid scheme?

----------------------------------

¹ The New York Times sent out take-down notices to some blogs who were reposting NYT content last week.

² A yottabyte (YB) is one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 1024) bytes. According to Wikipedia, all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte.

Acronym Required has written previously on open-source and open-access publishing, and on print media and its decline. To be continued.

The Rand Rage

Everyone's reading Ayn Rand. Have you noticed? The other day the Freakonomics blog wrote about a "recession icon of sorts emerges, wrapped in a Snuggie, puffing on a pipe -- and now with a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on his lap." Back in January, Stephen Moore fantasized in the Wall Street Journal:

If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Sure enough, two months later, look! As books sales went up, the stock market rose, purportedly because Citi's living richly again. Is it Rand? Another sucker rally? Moore explained his rationale for the Ayn Rand reading assignment: "Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a 'virgin.'"**

The Movie is Better

I 'd last read "Atlas Shrugged" (1942) and "The Fountainhead" (1957) one summer in high school and found Rand entertaining. I wasn't an conservative, ideologically precocious teenager. I'd probably just finished up the Hardy Boys series and I wasn't submitting essays to her namesake institute's high school writing contests, -- I read Rand as pure fiction.

My recent dilemma was how to refresh my adult mind on Rand's ideas without adding another 1000+ page book to my staggering reading list. Sure, I could have skipped the book and read the reviews. But then I would have risked misinformation, like those who regurgitate PJ O'Rourke's interpretation of "The Wealth of Nations" thinking they're reading the real thing.

I reasoned that I could reread the "The Fountainhead" faster. It's a fraction of the size of "Atlas Shrugged" and although its written a decade earlier, it's laden with the same notions. I then stumbled upon "The Fountainhead", the movie -- even better. At 113 minutes, you save days of reading, and you can multitask while you watch, because it's pablum for simpletons.

Eerily Similar?

Beyond efficiency, there's another reason to watch the movie. When you read, your mind puts you in the story. You're standing at the quarry described in "The Fountainhead" (1949) in your 2009 shoes and 2009 hairstyle, with your 2009 global attitudes and 2009 cultural disposition and intelligence. You end up thinking what readers of Atlas Shrugged think these days -- Wow! Atlas Shrugged is just like 2009 -- wasn't Rand clever? You're perhaps predispositioned to the same specious comparisons that Stephen Moore made in his WSJ article:

"In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal -- stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in "the public good." The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything."

This, Moore says, is "eerily similar" to the banks' dealings with Paulson last year when they "signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government". Really? No, actually it worked the other way. The government gave the banks the public's money, and the government isn't likely to gain much from those banks.

Consider many other examples that throw doubt on Moore's conclusion, for instance scientific research. Like many federal institutions, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), funds research at public universities and eventually those advances get transferred to private industry, which can develop, patent, and profit from research paid for by government. Arpanet, developed by the Department of Defense, is now the internet and quite lucrative for businesses. As Rand once said:

"When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes."

You can avoid this type of historical misinterpretation by watching "The Fountainhead" yourself. Rand wrote the script and was heavily involved in the editing so you should have an authentic experience.

Homeland Terrorism and Bodice Rippng

As you watch the movie you can ask yourself: Despite what Moore and others say, is this a story we want to claim as influential to our economic foundation? --Alan Greenspan was an acolyte? Is it weird that US Congressmen present "Atlas Shrugged" to departing staff? Is the USA circa 1957 relevant to the USA circa 2009?

The female protagonist of the "The Fountainhead" (1949), "Dominique", rides up on her high white horse while Howard Roark mans his drill in the quarry, all testosterone and biceps and brawn and pride. Sparks fly from the dysfunctional male/female tension typical of Harlequin romances. Like any bodice ripping potboiler-romance paperback, Dominique and Roark are each other's quarry -- but Rand goes the extra mile and sets the story in a quarry too.

Roark is an outcast architect who chooses manual mining labor rather than sacrifice his ideals as an architect who designs aesthetically unpopular buildings. In one scene Roark lets a fellow architect take credit for his drawings. Then Roark finds out the builder altered his plan, gets mad and dynamites the entire complex. So the 2009 message is...teamwork is for sissies?

How about when Roarke throws the high falutin' Dominique to the ground in violent, mad lust? 2009? Or when Roark stands up in front of the jury after his dynamiting spree and delivers his big speech on the superiority of "creators". Roark says of himself and his hero "creators" :

"The great creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed; every new invention was denounced....He held his truth above all things and against all men. He went ahead whether others agreed with him or not, with his integrity as his only banner. He served nothing and no one. He lived for himself. And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement..."

Roark is not so much noble creator, as he is a one man Weather Underground". His narcissistic speech does nothing to explain how anyone benefits from rampant vandalism, how misrepresentation of authorship is good business, or how societies would sustain themselves with such rampant selfishness. In reality, we would lock this man up as a felon. But alas, in the movie, the jury acquits him.

Harlequin Potboilers Founded our Global Economy

Just as Adam Smith proponents rarely mention the "Theory of Moral Sentiments", politicians who adopt Ayn Rand's ideas selectively pick points that they find useful and reject other significant sections of her philosophy, hailing her wisdom only when it supports their agendas.

Rand, a Russian immigrant, thought America's founders had made a big mistake in the Declaration of Independence by saying that men were "endowed 'by their Creator' with certain unalienable rights." So she had Roark redefine "creator", banish the big "C", and make each individual his own "creator", little "c".

In 2009 at least 50% of the population believes in the Creator, big "C". Rand was intolerant of this, and of Reagan and the "New Right", who she criticized for mixing religion with politics. She predicted dire consequences for Reagan's embrace of religion in his campaign:

"[R]eligious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice--and therefore it has to lead to the same result in practice: dictatorship... While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is statism....."

"[C]hildren, we are told, should be indoctrinated with state-mandated religion at school. For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the Book of Genesis as a scientific theory on par with or even superior to the theory of evolution..."

"What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans all over again, but without their excuse of ignorance....The New Right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American revolution....."

Those who see all the parallels between "Atlas Shrugged" and today's banking aren't saying anything about Rand's predictions for teaching religion in schools, a practice that GW Bush was strategically equivocal about and that conservatives continue to embrace.

Helping is Futile and Other Anomalies

During the Cold War, the US fought Communism and Socialism, so it seems natural that her writing was popular with politicians and citizens. Marginalized conservatives half a century ago naturally embraced her virulent opposition to Communism, since it fit into the narrative they were building. Now the Randian movement (and conservatives) drudge up other enemies. One such enemy is altruism.

The Simpsons satirized Ayn Rand in "A Streetcar Named Marge" -- where one poster in the "Ayn Rand School for Tots" declares "Helping Is Futile". It's no joke.

When the Asian Tsunami wiped out over 200,000 people across Asia, the Ayn Rand Institute urged western governments not to give aid. Ayn Rand criticized altruism because she predicted in was a slippery slope to Communism.

"the New Right is leading us, admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents. By virtue of the movement's essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country--and, therefore, of Communism in the world at large."

Ayn Rand ranted about the "New Right" movement that ascended into politics with Reagan, and charged that by accepting of the "New Deal", the Marshall Plan and social programs they were destroying the USA.

Twaddle to Live By?

By the end of the movie I realized my high school memory of Rand was too complimentary. I'm not movie critic, but "The Fountainhead" would dissuade most of delusions that Rand has anything to offer 2009. Do we really need to recruit "high-priced twaddle" to support modern day economics or policy?

At first we thought that since "The Fountainhead" was old, the age might be clouding our opinion. But while her book was popular in its day it also had voracious critics, and the movie met with a lot of the same criticism. A 1949 New York Times review had only scathing words for the movie: "[A] more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven't seen for a long, long time"...."Loaded with specious situations"...."wordy, involved and pretentious"...."not the most brilliant demonstration of logic in pictorial form". The author thought Roark's "creations" were abominable: "his work, from what we see of it, is trash".

If you read PJ ORourke instead of "Wealth of Nations" to understand history, or Crichton instead of the IPCC climate change report report to understand science, you might also subscribe to Rand's philosophies and urge that for today's economy. But pundits and admirers of Rand's fiction sweep under a giant rug all the anachronisms and flaws of "objectivism".

Historians with Atlas Shrugged in their hands would convince you Americans are individualists and historical winners. They would trace a history that connects today to yesterday, wealth to happiness, to Reagan to Rand and the glorious defeat of Communism, to the Invisible Hand and to Jesus Christ himself. But these are gauzy, fatuous connections, built around tawdry tales like "The Fountainhead".

So why is everyone touting Rand? Perhaps so they can drive by all the food lines and spit on people with a clear conscious? Who knows. But if major constituencies in America turn now to embrace Rand's half-century old "philosophy", should we worry?

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**Then what? (Rand's fictional women were routinely flung to the ground by her male heros and defiled or deflowered -- Ahhh, the good 'ole days?)

Grapevine of Worry

Lucy Kellaway wrote in the Financial Times a couple of days ago that her own "mild fearfulness" about the economy had ballooned to hyperventilating paranoia after she spent time surfing the web and opening e-mail.

"Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world's economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours, and yours become mine."

Since I don't "sit over my computer all day and feed my anxiety", I disagree. I don't succumb to bad news, rather I cheer myself when Obama talks about limiting publicly financed executive pay, or when the head of the Bureau of Land Management puts a hold on the drilling leases near national parks auctioned off by the Bush administration. In dire moments, I distract myself with unicorn chasers and happy news. Don't you? I walk away from the computer at will. I turn it off.

Back To Math Class You Go

But lets move beyond my anecdotal evidence. Lucy Kellaway speaks, as always, slightly tongue in cheek, but other news stories might convince you that the internet truly does harbor inescapable and vile corruption that needs to be caged. Take for instance, the New York Times piece yesterday about MySpace and their campaign to purge registered sex predator names from their site. According to the NYT, MySpace turned over 90,000 names to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

Officials are pressuring social networking sites to adopt more stringent safety standards to assure children's safety. This is a welcome but confusingly priority since a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, commissioned by 49 state attorneys general found that bullying online was a far more serious problem than sexual solicitation. Nevertheless, Attorney General Blumenthal said in a recent statement:

"Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace -- shown by our subpoena -- is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable...for every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages."

I'm all for blocking names. But lets sort through his math. 90,000 names, times "hundreds" of "others". We'll interpret his "hundreds" conservatively, let's say 300-- although perhaps the Attorney General meant 900. So 90,000 * 300 = 27,000,000 sex offenders on MySpace? Maybe up to 81,000,000? The population of the US is ~303,824,640. So on the conservative side, Blumenthal tells us that 1 in 10 US sex offender citizens trolls MySpace. YIKES!

The Times reports later in the story that there are 700,000 sex offenders in the US. The paper doesn't worry with the math discrepancy. Instead they quote John A. Phillips, "chief executive of Aristotle, a company that supplies identity and age verification technologies for companies like the New York State Lottery, breweries and film studios", who is trying to sell his software to Myspace, and so piles on: '"this is just the tip of the iceberg on MySpace".

So, fear for the little children. Fear for the investor class, homeowners, and retirement fund enrollees. Who else?

Fear For the Suggestible, the Unvaccinated

If 1/1000 to 4/1000 registered YouTube users rate vaccination videos with 1 to 5 stars, adding comments like, "your video is stupid, and your a dumbass that's what my mom thinks", should we use this "data" to propagate concern that YouTube feeds the public irrational and dangerous opinions about vaccinations? A year ago the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study that did exactly that.

In December 2007, University of Toronto researchers announced a "first-ever study of its kind". The investigators selected YouTube videos relating to immunizations or vaccinations, and concluded that much of the video content "contradicts the best scientific evidence". The public health community should find this "very concerning", they wrote. The press pounced on this announcement like a starved puppy tossed a Porterhouse steak. Articles titled "YouTube Full Of One-Sided Anti-Vaccination Videos", littered the news.

The authors selected and watched 153 videos. 73 (48%) had so called "positive" messages (in favor of immunization) , 49 videos (32%) had so called "negative" messages, and 31 videos (20%) had so called "ambiguous" messages. The study concluded:

• 1) "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers"
• 2) negative videos were more likely to "receive more views"
• 3) negative videos "received a higher mean star rating".

The authors then generated their dire warnings.

Garbage In...

When JAMA published the study I spent some time looking at their data, which I'll briefly highlight here. Unfortunately, it was impossible to repeat the study. Obviously, time had elapsed between authors' video viewing and publication, but also the authors' described their methodology fleetingly: "On February 20, 2007, we searched YouTube (www.youtube.com) using the keywords vaccination and immunization." Straight-forward and repeatable? Hardly. Different permutations of the keywords and Boolean operators yielded anywhere from 63 to 1300 videos, when we copied their methodology. This result may not seem important, but such unreliability prompted us to look at the validity of the study's conclusions.

The authors found that "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers." Of 73 "positive" videos, 46 had a rating. Out of 49 "negative" videos, 42 had a rating. But you have to wonder how meaningful a metric like "number of ratings" or "likely to rate" is. Looking at the raw data a different way, you would also learn that more people rate "positive" videos.

We multiplyied 73 "positive" videos by the study's "mean number of positive" video views - 181, which gives 13,213 views. Yet there were only 37 viewer ratings. Multiplying 49 "negative" videos by the mean, 520 views per video, gives 25,480 viewers -- but only only 36 ratings. So yes, there were "more views" of "negative" than "positive" videos, and more negative videos were rated. But also the data showed that an individual is more likely to rate a "positive" video (.28% of viewers rated), than the "negative" video (.14% of viewers rated). Why? Do more people watch "positive" videos to the end? Who knows.

There were other confounding questions unanswered by the study. How long had the videos been posted? Does rating a video actually signal a change in attitude? Behavior? Anything? How many people rate videos -- only registered users can rate videos, so do registered YouTube users represent the vaccinating public? Is a "negative" Gardasil video a "bad" public health message, given the uncertainty about the pros and cons of that vaccine? Moreover, can tabulating viewer ratings translate to anything meaningful? Especially when only ~1-2 in 1000 viewers rates a video?

...Garbage Out

The authors also tallied the YouTube star ratings and concluded that "negative" videos received higher ratings. But in a 1-5 star rating system such as YouTube's, what do we learn from reports that the mean "positive" video rating was 3.5, with 1.5 standard deviations (SD), whereas the mean "negative" video rating was 4.4 with .9 SD?

Does running statistics on shaky data make it more meaningful? According to analyses of 5-Star Rating Systems there are plenty of other problems with drawing many conclusions from ratings. Individual ratings tend to be either very low, or very high (1 or 5), in a bimodal distribution. Problematically, an average score of 3 or 4 might only describe "conflicting opinions". As it turns out, averaging most 5 star ratings gives a mean 3-4 star rating.

Another bias of 5 star rating systems is upward-bias from "fans". For instance, when we looked at available videos in December, 2007, in a video from "House MD", the TV program, a doctor very sarcastically scorns a woman for not vaccinating her child. This ("positive") video got rated very highly (4+ stars). But tans will rate a show highly no matter what the public health message. Problematically, then, the JAMA study uses these crude ratings to make some serious public health claims about the dangers of YouTube.

In December 2007 we did our own little mini-study on YouTube to confirm the JAMA data showing that only 1-5 of every 1000 viewers rated these videos (true). Ironically, at the time, the most popular YouTube video about vaccination was a "positive" one put out by a pharmaceutical company, which only showed up in some searches. This corporate video got almost 800,000 views, more than 10 times the 69,000 total views of the 153 videos the authors studied, far surpassing all the "negative" videos.

The pharmaceutical company was advertising a video contest for homemade videos about getting a flu shot with a $500 prize. The video got negative reviews, but some comments reflected people's annoyance that the contest had ended or they hadn't won. The House MD video was the second most popular video.

Barbarians on the Net

This idea that the internet will tear down society one way or another by undermining civility, by cultivating irrational fear, spreading disease, crime, or irrational behavior is not new, and in fact reflects various bricks and mortar versions of the same fear-mongering. See for instance, The Coming Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan and similar titles. In reality, nation-states quite adeptly control the internet, as they do their roadways, waterways, and airspace.

Despite the constant threat of unreasonableness and anarchy, it is reason that often trumps unreasonable cacophony on the internet, the opposite of what people predict. Would Obama have been elected without the internet? Would the Palin candidacy have met the same fate without TV's internet availability to the hordes who watched Couric and Fey?

The internet has its problems, but I suspect its vagaries offend most people when the internet disrupts the power assumptions they hold dear. One can find all the nastiness, the worry, the fear, and the bizarre opinions of the internet on the streets. In reality, predators pass kids everyday on the street, as anonymously as on the the net.

The internet provides only an illusion of anonymity for ne're-do-wells and oafs, just as your house with its fence and well surveyed lot and planted trees provides an illusion of safety to you. Do those in privileged positions avoid the awfulness of the cement ghetto more easily than they elude the unsettling and unwanted spam in their AM inbox, and thus be more offended by the internet?

Power brokers of course become threatened by the internet. Record companies, the networks, and politicians, and pharmaceutical companies -- they've all had run-ins with the internet. Professors object to "RateMyProfessor", as it mucks up the power structure. But it's certainly helps the public forum.

One needs to exam the data behind assertions that the internet is dangerous. Corporations have far more power on the internet than so called fringe groups -- to advertise, to astroturf, to datamine, and to collect personal information, although they may claim that's not so. The pro-vaccination video put out by the pharmaceutical company, even by the very dubious standards put forth in the JAMA study, was more "influential" then all the rest of the videos on YouTube combined.

Authors, consultants, the media, have always tried to pin down and characterize internet communication trends, but their calculations and predictions often miss because they are only a static snapshot of the evolving internet at a point in time. John Perry Barlow predicted the World Wide Web without a government (1996); consultants predicted internet "content was king" (1997); Cass Sunstein dreamed up regulatory schemes so that the polarizing internet wouldn't destroy democracy (2001); and print journalists talked about how doomed blogging was (2004). They misunderstood the adaptability of the internet as a communication tool and underestimated how individuals, corporations, and governments would continue to shape it to further their own personal wish lists. One day anti-vaccination videos seem prevalent, the next, pharmaceuticals have usurped YouTube just fine thank-you.

The film critic Robert Ebert is right, newspapers can be great to read, (all five of them) they also tend towards banal, narrow-minded, wrong, and biased, so we better get used to the excellent, disparate, positive as well as very negative flux of the internet.

From Taiwan: BPA "Potentially Toxic"

Taiwan is considering listing bisphenol A (BPA) as a "potentially toxic substance". Companies that used BPA would be required to notify the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of Taiwan. Taiwan is one of the primary manufacturers of BPA in the world. ¹ The country produced 635 megatons of BPA in 2005, compared to about 2260 megatons produced in the US during the same year. Japan, Western Europe, Korea and South American also manufacture large quantities of BPA. (Chemical Week, October, 2005.)

From Canada: CBC's "Disappearing Male"

The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) recently aired a program on bisphenol A called "The Disappearing Male", available here and at CBC. The program broached a subject that hasn't been discussed too much in the media, the effect of certain chemicals on male sexual development, both in humans and other species.

The report reviews the effects of plastics on health and environment according to scientists who have long sought to bring attention to the deleterious effects of endocrine disruptors. The film also reports on a Canadian town called Aamjiwnaang Canada, that sits by a toxic chemical plant, where girl babies outnumber boy babies by about 2:1.

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¹ We previously looked at the response of politicians to citizens' safety concerns in terms of the economics of bisphenol A in Canada and the US.

² The film also provides a brief demo on mouth pipetting.

Obama Change? Like Island Time?

When the Obama team signaled this week they would not follow through on their campaign promise to impose a windfall tax on oil profits, people wondered whether "Obama Change" was "change" only in some warped sense of the word -- like being on "Island Time" -- elusive, non-committal, eventual, perhaps. After all, he did say back in the day:

"I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills."

That was June, 2008. So what was that campaign promise about? Easing the worries of families who were broke? Was it Obama's fleeting response to an audience who disapproved of oil companies getting super-rich while the economy flagged? Was it just an empty promise? Or perhaps now with oil prices so low windfall taxes wouldn't suffice to help individual energy bills. Did the president-elect's threat influence the price of oil? Perhaps oil executives lowered prices in order to dip below the radar a bit.

It's hard to know who's being more wily, Obama or oil companies. But before we can spend too much time wondering why the president-elect changed his mind on windfall taxes, Barack Obama gives us more promises. We reported a couple of weeks ago on Obama's address to the Governors' Global Climate Summit about his administration's intentions to act on climate change and invest in "500 million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

In Obama's address to the nation yesterday, he re-presented the idea of the "National Infrastructure Reinvestment", which he also pushed during his campaign.

Highways, Information Super Highways, Technology, more Technology

On energy, Obama's promising to produce jobs by making buildings more energy-efficient. As he put it:

"We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won't just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work."

"Installing efficient light bulbs." When Obama ran for president interviewers would ask him what he did to save energy and light bulbs and the exchanges became a bit of a joke. Here was his take on changing lightbulbs::

"...Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, ''I'm talking about personal. What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

When Barbara Walter's asked Obama about the light bulbs a couple of weeks ago, they both laughed -- a shared joke. But now he's launching his "collective" light bulb plan? Obama is also promising a "sweeping effort" to modernize schools -- to make them energy efficient also.

Additionally Obama promises his administration will invest in infrastructure, new highways and bridges. And not only tarmac highways but information super-highways too. Saturday Obama also mentioned technology to solve healthcare problems -- by networking hospitals, increasing broadband penetration so everyone is on the internet, and increasing student access to computers.

Infrastructure without the B-Word?

Obama is following through with his campaign plan to launch a 21st century "New Deal" and says such an investment hasn't been made since the Eisenhower days. As a Senator, Obama co-sponsored the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007" introduced by Senator Christorpher Dodd (D-CT) in August 2007. The idea is to establish banks to fund the a subset of the projects Obama spoke of yesterday. When Obama campaigned last summer on "rebuilding America", he also talked about a bank, as well as promising to withdraw support from Iraq to fund infrastructure.

As everyone knows, Iraq is a bit in limbo -- and where's the bank? Where's the follow through on banks? Or is it all a joke?

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Acronym Required wrote on infrastructure and the Minnesota Bridge collapse in "Guano Takes the Bridge, Pigeons Take the Fall". We wrote about infrastructure and the levees in "FEMA and Disaster Preparedness", "Disaster Preparedness - Can We?", and "Levees - Our Blunder". We're fascinated with technological salves for problems.

YAY!

It's a new day.

"...His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world..." (NYT)¹

Yes, there's work to do. Yes, it will be difficult. But today we recognize how much America's just accomplished.

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¹Obama won despite warnings about possible GOP ballot fraud stemming from information dribbling out of the Ohio trial concerning 2004 Ohio ballot fraud. In the latest episode, Michael Connell, a consultant whose firm has been accused of computer manipulation, denied knowing anything about GOP rigging the 2004 Ohio election results. Connell works for Randy Cole. Cole owns 15 companies that work simultaneously on GOP election campaigns (Bush/Cheney 2000/2004, McCain 2008, many others), anti-Abortion groups and churches, GOP mass mailings, government contracts, etc. Stephen Spoonamore, a key witness in the trial brings the allegations, explains in a multi-part series starting here.

Stud's Terkel passed away October 31st at the age of 96. Robert Ebert, who had known him for years, described him as a man of "boundless curiosity and bottomless memory" -- a great listener. He was blacklisted during McCarthyism along with his wife -- Hoover thought he was subversive. In turn, Terkel suspected that Hoover "had a lifelong suspicion of those who thought the Constitution actually meant something". As Ebert put it:

"Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and 20 best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names."

Ebert writes on Terkel here. Studs Terkel's recorded conversations with people across the U.S. bringing poignant humanity to subjects that many people would have just as soon dodged. He wrote books -- Division Street , on Chicago and immigration; Hard Times, on the great depression; The Good War, on World War II, Race, Coming of Age, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, and more. His radio show ran for 25 years, and each night he signed off "Take it easy, but take it."

Terkel was always up to something. Last year, among many activities, he joined a suit against telecoms for wiretapping done at the bequest of the Bush administration. Acronym Required commented on his commentary in the New York Times concerning granting the companies immunity from lawsuits. We quoted his comment about living in the last century: "nothing much surprises me anymore. But I always feel uplifted by this: Given the facts and an opportunity to act, the body politic generally does the right thing." As Ebert said, he missed the upcoming election, but he didn't miss much else.

Happy Halloween. Over 23 million people have voted in early elections across the United States. People are now driven to distraction by the election, even Acronym Required at times. But we're also distracted by science topics.

• Decidin'

  For instance take the cartoon that accompanied an article in last week's New Yorker. It was a drawing of a TinTin looking character, eyes wide, eyebrows arched, finger to his pursed lips, puzzling over two choices on a wall chart. On the left I saw a rooster. On the right I saw a Drosophila.

  The accompanying article "Undecided", by David Sedaris, discussed the baffling group of supposedly undecided voters:

  "I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?"

  He placed the dilemma in terms of airline food (he probably flies in the class where the still have that):

  "The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

  It still took me a while to figure out that the cartoon character was standing in a voting booth. The choice was not a silly Rooster or Drosophila but "chicken" or "shit with bits of broken glass" in it. The Drosophila wasn't that at all, just a giant red-eyed other type of more fuzzy fly, standing on a small brown mound that represented Sedaris' subject, "shit". In an effort to explain my confusion, I'll just say I was writing about C. elegans at the time, another model organism, so perhaps that's why I saw Drosophila melanogaster.

• Buggin'

  It was a Drosophila kind of week. Scientists and many knowledgeable Americans (and French) were angry that V.P. candidate Sarah Palin dissed fruit fly research as waste. Of course she wasn't talking about Drosophila melanogaster, but olive fruit flies in a completely different taxonomic family. But the outrage over her perfunctory dismissal of California agricultural research is warranted.

• Poisonin'

  Updating our melamine coverage from previous posts, this week brought China and Hong Kong melamine contaminated eggs, thus widening the scandal. The culprit may be melamine laced grain which has spread the toxic chemical throughout the food chain. China is now culling chickens. The past year has seen the demise -- through culling and dumping -- of some major protein sources, pigs, milk, eggs, chicken -- hopefully there's some unadulterated beans and soy and rice around.

• Labelin'

  India passed the Prevention of Food Adulteration (Fifth Amendment) Rules, 2008, which will require food product labels starting in March, 2009. Fruit products cannot be labeled as such unless they contain fruit, etc. Cardiac conscious customers will now be able to identify transfats such as "vansapati", hydrogenated vegetable cooking oil which is commonly found in packaged food.

• Trick-or-Treatin'
  The cost of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes doubled between 2001 and 2007, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, from $6.7 billion dollars in 2001, to $12.5 billion dollars in 2007. The higher cost is due to new drugs, which can be 10 times higher than old drugs, as well as increased numbers of patients. The number of patient visits increased from 25 million in 1994, to 36 million in 2007.

  But today's Halloween. So here's a carbohydrate chart (PDF!) from "DLife" (For Your Diabetes Life!") For example:
  - 3 Musketeers 16 gram fun-sized bar: 12 grams
  - Gummy Bears 11 pieces: 30 grams
  - M&M's "Halloween" mini box: 10 grams
  - Tootsie Roll midgets 12: 30 grams
  - Heath Bar 1.4 oz. bar: 20 grams
  

• Cravin' Palin

  One of this year's most popular costumes is a Sarah Palin costume. This would be a challenging one to pull off for three reasons. One, it's just gonna' be an icky couple of hours sitting in that particular suit. Two, do you really have her style down? Sarah Palin is hot, according to, well, everyone, which may be hard to live up to. I recently got an explanation of this relative hotness -- it's "niche hot". Therefore if she doesn't win the vice presidency maybe she'll vamp through Playboy, with a "hot" politician theme, and if not that, then she actually already has her Palin calendar awaiting your purchase.

  But she's a tricky act to follow, which brings us to your third challenge. You might be able to cackle "you betcha!" with the best of them, you might be able to wink wildly, you might be able bend the elite right wing news staff of the Weekly Standard, the National Review, The Hill, and the New York Times to your side by leading them around by the front of their pants, as a recent New Yorker article describes¹.

  But do you really have her diction down? Can you remember to drop the "g" on pallin', and lyin' -- like Palin'? Maybe, but can you remember to leave the "g" on the word when necessary? Can you remember to say "cravING", as she does? As in, American's are craving that straight talk"? And Americans are craving something new and different..." You're not hearing "I'm Sarah and I'm cravin'". Americans are cravinG.

  Sure "it's genuine, not affectation", just like she's genuine in every other way, an outsider, didn't hire lobbyists to buff her image as Alaskan governor. I think it's a tough Halloween costume to pull off.

• Swoopin' & Spookin'
  Merriam Webster's Word of the Day is Chiropteran:

  "Chiroptera" is the name of the order of the only mammal capable of true flight, the bat. The name is influenced by the hand-like wings of bats, which are formed from four elongated "fingers" covered by a cutaneous membrane. It is based on the Greek words for "hand," "cheir," and "wing," "pteron." "Cheir" also had a hand in the formation of the word "surgery," which is ultimately derived from the ancient word "cheirourgos," meaning "doing by hand."

  Acronym Required wrote a little about bats in "Bats, Riddles, and Viruses."

• Mappin' not Spyin'

  The town of Molfsee, Germany, is rebelling against Google's "Street View". Google would dispatch vehicles with camera's to map the town's streets, but the 5,000 citizens have laid down the law. The company would need a special permit to photograph the city's streets, which the town politicians refuse to grant. The town's concerns about privacy are shared by state and federal privacy experts, according to Spiegel.

• Votin'

  As for the election, some, like Larry David, are pacing and suspicious. There's been a steady stream of alarming reports about voting machines, it's no wonder that everyone's a bit on edge.

  There's apparently a trend now, everyone's droppin' their g's. On the positive side, voting turn-out so far is great. Pray; no Hope; no Work for the most honest, cleanest result.

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¹ This article also contends that this one young Republican started a blog advocating Sarah Palin for Vice President, and that blog precipitated a lot of conservative enthusiasm: "In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day". To put this in perspective Daily Kos gets about 2,604,779 page views a day, so if there's about 3-4 hits per page view, DKos gets about 6 million hits a day. Brickley was getting about 1000 pages a day -- not too much.

You watch me and I watch you and the government watches us and we watch the government. If everyone is in on the surveillance then the cameras all around us shouldn't make us paranoid right? Citizens can access the images as well as government, and through all this benevolent spying, we'll decrease crime and preserve liberty. Life will be good in a "transparent society", better than in the old fashioned privacy days, in fact some thought think this "transparency" was is the only way liberty would be preserved. Although I'm simplifying a bit, David Brin's article and book about his "Transparent Society" received laudatory attention when it was published ten years ago.

Even a couple of years ago, before cell phones with cameras were ubiquitous and before governments accelerated post-9-11 surveillance was still under wraps "technoprogressive" critics continued to argue the pros (often) and cons (sometimes) of the "transparent society". A couple of years ago the corner cameras didn't have quite the omnipresence they now have in the UK and it was easier to imagine what the technology could be before the technology was in our midst, fully realized.

I was a "Transparent Society" critic for many reasons which could be summed up by saying I thought the ideas naively utopian. However I marveled how the technology Brin predicted became commonplace and how cell-phone cameras, for one, offer citizens ready opportunities to document events. But no matter how many times people update their Facebook, despite how many times technology companies market their newest freedom enhancing device, citizens don't usually get the upper hand in the information arbitrage, regardless of the medium of exchange. One of the most compelling recent criticisms of the "transparent society" was written by Bruce Schneier last March in his column "Security Matters", published by Wired. He criticized the idea that "mutual disclosure" could stop the inevitable erosion of privacy via technology:

"...it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power. You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee."

This seems more obvious now than it did in March, more obvious in March, 2008 than few years ago. Brin's ideas now seem as facile as John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow's 1996 piece told governments to stay out of Cyberspace, which he declared a "civilization" and promised a "more humane and fair than the world your governments have made."

Each year's technology evolutions make those original manifestos seem in hindsight, more nostagic, even quaint. China now monitors and archives Skype messages. Ah, but I don't live in China you say. Then for you the New York Times writes today about the newest book by James Bamford "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra- Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". The author's third book on the NSA focuses on "the agency's growing partnership with private companies to tap into the fiber-optic cables that now carry most telephone and Internet traffic." As he documents in the book, ABC reported that the NSA had been recently eavesdropping on ordinary citizens abroad.

What are citizens to do if it ends up they can't hold a candle to the state's spying? Get creative. Via BoingBoing, we're led to Open Rights Group's (ORG) 4 X 5 meter collage of photos of surveillance "ephemera" all over the UK. The group collected photos capturing what they call "UK's wholesale transformation into the surveillance society/database state". ORG then arranged the photos into a "Big-Brother-esque photo of Gordon Brown looking over Parliament Square against a background of barbed wire, handcuffs and double helice."

The (new) US government also has some ideas up its' sleeves. Like the so called "Google government" proposed by Obama in 2006 or Palin in 2008. Will that correct the imbalance of power by making more information available to citizens? Ease our minds?

It's the Economy and the Election...

When US citizens wake up each morning wondering what they might have lost from their retirement accounts overnight, and what they inadvertently gained: i.e., one morning you learn you're part owner of a gargantuan mortgage business, the next you find yourself lassoed into a giant insurance collective -- no one knows what's next. Will there be a knock on your door tomorrow AM and someone waiting to press a hoe into your hand?

When congress says they're reeling, they're "stunned" from the news delivered by the Fed at their big powwow last night, and when the press is overwhelmed with the ups and downs of an off-the-charts financial crisis and the back and forth poll numbers for McCain and Obama, we completely understand that you can't give science your usual riveted attention. With the Fed sucking up all these great liabilities and throwing the whole the "government needs to get out of the way of business" idea out the window -- or did we just all misunderstand what that really meant -- we agree that reading up on monetary policy and investigating your own sense of what "full-scale panic" means might be your highest concern.

Sure the future of permafrost is interesting, cell culture research and science curriculum really important, and yes, these things should definitely claim our attention and that of all four candidates. But I'm distracted wondering why GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin canceled more appearances in the last few days than the number of heavyweights the Republicans have pulled in to play defense in Troopergate. Palin's appearances have been canceled in Seattle & the Eastside, Virginia Beach, Dayton, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Tampa and Central Florida, Virginia Beach, Cincinatti, Jackson Hole, and all of California, as well as other places. Did McCain shoo her off-stage with Fiorina to be seldom seen and not heard? Is she cramming for a American Politics 101 final? Dental work? Did she she see a Russian tanker trawling the water out her dining room window? Nervous breakdown? Sure the also "hot" Cindy McCain will replace Palin at some events, but there's got to be some disappointed Palin admirers.

Anyway, we tear ourselves away from those massive shim-sham distractions (for the moment), in order to glance at some recent science-ish news.

Some Science Headlines

• Thousands Tens of thousands of babies are sick and several have died from Chinese baby formula contaminated with melamine that compromises kidney function. This is the same chemical that was found in pet food imported from China to the U.S. last year. Officials in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangladesh Yemen, Gabon, Burundi and Myanmar express concern that the tainted products might be available to consumers their countries also.

  Melamine has also be found in milk, yogurt and ice cream in China and Hong Kong. In 2007 the FDA found that US manufacturers of animal feed had also adulterated their product with melamine.

  Earlier this year, contamination of US supplies of heparin led the FDA to investigate and find myriad problems in the oversight process of the imported product. The agency discovered quality control issues, ranging from agency confusion about the real name of a Chinese plant that went un-inspected; to the crude processing methods of the pigs intestine in family-style workshops". Experts admonished drug makers (after the fact) that the shortage of pigs in China due to blue-ear disease should have served as a red flag to the possibility of spiked heparin.

  Heads will certainly roll (figuratively if not literally) in China over the milk scandal, but an overall plan about how to prevent the next batch of fatalities has yet to emerge. In this instance, neither US and Canadian health agencies have found melamine contamination in their milk products.

• In other news, the FDA has banned 31 drugs manufactured for export to the US by the Indian company Ranbaxy, based on an inspection of the company's Dewas plant that revealed cracked equipment, unsterilized and unclean preparation areas, inadequate procedure specification, and sporadic documentation of testing and cleaning.

  Yesterday, in response, Ranbaxy announced that it had hired Rudy Giuliani, last seen speaking on behalf of McCain at the GOP convention, to help lobby the US agency.

• Also: Environmentalists cheered last year when Florida penned an agreement to buy land in the Everglades from the sugar industry. Interestingly, some of those who pressed hardest for the move were free-market conservatives and groups such as the Cato Institute. Sugar subsidies were instituted back in the 1930's, but the industry has since shrunk, and been monopolized by a few firms whose prices were kept artificially high with the subsidies, crowding out foreign competitors. The Fanjuls, an entrepreneuring family originally from Cuba, own one of two Florida companies that control most of the sugar consumed in the US. Last Sunday the New York Times ran a great article about the buyout, digging deeper into some of the issues complicating the deal, and questioning whether the company actually arranged for their land to be lucratively bought out by the state when its business began to suffer in the downturn.

• In infectious disease news: The CDC estimates that 90,000 people die in the US each year from institution acquired infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Science reports this week that the "perfect storm" of antibiotic resistance and diminished reserves of medicines portends trouble The situation not only demands new drugs, according to Science, it requires new drug targets.

  The journal summarizes two recent studies that work in this direction. In the first, a group of scientists created a class of synthetic antibacterials effective against staphylococci including methicillin and multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus.(D. J. Haydon et al., Science 321, 1673 (2008)) The chemicals target specific proteins responsible for cell division. The August 22nd issue of Sciencecontained a report from another group who found a molecule that inhibits the gene which causes virulence and is turned on when certain conditions occur as the host responds to the infection. (D. A. Rasko et al., Science 321, 1078 (2008))

  On the prevention side of things, researchers at the University of Illinois found that tetracycline resistance genes can most likely be transferred from animal to animal in large hog containment areas into groundwater that feeds the public water supply. This could be one way that antibiotics used in feed to prevent infection and promote growth are adding to the overall problem of antibiotic resistance.

  And to get a sense of how far our understanding about microbes and mechanisms of infection, read up on Stanley Falkow from Stanford University, who was one of five scientists honored with a Lasker prize for his work on microbes and aspects of antibiotic resistance.

• Iran has detained AIDS doctors Dr Kamiar Alaei and his brother Dr Arash Alaei since late June. (via Nature News) The two were known world-wide for working to prevent and treat the disease, and for tackling issues around HIV/AIDS in model ways, for a country which long denied that HIV/AIDS was anything but a "Western Disease". Their disappearance in late June has drawn global concern and calls from various physician groups for the Iranian President to answer questions about the whereabouts of the AIDS doctors. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled appearance at a UN meeting next week.

• In other news: Both McCain and Obama have now submitted answers to questions about their science policy gathered by ScienceDebate2008. Some of their statements have been published here at the LA Times also. Several other science groups have submitted a document for both campaigns that lays out strategy for the incoming president on science and technology policy. Obama has named five science advisers who would serve his administration.

• Now for some old news: Last May the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), Sarah Palin tried to obfuscate the contents of report written by state scientists that supported the federal scientists' decision of list polar bear as an endangered species. Palin wrote in an editorial in the New York Times January 5, 2008: "I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time. My decision is based on a comprehensive review by state wildlife officials of scientific information from a broad range of climate, ice and polar bear experts." But the state's biologists agreed with the federal assessment. Palin is has also been criticized for her positions on global warming, oil and gas drilling, Exxon Valdez oil spill damages, and the Endangered Species Act. Why does this sound so familiar to me?

Oops, we've inadvertently gone full circle, escaping politics with science then allowing ourselves to get whooshed back into the politics. But why not wonder about Palin? There's no outro to this post. We wonder what science policy would really be like in a McCain government, or in an Obama government? More like China? More like India? More of the same? Same, same but "different"? Science and technology depends on politics and government. We may think we know what science and technology looks like in an "extreme" market economy, we've seen its penultimate apex during the Bush administration. ¹ But lets not forget that we didn't anticipate Bush's actions. Now's the time to think beyond the rhetoric. I'm not sure I buy what many people insist -- that the candidates will be very alike on science issues. Now's the time wonder why McCain chose Palin if their philosophy is so different. Now's the time to learn more about Obama's science advisers.²

Perhaps we can have some government involved before the next giant catastrophe...? Before the energy investment bubble, the imminent infectious disease outbreak, the next bunch products consumed by citizens because manufacturers successfully slipped drugs cut with toxic proteins past the FTC or the FDA, the next species goes endangered, the growing storm of global warming, or the EPA....does whatever they do? There aren't too many science problems that won't be directly influenced by the new administration's policies.

¹ The book Supercapitalism by Robert Reich was interesting.

²Though it's certainly nice to see he has any now.

Un-Science Tuesday

A while ago, some self-appointed science public relations coaches took to criticizing scientists who published important science news on Fridays. Of course up to that point, for me, Fridays had been for science reading -- a little journal club and catching up on the literature. Science Friday wasn't just an NPR show. But these folks sternly instructed scientists to publish the big news at the beginning of the week, at the start of the "news cycle". They scolded them when they didn't.

I'm still not too sure that science fits in the whole "news cycle" paradigm -- the crazy and consumptive frenzy. Can science really be skimmed, emoted, and flushed? I suppose if science is to be "news" it must adapt. Accordingly then, even though economists say "there is no Friday Effect", some science publicists dutifully publish their Big Science News at the beginning of the week.

It follows then with just as much logic, that if Monday is the big day for science news than Tuesdays must be the day for big anti-Science news. No, you say, Tuesday's a big science day too. The New York Times runs their weekly Science section on Tuesdays. True, but consider that columnists steer the opinion ship for the NYT and on Tuesday John Tierney the "science columnist" runs his distinctively un-Science section. Just yesterday he assured us in his article in "10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List", that the Arctic ice isn't melting, cellphones don't cause cancer, hot dogs are good for you, and bisphenol-A is one of life's essential building blocks.

On one hand I understand his feelings. Every time you turn around there's another disturbing warning. Recently, radium emitting granite counter tops attracted attention or the type that manufacturers will resent, and that after warnings on cellphones, jalapeno peppers, salmonella tainted tomatoes.

Of course, there's an economic downside to all of this. The salmonella warnings caused the price of tomatoes to fall by $3.00 per pound in my area. Of course, this was good for me. I took a small personal risk and bought some localish tomatoes, despite frenzied media calls to avoid them. But unlike Tierney who likes to turn his personal choices into the reader's public policy, I didn't march around the produce section with a megaphone hectoring other shoppers to buy tomatoes. Tierney the New York Times"science columnist" hounds others to adapt his anti-global warming, anti-recycling, anti-science positions.

You'd think New York Times wouldn't choose as "science columnists" writers who tell people to ignore scientists, but I can only conclude that when your paper's profit drops 82% in a quarter, the "fit to print" standard plummets as well. (Although Tierney's been at this for a while, I argue he's reached a new low.) Here's the science behind some of Tierney's science fact denialism.

• Now that the "nitrite scare" has passed Tierney says, and grilled food is ok, rest assured that hot dogs are ok too. However scientists don't say any such thing. Doctors say nitrites are linked to stomach cancer. Who do you believe? The Mayo Clinic? Or John Tierney?
• John Tierney has long claimed that global warming is trumped up fear mongering, that the Arctic ice isn't melting and by extension there's no global warming. Last week, a huge 4 kilometer piece broke off the Arctic shelf. Derek Mueller, a polar scientist and research fellow at Trent University, in Peterborough, commented ""Ice shelves don't just break up. There's no karate chop". He went on to note the shelf's "gradual weakening over time as a result of warming temperatures." Of course, John Tierney didn't say "a 4 mile block of ice didn't break of last week". He just didn't mention the fact.
• Recently a panel of more than 20 scientists looked at various cell phone studies and found some alarming evidence that pointed to increased risks for brain cancer. They recommended taking 10 simple precautions while using cell phones which the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute announced last week. John Tierney skips over that information.

  Instead he says that despite the fact that "prominent brain surgeons" talk publicly about cell phone dangers, his "colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted that there is no known biological mechanism for the phones' non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent links between cancer and cellphones." Who do you trust Prominent brains surgeons or Tierney's parsing of his colleague's column?

  Tierney skips the part of Parker-Pope's that about article ¹ research showing "increases in three cancers: glioma; cancer of the parotid, a salivary gland near the ear; and acoustic neuroma, a tumor that essentially occurs where the ear meets the brain." Parker-Pope noted that researchers are concerned about the design flaws and duration of many of the previous studies which showed no harm from cell phones.

  Another recent article on cellphones makes it clear:"The scientists agree on two things: there's no formal proof of the cell phone's harmfulness, but a risk exists that it promotes the appearance of cancers in cases of long-term exposure."

• On bisphenol A, Tierney writes that he still uses his "old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with [bisphenol-A] BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts". He warns that "if they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers". Of course this is his choice, nevertheless, scientists show in hundreds of studies that BPA is an endocrine disruptor that's unnecessary to the manufacture of baby bottles.

So in your experience -- think climate change, tobacco, asbestos, beryllium -- when science doesn't "know for sure", is that the time to pull out the stops and go all cavalier with risky behavior...? When it's so incredibly easy to reduce your family's personal risk? By publishing a jumble of half-truths, incorrect information, laced with that devil may care attitude, the New York Times erodes its credibility and does a disservice to both science and consumers.

The Campaign to Stop the Worry. Aren't They Thoughtful?

Not all Tierney's so labeled worries are equally risky. But his presentation, incomplete facts and distorted interpretations aim not to clarify but to muddy the waters. I don't know what the risk associated with his 10th point, "unmarked wormholes" is, and I personally can't ameliorate it. Scientists don't know the exact risk of cellphones but people can do something about it. That's the real worry -- for the chemical, plastics and cell phone...industries.

Tierney doesn't name any scientists, instead he makes science and scientists the amorphous enemy. (I've listed the names of the doctors and scientists who served on Pitt's cellphone panel below.¹). Tierney's article cheekily and disingenuously appears under "Findings", as though he's presenting some science research. And as icing on the cake the New York Times lists as a source for more information, the ACSH, an industry funded public relations firm. ACSH does not currently make public its donors, but to get an idea, the Union of Concerned Scientist's report on industry funded non-profits informs us that Exxon-Mobil donated to ACSH for work on work on "climate change issues" (see PDF).

The most alarming point of Tierney's article to me, aside from the fact that it's supposedly "science", is the premise: new knowledge causes "worry...fear, guilt or angst". Why is there a constant drumbeat about protecting the populace from "fear"? There has been a decades long media blitz to "stop the worry" by ACSH. Just this year ACSH put out (this 01/08 Top Ten list of 'silly scares' and this Top 5 list. Are we really afraid of their unreasonable fears?

The truth is we can control lots of BPA exposure by using readily available glass or metal. If hot dogs are the most tasty treat for you, than there's plenty of nitrate free processed organic meat products. No? Then start by not entering hot dog eating contests at country fairs. Reduce your cell phone exposure by not wrapping cell phones around your ear while you shop for groceries. It's silly looking anyway. Stop contributing to global warming by biking. Don't bike? Walk. Carpool and meet new people. Read! How did Tierney's ancestors confront tigers given that his brain seems forever paralyzed in a resilient attachment to plastic bottles? Or is this the point of the ACSH?

Of the millions of products available to us, do we really need Nalgene bottles? If so we're a pathetic species. The end result of this corporate funded campaign is that adults are encouraged to act like three year olds clinging to a special toy, while standing in a rising sea of toys.

Mighty Myths: Scientists are Terrorists, But Science Can Fight Terrorism

Also penning a few un-science ideas on Tuesdays is Clive Crook of the Financial Times. Crook "is the FT's science editor". He wrote in an article yesterday with with Sir Richard Mottram, the former "permanent secretary for intelligence, security and resilience in the UK Cabinet Office." In their article, "Careful science can help to fight terrorism", the authors first frame a three part problem: 1) Scientists are likely terrorists 2) Science and technology increases terrorism 3) Science and technology used to prevent terrorism constrains free society. As they put it:

• "For a start, scientists, engineers and doctors have played a considerable role as terrorists since the mid-20th century." They authors don't see fit to provide evidence, rather they then assert: "something about the certainties enshrined in many scientific disciplines may also chime with the inflexible philosophy of some terrorist groups."
• Next they say, "unconstrained dissemination of scientific knowledge may enhance the terrorist threat in its most severe forms"
• And finally, "unconstrained use of scientific and technological solutions in countering terrorism - for example, exploiting developments in sensors and in biometrics, information-handling and communications - could themselves damage the free society"

As I said, they provide zero evidence for their three suppositions, although all three appeal to common perceptions in a familiar muddly way, and the third seems quite probable. The authors then go on to say that although science is bad, science can also be good:

"Science can help strengthen infrastructure and mitigate the effects of an attack, particularly if a nuclear or biological weapon were to be used. And we can expect disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences to contribute more to our understanding of what drives terrorism - and therefore how best to prevent it.

I'm not arguing with all of Crook and Mottram's points. But they strain to construct some image of science, technology, and scientists, then once they establish that, they go on to vilify that image. I guess to build reader alliance? Acronym Required has followed various crises -- hurricanes, tsunamis, AIDS, bridge failures, pandemics, healthcare, etc. In each crisis, people assert with confidence that science and technology can solve the the very same problem...sometime in the future.

However failure is often not a technology hitch but a political and/or management issue. 9/11 wasn't a technology failure. The US government failed on the ground to pay attention to intelligence indicating that such an attack was likely. FBI agencies didn't use email, moreover they didn't communicate any way. Bridges fall down because of inspectors. Hurricanes cause more damage when FEMA is a "dumping ground" for ineffectual political appointees and levees aren't built due to politics. AIDS kills more people when health ministers counsel citizens that http://acronymrequired.com/2006/09/south-africa-peddling-beetroot.html">beetroot is a cure, etc.

Scientists and their science, and the technology that interfaces with society are all very important, yes, critical to the progress of civilization. But to reiterate our belief and one of the eternal themes of this blog: science, scientists and technology won't save us from ourselves.

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¹ Tara Parker-Popes lede for the cellphone story June 3, 2008 was: "What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don't?" This has a certain libertarian populace appeal -- "Hey! No one tells us what to do." I suggest the following tongue in cheek change based on the list of scientists on the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's panel: "What do French brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don't?" It has a double whammy effect that the 'Stop The Worry' cabal might appreciate. Many wondered, as I did, who was on the panel? For what it's worth, here's the list:

1. Bernard Asselain, MD, Chief of the Cancer Biostatistics Service, Curie Institute, Paris, France
2. Franco Berrino, MD. Director of the Department of Preventative and Predictive Medicine of the National Cancer Institute, Milan, Italy
3. Thierry Bouillet, MD Oncologist, Director of the Radiation Institute, Avicenne University Hospital Center, Avicenne, Bobigny, France
4. David Carpenter, MD, Director Institute of Health and the Environment, University of Albany, former Dean, School of Public Health
5. Christian Chenal, MD, Emeritus Professor of Oncology, University of Rennes I, France and former director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) team "Radiation, Environment, Adaptation"
6. Pr Jan Willem Coebergh, Oncologist, Department of Public Health, University of Rotterday, The Netherlands
7. Yvan Coscas, MD Oncologist, Chief of the Department of Radiotherapy, Hopital de Poissy St Germain, France
8. Pr Jean-Marc Cosset, Honorary Chief of Oncology/Radiotherapy of the Curie Institute, Paris, France
9. Pr Devra Lee Davis, Diretor, Center for Environmental Oncology of University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institure, USA
10. Michel Hery, MD Oncologist, Chief of the Department of Radiotherapy, Princess Grace Hospital Center, Monaco
11. Dr Ronald Herberman, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, USA
12. Pr Lucien Israel, Emeritus Professor of Oncology, University of Paris X!!!, Member of the Institut de France
13. Jacques Marilleau, Engineer SUPELEC, former physicist at the Commissariat of Atomic Energy and at CNRS Orsay, France
14. Jean-Loup Mouyesset, MD Oncologist, Polyclinique Rambot-Provencale, Aix-en-Provence, France
15. Philippe Presles, MD, President of the Institut Moncey for the Prevention and Health, Paris, France
16. Pr Henri Pujol, PhD Oncologist, former President of the National Federation Cancer Centers, France
17. Joel de Rosnay, PhD, Former Assistant Professor of Biology, MIT, Boston, USA
18. Simone Saez, PHD, former Director of the Cancer Biology unit of the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Lyon, France
19. Annie Sasco, MD, Doctor of Public Health, Medical epidemiologist, Director of the Epidemiology Team for Cancer
Prevention -- INSERM, University Victor Segalen, Bordeau 2, France
20. David Sevan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, Doctor of Science, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh
21. Patrick Souvet, MD, Cardiologist, President of the Association Sante Environnement Provence Aix-en Provence, France
22. Pr. Dan WArtenberg, Chief, Division of Environmental Epidemiology, UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
23. Jacques Vilcoq, MD, Oncologist, Clinique Hartmann, Neuilly-sur-seine, France

Last year we wrote in "Green Spirit", about the wave of environmental sentiment sweeping the US. The New Yorker had captured the mood in a cartoon depicting one plant executive asking another whether they could dye the smoke from the stacks green.

The most unlikely corporations were hopping all over themselves to play green. BP had just launched two sites, The Green Curve, and A Little Better Gas Station, complete with games like "Gas Mania" and kid friendly distractions. The BP sites are no longer standalone so not quite so much fun, but have been incorporated into bp.com in all their original kelly green and neon yellow glory.

These sites come and go, and of course now other companies have launched a new crop of green spirit. First up is Chevron's www.willyoujoinus.com. "Will you join us" is a collaboration between The Economist, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, and the oil company. The site tells us that "the demand for energy becomes greater, and every day it becomes harder to find". Driving home the point, a global oil consumption ticker spins through millions of barrels consumed during your site visit. The homepage asks viewers to "join the discussion". I suppose it would be impertinent to ask them to put a profits ticker underneath the consumption ticker -- "finding energy" is research and capital intensive.

The current discussion topic is "Global Food Prices & Energy Supplies, Finding a Balance". Fortunately, it's not all gloom and doom, you can "Play Energyville" too.

PZ Goes to The Mall of America

PZ Myers of Pharyngula got booted from the line of registered guests to see the movie "Expelled", a creationist production about intolerance towards religion. In an act of abject poltroonery the movie's producer ejected PZ while the rest Myers family and his other companions, Richard Dawkins and staff, were allowed to stay. The "Expelled" producer, perhaps charmed by the English accent, said he allowed Dawkins to watch the movie because he was a 'guest to our country' and had probably 'flown a long way'. (Better than saying he didn't recognize him). In this amusing YouTube video Myers and Dawkins explain what happened.

"Expelled" is a flick of reportedly dubious quality not to mention phantasmagorical content that showed at the Mall of America. (There's the religion we know and love.) Dawkins, in good form, calls the movie "shoddy", "boring", and "bad in every possible way", filled with "Lord privy seal" moments and attended by a completely "sycophantic audience." He calls the whole production "second rate in film-making and public relations", to which Myers suggests that "second rate" might be a tad complimentary.

PZ Goes To The Apple Store

Mild mannered PZ, albeit with the ferocious quill, appeared in the movie at the request of the filmmakers. Then for his contributions, whambo, out on his 'arse, whereupon he whiled away some time in an Apple store blogging. Meanwhile, in the movie showing across the way, the helpful Myers explained that he wishes to increase science literacy and make religion a "side dish rather than a main course", something 'to do on weekends'. His tone is notably conciliatory, comparing religion to knitting, as in -- "we're not going to take their knitting' needles away".

His is a charming analogy. There is a 21st century knitting revival and as many religious people in the US as ever. I used Google's totally unreliable "Trends" to compare "religion" to "knitting" here, and if you squint carefully you can see an inverse relationship. (Either that no relation whatsoever or the two trend together.)

The Economics of Antediluvian Intolerance

Coincidentally, I'm reading Dawkin's "The God Delusion" now, along with "Christopher Hitchen's "God is Not Great". You've got to be impressed with how Hitchen's waves his pen around, regardless of what he says, and while Dawkin's book is milder, he has little tolerance for my tolerance or anyone else's. Serious books with bits of entertainment, and I'm sure good screedy profitable fun for the authors.

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Acronym Required wrote about science and religion in "Science Faith and Books", in "Dover: Science Prevails over Intelligent Design: Judge Doesn't Monkey Around", in "Evolution v. Not Evolution" among others. We looked at quests for fame and PZ Myer's reception for Stuart Pivar versus Lynn Marguis in "Science Fame: Million Dollar Minutes" and mentioned Hitchen's writing in "FISA: Turning Orwell On His Ear".

My House or Yours?

One evening about 5 years ago I learned of "chicken pox parties". There on a news group, a dozen people chatted about sending their kids to a "party", with such nonchalance you'd have thought they were planning holiday shopping and $5.95 lunch special afterwards. Perhaps they'd spent hours thinking over the pros and cons. But at least on this public forum, those do-it-yourself infectors didn't question the public health risks, the possible complications, or the ethics of purposefully exposing your kids and family to highly infectious diseases that fortunate people in western countries get immunized against. If they had doubts they masked them with derring-do.

I was taken aback by this parental concept of fun and thought it some new and bizarre fad. Naturally I was curious. How would it work? -- "OK kids, now we're going to pass the communal drink cup around, then we'll play the kissing game..."? -- (I also rethought my entire childhood in a positively idyllic way, though I never forgot the sting of merthiolate.¹)

How ironic are these modern parental dalliances with infectious disease? Public health's largest successes include the vaccination campaigns that eradicated or significantly reduced loathsome diseases such as smallpox, polio, yellow fever, measles, diphtheria, and tetanus. The UN reported last November that measles vaccination efforts, especially in Africa, have helped decrease measles deaths by two-thirds across the world since 2000.

Scientists and doctors toil to develop vaccines for ugly scourges like HIV and malaria, which are each responsible for mortally infecting up to 30% of some populations. When a recent AIDS vaccine trial failed, the collective global dismay across the public health specter was palpable. For diseases where vaccinations aren't available, citizens in developing countries latch on to promises from the public health community that millions of people's lives will someday be saved by immunizations. Then, against this backdrop, suburban parents in western countries shun vaccinations because in their country, in this day and age, the injections themselves seem more dangerous than the diseases.

Chicken Pox Parties Through the Ages

It's tempting to think of these "chicken pox parties" as the privileged reserve of parents of a certain age who never saw the ravages of disease that previous generations knew intimately. Maybe if they saw a man crippled by polio; maybe if they had lived through the smallpox epidemics in New York at the end of the 18th century, where one in five victims died and in milder cases victims were left left blind, they would change their stance. Maybe their mother or grandmother never described what it was like caring for a family during an outbreak of chicken pox as it swept through the household, infecting each of six children.

But doubts about vaccines are perennial. Now parents air their vaccination suspicions via the web. Before the web, they talked on the phone, or at work, or in between hauling water from the well. This is not the fad of a select cohort of modern parents, convinced that a case of wild chicken pox is safer than a vaccine because they've never known anyone who died of the disease.

These unique "social events" seem shocking when they appear in your inbox. Go to any online article about any part of the whole wide topic of vaccination and peruse the comments section for horrifying rumors, misunderstandings, and cavalier-bordering-on-criminal pronouncements about never vaccinating kids. It's enough to make anyone shudder -- doctor, scientist, parent or casual reader. It's easy to see how those who claim that thimerosal is responsible for every imaginable childhood tic are dangerously misguided.

But the flip side of this is that it's difficult for scientists and public health officials to see how some of the confusion got started. Moreover it's less acceptable in this crowd to question or challenge an authority who tags as crazy anyone who questions any aspect of vaccinations. There's a reason for this. There's no room for vague statements when you're trying to vaccinate a population, to reduce the likelihood of death from a disease for which there is vaccination. But, mistakes have been made (the appropriate use of passive voice), people did used to die from vaccinations and even today, freak accidents do happen.

Raggedy Ann

Naturally, vaccinations have an interesting and controversial history, like much of medicine. The tussle between public health campaigns and fearful citizens is part and parcel of that history. Administrators of the first vaccines would introduce a wound in the patient's arm with a sharp implement of some sort -- say a stick. They would then infect the wound with a bit of virus from a sick neighbor or some pox they carried door to door in a jar. As you can imagine, this wasn't too sanitary, and in fact tetanus was a common side effect of these vaccinations.

Arthur Allen writes in "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver", that "Raggedy Ann" was the name given to a rag doll handed down from writer Johnny Gruelle's grandmother to his daughter Marcella. Marcella died at 13 after receiving two smallpox vaccinations in school, and Gruelle memorialized in his young daugter in his books. According to Allen, the Raggedy Ann doll then became symbol for the anti-vaccination effort.

Even once vaccinations became safer than the crude, stick in your arm variety of the early days, concerns remained about deleterious side-effects. During several outbreaks of smallpox in New York in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, rumors spread that the vaccine contained tetanus, despite significant efforts by health professionals to dispel such notions. Today, people don't worry about tetanus maybe, but they worry about autism.

Because It's Good For You

Along with the health side effect worries, people were historically agitated when governments tried to compel vaccination. When vaccinations arrived in the US from England in the early 1800's, people balked at what seemed like an encroaching role for government. Back then, American public health initiatives were more about trying to convince people not to do things, like "[let] their privy overflow into the street" says James Colgrove in "Between Persuasion and Compulsion: Smallpox Control in Brooklyn and New York, 1894-1902 (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.2 (2004)). As Colgrove's title indicates, for many years, public health officials walked a fine line between persuading, cajoling and forcing public compliance to vaccinate, all without legal authority.

In the late 19th early 20th century, health officials contained smallpox outbreaks by determining the circumference around an infected household and vaccinating households within that area. If someone refused to receive the vaccine, authorities would station couple of policemen known as the "Sanitary Police" to enforce a quarantine on the household. Enforcement was strict. People would dig tunnels out of their New York residences, but authorities would catch them in New Jersey and haul them back for punishment. Libertarians complained that the government was overstepping.

At the beginning of the 20th century, anti-vaccination advocates successfully brought two high profile cases to court to challenge the government's right to make vaccinations compulsory. In 1904, the New York state court decided in Viemeister v. White that the state could mandate laws curtailing individual liberties in order to protect public health. In 1905 the Supreme Court decided that all states have the right to legally enforce public health measures in the infamous Jacobson v. Massachusetts precedent. This helped solidify government authority. From there continued medical advances and quality control improved the safety of vaccines. However real and perceived hazards remain.

The same issues (legal, moral, individual liberty, public safety, medical safety) churn in the public arena today as during the smallpox vaccination campaigns of 100 years ago. People erroneously think modern issues are unique to our era, but the underlying questions are the same. Is HepB really necessary for newborns they ask? Can I infect my own child with chickenpox? Can I skip vaccinations altogether and depend on herd immunity? States struggle with how to keep populations safe.

Additionally, people understand the profit incentives of pharmaceuticals and ask questions like: Is a cervical cancer vaccination really necessary for my 9 year old daughter? Since so many vaccinations are enforced by law there's an uncomfortable nexus of profit motives (pharmaceutical companies), individual health concerns (what are the risks of taking or not taking the vaccine), and public health concerns (how to prevent scourges and keep the public safe).

While vaccinations are one of medicine's greatest coups, there are still many issues and questions about vaccinating. Nevertheless among all the doctors, commentators and public health authorities who speak out, there's always one subset of the chorus who authoritatively treat all questions and concerns with the same universal knee-jerk dismissiveness. Is their approach the best public health strategy?

"Same, Same But Different" - Polio in Nigeria

Vaccination doubts are not the exclusive domain of "naive" westerners. Polio persists in countries like India, Afganistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, where many people know first hand the crippling effects of the disease, yet still sometimes resist vaccination. In 2003, Nigerians were told that Westerners were trying to pass off HIV virus and/or sterility drugs as polio vaccines and began refusing vaccinations. Here's how the CDC described the problem (brackets mine):

"False rumors about OPV [oral polio vaccine] safety adversely affected SNIDs [Subnational Immunization Days], with the greatest impact in Kano, where 25% of all Nigerian WPV [wild polio virus] cases occurred in 2003. Citing vaccine safety concerns, state authorities in Kano (which last conducted a SNID in April 2003) decided in August 2003 to suspend all SIAs [supplementary immunization activities]. Statewide suspension of SIAs at different times during 2003--2004 also occurred in Kaduna, Zamfara, and (to a limited extent) in Niger state. As a result of these rumors, public health managers and frontline health-care workers found it increasingly difficult to improve microplanning, training, and implementation of SIAs."

Unlike the New York Times, the CDC is not in the business of humanizing disease. The agency rotely listed the events but of course gave no hint as to where such false rumors may have come from. However not insignificant to the CDC's dry announcement, Nigeria's history with vaccinations provides some insight into the quandary of public resistance. For instance consider these three recent events that have spurred public suspicion of Western medicines:

1. A well know problem is how Western AIDS denialists like Peter H. Duesberg influenced South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, but few people explore the history. However some say a book by Edward Hooper published in 1999 called "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS" (Little, Brown) fed rumors throughout Africa that AIDS was spread to humans via a related simian virus contained in a oral polio vaccine (OPV) given to populations in the 1950's. Hooper theorized that OPV was developed by scientists who used primary chimpanzee kidney cells as a substrate for the vaccine. The polio vaccine was tested in mass trials across Africa, Poland and Russia, but Hooper claimed that in Africa OPV led to HIV.

   Hooper's book was well received. Reviewers from most major newspapers gave the book good reviews, and even more skeptical reviewers gave partial accolades. Robin Weiss of the esteemed journal Science called the book "a towering achievement; right or wrong in its main conclusion, there is much to learn from Hooper's exposition" (Vol. 286. no. 5443, pp. 1305 - 1306). John Moore, in the journal Nature's review called the book, "in many ways, superb. It is scholarly, thoroughly researched, well (if densely) written and deserves, indeed demands, to be taken seriously." ("Up The River Without a Paddle", 401, 325-326 (23 September 1999) | doi:10.1038/43778)

   However both journals disagreed with the central tenet of the book because Hooper based his conclusion on circumstantial evidence. Shortly after this slew of positive if not approving reviews, no less than three research groups disproved Hooper's hypotheses. Their research was published in Nature and Science.

   Now, despite the ample research showing that the author's interpretations were incorrect residual interest and belief in Hooper's book lives on today and the autor continues to publicize and update his hypotheses.

2. Africa has long been a place where clinical trials are conducted unlike the way they are in the US. When these trials don't work out the fallout hurts subsequent public health efforts. Take the recent example of Pfizer's Nigerian clinical trial of Trovan in 2006. In the middle of a meningitis epidemic, the company clinical trial tested a population of kids with the antibiotic Trovan (Trovafloxacin). Half were given ceftriaxone, the drug normally used to treat the disease, and the other half were given Trovan. Kids from both groups died, but eleven of the kids in the trial on the test drug Trovan died. Although both control kids and experimental cohorts died or remain permanently impaired, the news focused on the kids that received the Trovan.

   The Washington Post covered the story in a series called the "The Body Hunters". Marcia Angell also outlined the trial in a New York Review of Books article, also called "The Body Hunters". Investigators who followed up on the clinical trials charged that the company breached medical ethics and said the trial wouldn't have been allowed in the US because it's unethical to do a trial of an unproven drug during an active epidemic. Among other issues, doctors gave inadequate or no informed consent to patients, and the dosage for the established (control) treatment was reportedly too low, which (had not so many kids died) could have made the experimental drug (Trovan) look better.

   National outrage over Pfizer's actions brought a group of Nigerian plaintiffs to New York where they unsuccessfully attempted to try the case in the US. Nigeria's suit against Pfizer continues to this day, and a lawyer for Nigeria recently testified about the US red tape complicating his attempts to summon to Pfizer executives.

3. Another incident in Nigeria illustrates a third pervasive fear about vaccines. In 2003, the rumors spread that Western vaccine campaigns were actually nefarious sterilization efforts. These rumors gained momentum after African scientists reported that some polio vaccines contained estrogen. A Muslim leader, Dr Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, secretary general of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria, claimed that he had research proving western goals to "depopulate" Africa and introduce "adulterated" vaccines.

   Throughout history, the west has championed family planning, which has elicited both abject suspicion and occasional rumors about devious plots by western forces to decimate populations via birth control and vaccinations. Public health workers have diligently tried to solidify trust of vaccinations among Nigerians for decades but their efforts occasionally fail.

   In 2003, the rumors ran wild, forcing the Nigerian polio vaccination program to shut down so that politicians could test the vaccines suspected of being birth control agents and provide public proof of their safety. An interruption like this can have devastating health consequences. In this case, vaccination rates fell to 30% and the disease spread to Muslim communities around the world. Muslims mounted resistance to the vaccinations some people say, because they were wary of the war in Iraq and perceived animosity from the US to Muslims. Eighteen countries previously declared polio free incurred polio flare-ups, including countries that hadn't seen polio since the 1980's.

   During the interrupted 2003 polio vaccination effort, many Nigerians went unvaccinated, and the population became susceptible to another uncommon occurrence. The polio vaccine, made of attenuated virus, can occasionally mutate to a wild non-attenuated virus that causes infection. But the chance of this occurring increases when a large number of unvaccinated people give the virus more opportunity to replicate and mutate to the wild form. The journal Nature reported that an outbreak of this type last fall ended up paralyzing 69 children.

Any of these incidents could have helped spread fears about vaccinations. Although science has dispensed with Hooper's ideas, and Trovan may have not have caused deaths, the cumulative effect of incidents like this has a far-reaching negative impact. Furthermore, when US companies run clinical trials in countries under circumstances that wouldn't be legal in the US, people's suspicions are not crazy and out of the blue. Their naturally suspicious, as you would be too. The problem is, if their legitimate suspicions are addressed in order to more easily continue vaccination campaigns, involved parties run the risk of litigation and negative publicity. No easy answers.

10 Billion Doses, 200 Side Effects -- Reasonable Risks and Parent's Fears

Despite the 2003 outbreaks, attenuated vaccine rarely mutates to the wild form. A WHO expert interviewed by Nature pointed out that "10 billion doses of oral polio vaccine...administered worldwide were implicated in 9 outbreaks, accounting for fewer than 200 cases of disease" (Michael Hopkin, "Health officials fear Nigeria Polio setback" 12 October 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.163). But no matter how rare these occurrences, or the fact that they most often occur when many people simultaneously refuse to get vaccinated, as in 2003, the incidents feed suspicions.

Time reported that Nigeria's 2007 outbreak due to the wild-type virus was contained via collaborative public health messaging between religious, health and political leaders. However sometimes mischievous anti-immunization authors, politicians, organizations or religious leaders stir trouble by either malevolently or innocently blaming such an outbreak on vaccinations.

There are risks to vaccinations. There are risks to clinical trials. There are mistakes, and sometimes medical malfeasance. And there's a public disconnect when it comes to understanding risk, 200 side effects in 10 billion doses is very safe. But no parent is content when their child has that rare adverse reaction. Perversely then, the possibility always exists that a few aberrant reactions to a vaccination will innervate the fears in hundreds of people and derail a whole vaccination effort.

Some percentage of the population will always distrust vaccinations, no matter how good the public health messaging. But another percentage of civilians have legitimate concerns. Public understanding of reasonable risks is further complicated by public health, pharmaceutical and political hesitation to admit errors out of fear that people will shun vaccinations or pursue litigation.

So what do these suburban American families have to do with Nigerian villagers? People have historically harbored distrust of government mandated vaccinations. They also intermittently distrust for-profit pharmaceutical companies, Western administered vaccination programs, and medicine in general. But if all patient resistance, hair-brained chicken-pox parties as well as questions about the necessity of cervical vaccines, receive the same reception from authorities, citizens adapt by uniformly distrusting public health authorities. Ironically, this reaction snowballs into even more vehement rebellions against vaccinations.

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¹ Merthiolate is a trade name for thimerosal and was widely used as a topical antiseptic for children. You'd fall down scrape your knee, and then into the wound mom would pour this reddish-orange-pink stuff, a toxin, as it turns out that, really burned and smarted. Barbaric 20th century medicine.

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To Run

The Unreasonable Man is running for office again. I recommend the movie, whatever your point of view about Ralph Nader's decision to run for president.

For those people in our generation who are not familiar with who Nader is and what he could possibly offer, The Village Voice points out what that might be. In a good review of the movie, the author marveled that Nader, the man now reviled as "Benedict Arnold", was "once a hero -- a little guy who brought Big Auto to heel, helped prevent more than 190,000 automotive deaths in 30 years, and was directly responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, the Freedom of Information Act..."

These are the same institutions and scientists marginalized by recent politics. A large, growing group of individuals wants to hold a presidential debate involving the fate of science at some of these very institutions. But some in this group don't want Nader's voice, insight, or history.

Should we mention the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, The Wholesome Meat Act, Mine Health and Safety Act, Medical Devices Safety, Food Labeling, Public Citizen? Not relevant enough? I don't know, maybe he is insufferable. But is this presidential candidate more ego driven than the others? Should the other candidates not run because they've already served their country as senators, or as First Lady, as a prisoner of war during service for the US, or as a civil rights lawyer? Is Nader just too...ancient history...really?

What Nader offers is at least a different, seasoned, knowledgeable perspective to citizens and politicians alike. Why shout for democracy (or have I misunderstood) then confine yourself to two parties? The movie "An Unreasonable Man was balanced, fast-paced and interesting, and offered insight to the party system -- and perhaps contextual information about the current election season. It filled in some questions that the emotive backlash against Nader in 2000 never answered. To be clear, those angry voices are well represented in the movie. But so too is a little history, a few facts and the voices of some very thoughtful critics.

There's also a very well reviewed book on the subject that I haven't read called "Crashing the Party". This from the preface: "people should play active roles in shaping the electoral agenda and ensuring varied, open debates. In short, democracy is not a spectator sport."

During the 2000 campaign a presidential youth conference of the National Youth Platform involving thousands of young adults in their teens and twenties, supported by Pew Charitable Trust, Heinz Family Foundation, Wisenbaker Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the YMCA and the YWCA held a forum after the primary, and invited all the candidates. The students discussed ten topics with Nader for a couple of hours. Ralph Nader attended but Bush and Gore declined since polling showed that young adults have general agendas and don't vote in large numbers. Bush canceled at the last minute saying that the Republican Party had engaged students in other ways, for instance at "conventions young people have led the effort to create hand painted signs." (PR Newswire, August 1, 2000).

Or Not

Lawrence Lessig on the other hand, decided not to run. You didn't know? In a quick turn-around for second thoughts, he called the party off. He had decided last Tuesday night to run for the seat of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who died earlier this month.

William Kristol says that "Democrats Should Read Kipling". He bases his recommendation on George Orwell's 1942 essay, "Rudyard Kipling". Kristol responds to the House Democrats' hesitation to sign-off on the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA), by taking a ludicrously bold position and advancing Orwell in support of the surveillance act.

He suggests that Orwell and Kipling would have approved the Bush administration's unfettered surveillance mission -- although more realistic reaction to the juxtaposition of Orwell and the Bush administration might be apoplectic brain stem activity -- 1984!1984! 1984!".

Kristol trots out the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Attorney General, a former federal judge, the director of national intelligence, and a retired Vice Admiral, who he says approve of surveillance. But the titles are identical to previous casts of discredited characters -- the ones who slam-dunked the US into Iraq, couldn't remember the facts and never meant to mislead Congress. And they're here to warn us blandly that "surveillance abilities are important to our national security"? Republican, Democrats and citizens agree. That's not the issue.

In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Andrew P. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and FOX commentator, wrote in "The Invasion of America", that since 1978, the government has been allowed 99% of its FISA applications. The current provisions would allow unfettered surveillance of phone or e-mail conversations if one of the people was a foreigner. He said:

"Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior....If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?"

FISA was approved by the Senate and the House continues its debate. To address the controversy, Kristol tracked down Orwell's essay on Kipling (a response to T.S. Eliot's essay) "in a used-book store -- in the Milwaukee airport, of all places". Fortunately for readers, they need not venture to a used-book store in Milwaukee as our intrepid columnist did, they can read Orwell's essay on the internet ("the World Wide Web", as it were).

Orwell observed that Kipling was often used for "quotations parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning." Indeed, that seems to be Orwell's own plight as well. Kristol clips sentences from Orwell's essay to cobble together his threadbare argument: Democrats should support FISA because the Republican party has been in power so long that only they understand how to rule the country.

Kristol gets off to a rough start using Orwell's oft-quoted comment that Kipling's writing was '''morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting'''. He brazenly edits Orwell's sentence, which actually read: "jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" (emphasis mine). Kristol says Democrats should be more like Kipling, who -- and he carefully selects another snippet of text -- "at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like".

So does Kristol intend to suggest that Democrats toady the administration with "jingo imperialism" like an early 20th century children's story writer -- or dare we suggest, like some columnists at the New York Times? Should Democrats kowtow to those who like to "think of themselves as the governing party "(emphasis mine)? Or are those in the "ruling power" the "jingo imperialists"? Quoting the sentence out of context as he does, Kristol leaves plenty of room for readers' interpretations, but distorts rather than elucidates Orwell on Kipling, (via T.S. Eliot, the impetus for Orwell's essay).

Kipling can't be scissored and dressed up like a little paper doll in patriotic neoliberal red white and blue trousers. Kipling was not some caricature scribe, but a paradoxical and contradictory writer whose views of England and its empire changed over time.

Edmund Wilson, Sara Suleri, W.H. Auden, Salman Rusdie, Edward Said, TS Eliot, and many more have studied Kipling's contradictions, nationalism, imperialism and racist attitudes. One biographer, David Gilmour wrote in "The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, of "his early role as apostle of the empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline." Kristol lauded Kipling for "identif[ying] himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition." But this was not Kipling, who often wrote from the perspective of the non-rulers.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of Gilmour's political biography in the June, 2002 issue of The Atlantic, called "A Man of Permanent Contradictions". Hitchens characterized Kipling as a deft marketeer: "his entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak." Hitchens quotes Kipling's poem "If", which seems to recognize of the need for political versatility:

In keeping with Kipling's literary fate of being widely adapted by all parties, the poem was a favorite of "José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism, and of President Woodrow Wilson. It was apparently written in honor of Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonial pirate who led an aggressive raid into Boer territory, precipitating the horrible South African war", Hitchens points out. I suppose its a complementary tradition then, that Kristol adopt Kipling as a neoliberal mascot.

But jingo imperialist he may have been, Kipling also embodied a stoicism and sense of military duty that's unfamiliar to much of the ruling elite today. When his son was denied commission into the army, Kipling pulled strings so he could enlist. As Hitchens writes:

"Ultimately, Kipling's two greatest literary and emotional attainments - the ability to evoke childhood and the capacity to ennoble imperialism - contradicted themselves too flatly and painfully, and culminated in the shattering sacrifice of his beloved son, John, on the Western Front in 1915. This was enough inner contradiction for several lifetimes."²

For all the variably scathing and favorable analysis, the pondering, questioning, loathing and admiration, Kipling remains enigmatic. He celebrated the empire, but foresaw its decline. Writes Hitchens; "To those born or brought up in England after 1914, let alone 1945, the sense of a waning day is part of the assumed historical outcome. It was Kipling's achievement to have sounded this sad, admonishing note during the imperial midday, and to have conveyed the premonition among his hearers that dusk was nearer than they had thought." The poem "Recessional", as quoted by Hitchens, warns of the Empire's demise:

Orwell wrote that while Kipling celebrated empire, he chaffed at its failings, saying: "He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it...The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing."

Kristol blurs Orwell's meanings and Kipling's complexities and contradictions. He grasps at Kipling's legacy and crafts a familiar Republican myth for loyalists. Ever the party scribe, Kristol draws Democrats as "refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans". Adept himself at fiction, Kristol charges that Democrats, once they controlled the Congress, "ensured that [Bush] couldn't turn those failures [in Iraq] around." This brand of subterfuge masking as patriotism is not Kipling's, nor should any of us continue to embrace it.

Perhaps Kristol attempts to reach beyond 1980's history, the worn cowboy hat and stirrups of the Reagan figurehead, but the plot is the same. Whose nightmare/dream is this? I'm not drawing any parallels between the US and British empires -- an analogy that would be as perilous as Kristol's -- but it's no longer morning in America.

Kristol attempts to sketch, a lovable and omniscient administration, a clan of sometimes bumbling but honest and well meaning folks, bible loving people just like you and me, who know what's best for us and happened upon power by the love of God (and the Supreme Court). They do not exist. What Kristol hails is a cold, organized machine with profiteering corporate intentions for Iraq and frighteningly little regard for the Constitution, you or me.

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¹ Here is the full text of Orwell's book about Big Brother, "1984".

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Acronym Required previously wrote on immunity for telecoms, and FISA. We also wrote on Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and mongooses.

When Media Swooned In the Arms of Tobacco

Cigarette peddlers lethally succeed in convincing people to suck smoke into their lungs non-stop, decade after decade. There's mountains of evidence for this, millions of publicly available documents on the subject, court proceedings, leaked internal industry documents, as well as movies, articles and books. One in five deaths in the US is smoking related, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) -- preventable deaths, tragically wasteful. Most of us, in and out of public health arenas understand the deceptive business strategies that the cigarette industry uses to reap profits from its killer product. Tobacco is the standard by which deception around other science issues is measured. Despite the evidence the tobacco is the culprit of a major health problem, however, we're forever embattled trying to dissuade people from smoking.

Tobacco industry history informs current discussion on other health concerns such as global warming, diabetes, asbestos and cell phones. Like tobacco, all seem to have a single corporate culprit. Comparisons between the issues are frequent, sometimes pertinent, but too often facile. In order to successfully continue profiting from cigarettes, many parties collaborate, including stockholders, legislators, presidents, and the media. Tobacco captured the media for decades, from movies that romanticized smoking to prolific cigarette advertising, to dubious reporting on the safety hazards that insured the sale and marketing of cigarettes.

One of many interesting stories in the history of tobacco is how the industry influenced investigative news reports back in the 1990's when reporters started uncovering the "dirty secrets" of the cigarette business. Investigative reports from major TV stations were squelched when reporters revealed the tobacco companies' knowledge about the health dangers of smoking. Tobacco companies took advantage of the networks' business aspirations and fears about getting sued, while certain media companies, motivated by profit, complied by shutting down controversial investigative reporting. Together, the tobacco industry and the media industry stifled public knowledge about the risks of smoking.

The 1990's was only last decade...but people tend to forget. Pieces of this story can be found on internet, for instance here and here and here. In his recent book The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007).¹, Allan Brandt chronicles the story of how two major television stations capitulated to the tobacco industry.

Tobacco Wars

In 1994 ABC News show Day One, aired a report called "Smoke Screen". The trailer for the segment told how companies "spiked" cigarettes with extra doses of tobacco. The show detailed how tobacco companies added reconstituted tobacco plant stems and leaves along with extracted nicotine to its cigarettes. This doctoring effectively controlled the dose of nicotine in cigarettes, and incidentally maintained the level of nicotine in "low-tar" cigarettes, assuring addiction. Jack E. Henningfield, an expert on addiction from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the NIH, called cigarettes the "crack cocaine form of nicotine delivery". This wasn't stunning news. The Surgeon General had declared nicotine additive in 1988.

However Phillip Morris promptly sued ABC for libel and $10 billion dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. Phillip Morris was particularly defensive about ABC's assertion that cigarettes were "spiked". The company insisted that nicotine was not a drug. Even though the company's own scientists had said their "product" gave people "a pleasing sensory experience with mild pharmacology".

Many experts thought the network would win the case. ABC's report hadn't specifically implicated any company, and Phillip Morris's libel claim was not obvious, since the company would need to prove both intent and malice. ABC defended Day One in court for months, spending millions in legal fees.

Meanwhile, Lowell Bergman of CBS's 60 Minutes was putting together another story, this one featuring Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist from Brown & Williamson. Wigand was one of many company whistleblowers who had begun to speak out about the tobacco industry, working with the FDA on their investigation of the industry.

When Mike Wallace interviewed Wigand for CBS, the CEO's of seven major cigarette companies had just testified before Congressman Henry Waxman's (D-CA) Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Each had said in almost identical statements that "nicotine is not addictive". But Wigand had headed up various research projects at Brown & Williamson and lobbied within B&W for safe cigarettes. He told Wallace that the CEO Thomas Sandefur had lied to Waxman's committee. B&W management knew that cigarettes were addictive, Wigand said, and used every opportunity to leverage research data that proved the addictiveness to sell their product. He also described how scientists added ammonia to the cigarettes to assure that the lungs absorbed the nicotine more easily, and how carcinogenic additives like coumarin (one of 700 cigarette additives at the time) were added to cigarettes despite known toxicity.

The Weak-Kneed Fourth Estate

Right before CBS aired its show, ABC shocked its employers, its lawyers, and onlookers by settling its lawsuit with Phillip Morris. The surprise settlement was motivated by ABC's pending business deal with Walt Disney Company. Disney wanted the liability of the lawsuit off the table. Phillip Morris had also threatened to pull advertising worth $100 million dollars a year.

Many in and outside the media agreed that the Phillip Morris lawsuit was about intimidation and that it effectively dampened investigative journalism. As part of the settlement, ABC apologized to R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris and paid 15 million dollars in legal fees. Phillip Morris took out full page ads in national publications to advertise the network's apology. Shortly after ABC's settlement with Phillip Morris, CBS canceled the 60 Minutes show featuring the interview with Wigand. CBS revealed that they were in the midst of finalizing a $5.4 billion dollar merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation.

Business interests had once again prevailed. Coincidentally or not, Laurence Tisch, the CEO of CBS, was the father of Andrew Tisch, CEO of Lorillard, who testified at the Waxman hearings. In the industry's well established pattern of denying science and math when it was inconvenient, Tisch told the subcommittee that he did not believe that cigarettes caused death, because death rates were generated by computers and are only statistical".

The CEO's sworn denials of their knowledge of tobacco's dangers were wearing thin and did not endear them to legislators. When James Johnston, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, compared cigarettes to ordinary sweets like Twinkies, Waxman tersely pointed out the stark difference between the two, "death". Waxman was not swayed then and of course today cigarette company denials elicit aghast indignation across the world, especially in the US and EU. We're wise to deceptive marketing, legislative finagling, and payments to scientists in mid-life/career crises made pliable about science with money. Cigarette companies lie, obviously.

But this is not obvious to people who aren't educated about tobacco's addictive and dangerous nature, or to those who smoke to possess prosperity, joie de vie and independence, the illusions that cigarette marketing sells -- or to those who are simply addicted, illusions or not. Many people have quit smoking and many people never start, but many more people continue to inhale and die. True, this is a devastating public health problem, but its also an undying, successful business strategy.

Tobacco Industry Solutions for Today's Business Executives: A Case Study

Tobacco's marketing strategies are highly successful, as Harvard Business Review highlighted in their February 2008 issue. Michael Sheehan wrote in "Understanding Opposition", about a few handy business techniques: "[s]omewhere between co-option and tug-of-war lies what I call a deflection strategy."

The tobacco industry used "deflection strategy", Sheehan wrote, to deal with pressures to reduce second hand smoke in the 1980's. The industry reframed the issue as a "sick-building" problem, caused by energy efficient buildings. Cigarette companies blaming the buildings for trapping indoor pollutants from things like office machines and carpets. Instead of banning smoking, Sheehan says the tobacco industry reframed or "deflected" the issue: "The solution was to engineer efficient ways of bringing more fresh air into facilities", he wrote, and although the "strategy wasn't ultimately successful", it successfully "stymied [smoking] bans for several years."

It's all about business, and all is fair. "Understanding Opposition" was on page 24 of HBS. Three pages before this article, on page 21, was an article on ethics, titled "How Honest People Cheat", a report on "honest" people's propensities towards dishonesty. It was nice to have close at hand, because it explained some of the rational of both the cigarette companies who deceived, and their would be emulators.

"It's clear that we have an incredible ability to rationalize our dishonesty and that justifying it becomes substantially easier when cheating is one step removed from cash. Nonmonetary exchanges allow people greater psychological latitude to cheat -- leading to crimes that go well beyond pilfered pens to backdated stock options, falsified financial reports, and crony deals."

The Harvard Business Review editors ironically and neatly compartmentalize tobacco industry's "deflection" on page 24, from "cheating", on page 21. Your average businessman should now be able to successfully walk this line. It's fine to "stymie a ban on smoking"; but one should never, ever, "backdate stock options".

Worldwide Opportunities

The tobacco story spans a hundred years and is a complex mix of sociology, science, business and politics. While the number of smokers in the United States began to decrease in the 60's, there are still large numbers of addicts especially among poorer populations and those in inner cities who are especially susceptible to tobacco's marketing. The companies long ago saw the writing on the wall in the US with the rash of lawsuits and public health activism and adapted to the business challenge by expanding their global strategy.

Companies today market aggressively in foreign countries, skillfully navigating each country's laws, and seducing young smokers using the same tools they perfected during the 20th century in the US. Advertisements spin notions of individuality, prosperity, freedom and cool factor. The messages appeal to the poorest populations who are naive to the addiction and health consequences. Tobacco thrives through wily marketing, a favorable trade atmosphere and the dueling motives of public health and profit. At every stage, cigarette makers seem to master all the tricks. Yesterday, the organization Corporate Accountability accused Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco of colluding with smugglers to gain entry into markets.

According to The World Lung Foundation, a contractor for the World Health Organization, in 2000 there were approximately 2 millions cigarette deaths in developing countries and 2 million in developed countries from cigarettes. By 2030 they project there will be 3 million deaths in developed countries and 7 million deaths in developing countries, totaling 10 million deaths worldwide from cigarettes.

In moment of enthusiasm once in 1996, former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) said to a reporter, "I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That's the kind of customers we need!" Then perhaps realizing how that sounded, he added: "Well, not exactly". A Vietnamese official queried by the same reporter said, "We'll smoke for 10 more years, until we are a more developed country." Then, perhaps not realizing the power of addiction he added, "Then we'll quit, just like you." (NYT April 12, 1996) More realistically, one doctor commented a decade ago about China's growing tobacco addiction: "If the Chinese smoke like Americans, then they will die like Americans"

For all the hand-wringing about tobacco's health effects, it remains highly profitable, capable of keeping potential naysayers at bay. China illustrates this dichotomy. The state owned tobacco industry in China contributes $30 billion to government coffers a year in tax revenue which is estimated to be 7% of government revenue (a decrease from a few years ago when it was 12-14%). 350 million people smoke in China, and 1 million people a year die. The country racks up $5 billion in medical costs per year. But government officials have balked at tobacco control, noting that it would "destabilize" the country. A recent WHO study found that "governments around the world collect 500 times more money in tobacco taxes each year than they spend on anti-tobacco efforts."

It's easy to find a primary culprit to blame problems on. But while society struggles with smoking at the same time it allows complex business, government, civilian, and not-for profit arrangements to pervade the media that informs us, the rule-making governments, and society itself. These arrangements thrive, albeit cancerously, because they are entwined in and reinforced by the very public health problems.

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¹ This post is not a review of the book, which is excellent, captivating, and highly recommended. Brandt's analysis and perspectives on the tobacco industry are thorough and insightful. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007)

Acronym Required previously wrote about tobacco industry funding of science research in "My Lab Thanks You For Smoking", and UC Senate Smokes RE-89. Lowell Bergman was one of the producers of last years four part PBS Frontline series called "News War" that we wrote about here. We've also written several posts about corporate advertising and the global warming debate.

PBS Nature, Animal Fare Light

I don't too often plunk down in front of the television and watch nature shows. The last time I watched a television show on animals was in a small restaurant in SE Asia which had the sort of overwhelming television presence that precludes conversation. Animal shows were popular fare in SE Asia. I occasionally watch PBS's Nature series. The last episode I remember watching, sometime last year, was called "Can Animals Predict Disaster?"

The show was a vehicle for elephants, hippopotamuses, tigers and fish to gambol about in zoos, deserts, forests, rivers, and oceans on various continents. "Can Animals Predict Disaster?" pondered whether animals could someday warn us of disasters, like the Sumatra tsunami of 2004. Behavior researchers investigated various related questions, like whether infrasound or geological cues warn animals of upcoming earthquakes or tsunamis.

One scientist set up large speakers on the safari and blasted classical music to giraffes and hippopotamuses over an impressive wilderness stereo system, then observed the animals' reactions. That was the control part of the experiment. I shouldn't anthropomorphize the giraffes by saying they looked bewildered. The scientist then blasted some pre-recorded hippopotamus calls. This prompted chorusing¹ from nearby hippopotamuses. The show explored at length what it meant for the hippopotamuses to chorus (in instances when a scientist regales them with his own recordings of their calls), and whether the animals could communicate impending disaster to each other.

As it turns out, animals have senses that humans don't, and unsurprisingly, communications systems we don't understand. Owls see better than humans, dogs' have more acute hearing than humans, elephants can sense vibrations hundreds of miles away through their trunks, and hippopotamuses chorus. But as one scientist pointed out, it's highly unlikely that animals evolved to run from tsunamis, since tsunamis are so rare. More likely, he said, animals would run from anything that sounded as threatening as a tsunami.

The episode crept towards its tentative conclusion: At the end of the day animals probably can't warn us of impending disaster. I say "probably" because "Can Animals Predict Disaster?" left some doubt about its answer. Perhaps PBS Nature's mission statement precludes it from completely trouncing people's fantasies about animals. On that note PBS Nature concluded ambiguously with a "what-if". "What-if" someday, humans could rely on animals to warn us before "the earth turns angry"?

These programs often feature predictable, anthropomorphic, action oriented fun. Suspense builds, large animals thunder across the plains, and the predator voraciously gets the prey. It's formulaic, family-friendly TV, with lots of death but very little copulation -- and certainly no embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions.

The extent to which these shows aim to please audiences is almost always inversely proportional to the production's potential as Acronym Required blog fodder. And we do, occasionally, mock media's science offerings, for instance our posts about Meerkat Manor, and the movie March Of The Penguins, commented on anthropomorphic edutainment. But always, even as we poke fun at these productions, we're acutely aware that the alarming pablum spooned out by the media in the name of nature or science today, can be bested with a thinner and less substantive gruel tomorrow.

TV, radio, newspapers -- they're all under the same pressure: money, money, money. The Wall Street Journal used to feature long, investigative health and technology articles, with corporate friendly front and editorial pages. But the paper's entire content is being Murdochized. CNN's home page used to highlight flimsy science coverage. Now we often find a CNN front page slathered with lurid crime tales. The network even managed to get itself panned as "corrupt" for its debate hosting tactics, on the front page of last Sunday's LA Times.

TV producers seem to forever probe the depths of available content, seeking the lowest common denominator, raking up muck from ever deeper ponds, flinging it out, wrapped with delicious advertising, to the apparently hungry masses. Since I watch TV infrequently, I don't get pulled imperceptibly into watching stupider and stupider shows until one day I find myself enthusing about some reality show contestant's outfit to a stranger on the bus -- no offense. Every six months I watch TV again and it hits me -- wow, is this it?

"Inspiring People to Care About the Planet": National Geographic, Aircraft Carriers, and Automobile Factories

In some blip of high expectations and naivete the other night, without considering any schedule, I turned on the TV and flipped to the National Geographic channel. I grew up reading National Geographic, along with Scientific American. Somewhere along the line, Scientific American changed. It used to carry long science articles with great graphics and lucid explanations of physiology and geology and other interesting topics. I still like it, but my impression of the current format is that it falls somewhere on the spectrum between USA Today and Highlights magazine -- albeit SA's website is better than Highlights'.

National Geographic used to feature anthropological articles on people and places around the world. Of course I wouldn't expect the same stories today, about some never-before-discovered jungle tribe that fashions strong vines for transportation,and brews therapeutic teas from the roots of exotic plant species, for example. But that evening I thought I'd learn something at least vaguely interesting, about a place, an animal, an ocean, some fish, a spider, an expedition. So I was surprised to tune in to the National Geographic channel and find myself watching a feature about the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan.

The USS Ronald Reagan is in the Seventh Carrier Strike Group led by Rear Admiral Wisecup. I sat through a segment on loading supplies from the supply ship, everything slung onto the carrier via a pulley system set up between the two ships. What was I watching? Could this be right? I met the supply chief, Commander Pimpo. National Geographic? I checked the channel to make sure I hadn't landed on the wrong channel. The USS Ronald Reagan is big. Its run like a small city, with its own fire department, hospital, and police force. Maybe the remote is broken? No, all of this and more was the subject of National Geographic's "Supercarrier: USS Ronald Reagan." I guess it had been a while since I watched National Geographic. I suddenly yearned for a goofy show with the snake gulping down the bird.

The supercarrier has won several best in class awards, such as the "Ship's Store Retail and Services Excellence Award", for the U.S. Pacific Fleet for fiscal year 2006 in the CV/CVN class"; the excellence in food service award for its class; and the "Battle "E"" award, for its condition and wartime readiness. All of this is interesting if nuclear powered aircraft carriers interest you. You'd find this story fascinating if aircraft carrier logistics stories excite you as much as stories about animals, history, science or space. You'd be intrigued if patriotism to you means appreciating the fine tuning necessary for "prompt and sustained combat" by 6,000 people manning a ship longer than the Empire State building, that costs taxpayers $2.5 million dollars a day to run.

National Geographic claims its mission is: "Inspiring People to Care About the Planet". I'm sure some people would argue that a show about the Navy's USS Ronald Reagan fulfills the mission. Anyway National Geographic can feature any type of show it wants. And it does. Take for instance "Ultimate Factories". There's "Ultimate Factories: Ferrari", "Ultimate Factories: BMW", and "Ultimate Factories: Corvette". Sure, ok, car factories are fun. But does a Ferrari factory inspire you to "care about the planet?" Yes, these are slick cars, but am I total stick in the mud, given NG's mission statement, to point out that Ferraris get 7-10 mpg in the city and 12-16 mpg on the highway?

On National Geographic's "Advertise with us", website page they advise hopeful advertisers: "Now we are placing more emphasis on preservation, seeking a sustainable relationship with our planet, and promoting greater public understanding that will lead the way to global balance." When does it start? Or is the sentiment reserved for the "Global Warming" section of the website, where they dare not mention that cars contribute to global warming? Oh well. I'm sure that National Geographic's hat tip to the US military and car manufacturers is rewarded.

Discovery: Future Weapons

Where else would one turn for a good nature show these days? The Discovery Channel? In 1985 the fledgling cable network was launched to be "Scientific American of the air", as a spokesperson told AdWeek. When asked how Discovery Channel planned to compete with other networks (at a time when cable TV hadn't taken off), he said "If we are a 'dark-horse' to be a fourth network, we're almost invisible because we're so dark". He added, "To be a fourth major network, we'd have to add a lot of stuff, which we are not going to do. The true beauty of The Discovery Channel is that it's differentiated and focused." In 1988 about one-third of the network's programming was nature documentaries, one-third was documentaries about "other lands and their cultures", and the rest was devoted to shows on science, technology, history, and human adventures such as trekking and mountaineering,according to a Christian Science Monitor article at the time.

But things change. Today the vast Discovery Communications, produces multiple channels; Discovery, Health, Science, Animal Planet, Travel, HD theatre, and TLC ("an affirmative and connective experience"). They launched the "Military Channel" in 2005. The channel was a rework of an aviation show that producers expanded because of "viewer demand" for land and sea --not just air-- military content. Last February, when Discovery added home-grown content to "Military Channel", Vice President Bill Smee enthused to USA Today about the US soldiers' videos they planned to air. The films wouldn't always be "feel-good", he assured, because they were filming on the job: "...I don't want to overpromise firefights, but you may see the aftermath of an improvised explosive device."

So why not I guess? Shouldn't gore be part of the "The Military Channel"? Granted, no one in their right mind would go there looking for basic science or nature shows. But fight fervor is not confined to the "Military Channel". If you happened to naively click over to Discovery Channel at 11:00 on a Thursday evening, you wouldn't find "Planet Earth", or "Shark Week", or "Man vs. Wild", or "Storm Chasers". You'd be watching "Future Weapons".

"Future Weapons" is now in its second season. The show created a stir last year with its special website dedicated to building audience enthusiasm for weapons. BAE Systems helped sponsored the site. The defense contractor told AdWeek in June, 2007, that their media goals for working with Discovery were "to keep the Non-Line-of-Site (NLOS) Cannon front and center in terms of the Army and people who are interested in the military'". BAE found Discovery's content so useful that it used the Discovery Channel's NLOS site as "real third-party validation that we could show to our prospective customers".

To be fair, defense contractor advertising has always been a part of Discovery Communications, even when the network wanted to be "Scientific American of the air", back in 1985. Shiny spiffy weapons just haven't been quite so "front and center". Also to be fair, Discovery Communications' mission is more in line with its commitment to military content than National Geographic's. On their "About" page, the corporation proclaims: "Discovery, it's not just our name, it's our very calling". A little dull, but universally inclusive, which gives the corporation an opening for all programming, even military recruiting.

Discovery Communications offers no pretense about saving the planet. Nevertheless, if "discovery is [y]our calling", forgive your audience for thinking along the lines of exploring the Amazon, or investigating bone marrow cell transplants, or climbing Everest, or observing some animals on the Kalahari -- without the NLOS Cannon and its "unprecedented responsiveness and lethality". Sure military technology is based on science -- but building enthusiasm for weapons is used for the purpose of exciting people about war, not science. From "discovery is our calling", its only a hop, skip and a jump to historical slogans like "it's not a job, it's an adventure", or the current Navy slogan of dubious meaning: "accelerate your life". ²

More, New Science on Cable

I do sometimes lament what passes for science programming these days, and I'm not alone. In 2003 there was a flurry of announcements and excitement around a proposed C-Span like science station called Cable Science Network - CSN. Science, and Scientific American, and Wired announced the program. The founders wrote in Scientific American: "Wouldn't it be great to watch congressional hearings on cloning, bioterrorism, global warming and aging? Wouldn't it be fabulous to attend--via cable--cutting-edge lectures given by scientists at various annual scientific conferences?" I'm not sure how the public answered, but CSN apparently never got off the ground.

There are other efforts starting however, and while programming can get worse, it can surely always get better. The National Science Foundation (NSF), has teamed up with the Research Channel to produce programs for national and international cable, TV, and internet audiences. There's also a PBS/Wired program called Wired Science. I'm sure there are others, I'll just have to channel surf a little more. Then there's always Second Life.

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¹Documented in various insects and amphibians. William Barklow has done (and popularized) the research with hippopotamuses, (ie, J. of Animal Behavior March 28, 2002, "Amphibious communication with sound in hippos, Hippopotamus amphibius").

² Granted, "discovery is our calling" doesn't fit too well with the new army slogan, "Army Strong" -- too many words in the former, whereas-latter-distorted-English --grunt. See more about "Army Strong" at goarmy.com.

Acronym Required writes frequently about science and media and has also written about global warming and cognitive dissonance, for instance in Cars: Buying Cognitive Dissonance", Sea Change or Littoral Disaster, Science Communication, Communicating Climate Change, and Climate Change, Fueling the "Debate", and others. Links to other Acronym Required articles are included in the text.

When Fear of the Internet Manifests as a Desire to Throw Cheerios:

In Time magazine's "When the Patient is a Googler", Dr. Scott Haig constructs a straw lady for our entertainment. His female patient "brandish[es]" information during an office visit and her unruly child strews chocolate milk and Cheerios around his office. Haig caricatures a harried mom and compares her scornfully to his ideal patient, the engineer who is "accustomed to the concept of consultation". His Mr. or Ms. "Logical" leaves the kids in someone else's care and probably sports a pocket protector to prevent ink from the Pilot Extra Fine Point pen from spilling on the doctor's office upholstery. Kudos to engineers for knowing their rightful place. To be fair, Haig likes nurses too. They're his "favorites", because "they know our language and they're used to putting their trust in doctors. And they laugh at my jokes."

Doctor Haig has a seemingly exalted position in New York's medical circles. He teaches, runs a private practice, and "punts" his undesirable patient, with her "mispronounced words and half-baked ideas", after only one short visit. Shouldn't we all be this spoiled? Hospitalists, emergency docs, managed care docs, brilliant and dedicated private practice doctors, nurses, lab techs, physical therapists, administrators and medical workers are usually stuck with their clients -- even when those individuals who have anti-medical ideas like yin-yang, or nutrition. But imagine if, like Haig, after a mere twenty minutes of most your insufferable patient, co-worker, doctor, or boss, you could simply boot them out? You could just bid that person adieu and never have to see them again? Without sacrificing your (let's say) $500,000K+ salary? Oh, should such a world be mine! To hell with compassion.

For a man of his stature, Haig's stereotyped "brainsucker" female protagonist with her wayward toddler provokes a strong reaction -- "I soon felt like throwing Cheerios at her too"..."I couldn't dance with this one". Why such indignation?

When patients visit the doctor they generally get one 5-30 minute office visit with the "expert". Doctors are pricey, even if insurance buffers the $200-$500 bill. "Personalized" medicine? Patients are lucky if the doctor gets their name and age right. Stressed by whatever ails them, patients don't see doctors for a living, as doctors do patients, so they should be forgiven their unpracticed manner.

And mispronounciations? Think of your dear grandmother, born in a time not too long after the town doctor made patient rounds with his horse-drawn carriage. Does she have to ape the behavior of a dispassionate engineer in order to avoid the scorn? Does the harried mom? She probably wishes she did have childcare. How and why would she know the pronunciations of words in the lexicon of an orthapedic surgeon?

Many doctors agree that patients should be as informed as possible for their own health. We all acknowledge that American medicine is often a broken system. Sure "experts" abound, but complacent doctors are easy to find too. Medical errors occur in "44,000 to 98,000" patients a year according to the FDA (via Google). Patients, being human, aren't all equally subtle or adept at integrating their new found internet information with the doctor's expertise. But doctors should be able to adjust to this. They should be able to relate to inevitable unevenness in "patient's bedside manners", and the variable ability of patients to see the body in the exact same way that a trained doctor does.

Google's Intrusion?

Haig did not write 'Googler Patient' for Acronym Required's rhetorical amusement. In his telling, his irritating patient knows his address, which unsettles him. But it's hard to imagine any real rage or paranoia built around that. It's easy enough to keep your address fairly private, and his patient is obviously harmless. If we were to hazard a guess, we'd suspect there's something underlying his irritation. We'd suggest that he's upset, unsettled perhaps, thinking about how the internet might further disrupt the cozy information asymmetry implicit in doctor patient relationships. Does Google Seach masquerade in Haig's tale as his pushy female who is intruding, too "rude" and "too personal"? Does "she" (Google) jostle the power structure? Does "she" (Google) unnerve the doctor?

There's a phenomenon at work here concerning the internet, medical information, and doctor/patient relationships. Unfortunately this Time column doesn't get around to exploring the more subtle and interesting aspects of the story.

In a related piece, Tom Delbanco, M.D., and Sigall K. Bell, M.D write in "Guilty, Afraid, and Alone - Struggling with Medical Error", (New England Journal of Medicine NEJM Volume 357:1682-1683, October 25, 2007), about mutual fear on the part of patients and doctors that exacerbates suffering due to medical mistakes. The authors have made a film for third year medical students and suggest that in the case of medical errors, there should be a forum for some sort of reconciliation: "patients and families will bring ideas to the table that expand the horizons of health care professionals". They note that "because of the power dynamics between physicians and patients, questioning the expertise or skill of an authority figure is particularly fraught for the least empowered members of society".

I've just finished reading a fun book that I got at a book swap called How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Bottom. I liked it of course, although other reviewers who are more opinionated about incorporating Proust in a book title found it alternatively "clever"- "witty..funny..tonic" or "superficial..contrived..patronising".

Happily, I can stay in theme by reading a couple of new releases that not only include Proust but science too. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer writes about artists who, ensconced in their writing or cooking or painting, conceived of some aspect of sensory science ahead of the scientists. In Proust and The Squid, Maryanne Wolf writes about human development and reading.

On Proust's place in neuroscience, I didn't bring Proust along to fill in the empty moments between my neurobiology experiments as Lehrer did, and have yet to finish "In Search of Lost Time" -- I may not be the best judge. While Proust inspired books divert my attention, Proust stares down from the spines of seven unfinished volumes shelved up by the ceiling, mocking my frenzied schedule. Although some reviewers make it seem unique or iconically 21st century to mix literature and science, I contend that the pairing is natural. Scientists have always been a cultured lot to my mind, especially neuroscientists, and artists forever inquisitive about the natural world. Whatever the circumstances or pretenses Proust so often finds himself as muse, these two new books promise interesting reading.

Studs Terkel writes in the New York Times today, that the current government wiretapping defies a 1978 law. In "The Wiretap the Time", Terkel argues persuasively that the case should be allowed to go to court. Mr. Terkel is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the telephone companies that conducted broad wiretapping on behalf of the Bush administration.

The administration has been seeking to grant immunity to the telephone companies to protect them from such lawsuits, a move that critics say would set a dangerous precedent. The Senate has spent significant effort fighting the administration to gain access to key documents in order to proceed with the case. Civil liberties groups argue that the government is trying to cover-up possible wrongdoing.'"Immunity suggests that there's been a violation of the law and they want to be absolved from any liability," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters. "I would like to know what happened before I absolve anyone from liability."'

Mr. Terkel, 95, speaks of the wiretapping that he's witnessed in the past century, the Palmer raids in 1920, the Bureau of Investigation raids, the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950's, in which Terkel was blacklisted and disallowed from working in television and radio "after refusing to say that I had been "duped" into signing my name to these causes."

In defiance of the 4th amendment, Bush has gutted the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, its "legal structure and social contract", says Terkel. Of his century of experience he writes: "nothing much surprises me anymore. But I always feel uplifted by this: Given the facts and an opportunity to act, the body politic generally does the right thing."

Whales

"The safety of the whales must be weighed, and so must the safety of our warriors. And of our country."

So said Judge Andrew Kleinfeld of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling over the future of the Navy's sonar testing program off Los Angeles waters. Last Friday's stay allows the U.S. Navy to resume training exercises halted August 6th by a Los Angeles judge because the sonar testing endangered 30 species. The Natural Resources Defense Council has more information about the effects of sonar testing here [link fixed 10/08/08].

The 3 judge panel noted the exceptional situation the U.S. faces today when regarding ecological questions: of being "engaged in war, in two countries." According to the ruling:

"we customarily give considerable deference to the executive branch's judgment regarding foreign policy and national defense."

The Navy's testing is not constrained to these waters, it conducts tests elsewhere. But the judge frames an issue of the local environment in the context of the war on terror. Outrageously, while spewing fallacies, the court also hasn't caught up with the rest of the world's judgment of the executive branch's abilities "regarding foreign policy and national defense". The NRDC will appeal the decision.

Armchair Warriors

So much for the whales, says the judge. But to the subject of the executive branch's "judgment". As the war in Iraq seems to lead policy by the nose in many seemingly unrelated areas, the nature of the executive judgment that guided us to this place never ceases to occupy us and the authors of numerous books, reports, legislative investigations, and judicial rulings. Such mendacity outrages the public, fuels years worth of reality comedy, and causes international consternation.

Now the occupation is taking over Hollywood in a slew of new movies, some of which we at Acronym Required have seen recently. And since man cannot live by science alone, we'll ungracefully segue into reviewing them here.

One arresting documentary is No End In Sight, a movie that chronicles the decisions made by Pentagon and White House during the first few years of the Iraq war, and links those decisions to Iraq's subsequent degradation into violence and chaos. The accounts are relayed by administrators and military who served in Iraq. I hesitated before seeing it, I'd heard it all, I thought. But it was especially captivating to view the build-up, invasion, and occupation of Iraq as contiguous history, rather than as news accounts broken up over time with distracting news about science and movie star jail episodes interrupting the narrative.

There's also War Made Easy, narrated by Sean Penn (on DVD) that deals with public relations efforts in by the executive branch of the U.S. in all wars since WWII. The message is that U.S. citizens are far too trusting of the executive branch. This film too is very good, but is not without it's own slant and advertising. (To begin with, it's not narrated by Sean Penn as much as by Norman Solomon.)

You can warm up for these accounts by reviewing Charlie Rose's interviews with Patrick Tyler and with Amy Goodman, at his table, on March 12, 2003. Seeing this display of unfettered war hoopla before the recent releases provided a sharp reminder of the media deluge we were under before the war, and gives a nice backdrop to the documentaries. The Rose interviews happened in the aftermath of a report on the unforeseen risks of going into Iraq just before the invasion. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times correspondent, who is considered by certain sources to be a part of the (evil) politically "liberal" cabal of the Times, discussed the war with Rose,agreeing that it was "a giant roll of the dice", with unknown risks but possibly great payoffs.

Tyler's best case scenarios for the Iraq war were fairy tales. In the first week, he predicted, liberation Americans would march in and form "that big ring of steel around Baghdad...using psychological operations to break the will of his commanders...force them to choose between Hussein and American forces...Iraqis will cheer the arrival of Americans....". This strategy, Tyler mused, would serve to improve our foreign relations with Europe, Russia and the entire Middle East, teach North Korea a lesson, and set the stage for peace between Israel and Palestine. Not to mention get Bush re-elected. Needless to say, no one had really looked into the future beyond their fanciful visions of leis joyfully draped over the broad shoulders of U.S. military by the grateful Iraqis.

It's fascinating to see exactly how wrong the pundits were -- even the "liberal" ones -- about the pressure put on media to sell the Iraq war, about the actual vs. perceived threats of the invasion. They were not only dead wrong about Iraq, their visions for how other foreign policy would play out were off too. Tyler noted Putin's great leadership, and his remarkable inroads towards the west and democracy. One of the most dire risks predicted by Tyler was that the U.S. could get stuck in Iraq "3 months from now", and Bush would lose the election. All of this discussed in those somber, serious tones reserved for such especially exciting occasions. It's stunning just how much hindsight of a mere four years provides. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has an interesting and relevant minor showdown with Charlie Rose in the same episode, about whether or not major TV networks were influencing the reportage of their anchors.

Not to focus exclusively on the U.S. and non-fiction, in fiction movies there is the somewhat related This Is England, which tells a story about England during the 1980's, and argues a view that desperate economic straits of that country under Thatcher led to the decision to go war and eventually, of all things, to the rise of skinheads.

These movies are apparently only the beginning. There are more Iraq themed movies attracting attention at the Venice Film Festival. These days, however, almost any movie, Bourne Ultimatum for instance, can be seen by a jaded audience as containing an underlying message for U.S. foreign policy.

In times like these, the courts and Hollywood argue, the place of the whales fades away along with the mystical escapism of movies like Whale Rider, when warriors coexisted with whales, a product of ancient times -- 2002.

Newsweek Now Decides Climate Change is Real

The title of Newsweek's current article, "The Global Warming Hoax", makes me wonder if Newsweek is still trying to appease all audiences, despite overwhelming evidence of climate change. The provocative title and cover photo with a giant burning sun gives the impression of a magazine intent on feeding the fire of debate. Inside, Sharon Begley coolly focuses on the deception of climate change by its deniers, who she says are running amok:

"....outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle -- and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion."

In the 4000+ word article, Begley profiles a cabal of naysayers', who say that global warming is false, unproven or unimportant. The article features the usual suspects, ExxonMobil, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, James Inhofe, Fred Singer, and Richard S. Lindzen. Its well worth reading if you haven't heard the denier's tall tales or want to read them again. Perhaps you went out and bought a Hummer after reading Richard S. Lindzen's 1000 word opinion featured just last April in Newsweek, fatefully titled: "Learning to Live With Global Warming, Why So Gloomy?":

"There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators -- and many scientists -- seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes...Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now..."

Earlier this year, to be fair, Newsweek published an article from "the other side", about the the Union of Concerned Scientist's report on ExxonMobil's lobbying campaign.

The 50% Solution

It's not clear whether Newsweek's "balanced" coverage is in deference to its readers or its advertisers or both. This newest article comes at a time when ExxonMobil itself acknowledges climate change. "With its change of heart, ExxonMobil is more likely to win a place at the negotiating table as Congress debates climate legislation"

To Begley's point, the deniers still thrive in their slowly closing circle of lies. In fact they have now have been invited to the negotiating table. Those media outlets which broadcast the deniers articles also thrive. The Financial Times featured an editorial last week titled, "The Steamrollers of Climate Science", by Clive Crook, arguing that the IPCC and its reports were tainted by "pervasive bias"..

He acknowledged that it was written by numerous scientists, but wrote as if the IPCC was actually just a few scientists, four maybe -- Ian, Paul, Chuck and Cliff (IPCC). He recommended that "if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source". Who did Clive Crook have in mind? He quoted the opinions of David Henderson, affiliated with the Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (all funded by ExxonMobil).

Today, the Financial Times published two letters to the editor, one in complete agreement with, one disagreeing with his editorial. The rote, 50-50 solution that heedlessly denies the evidence.

Oil in The Melting (Shhhh!) Arctic

The climate change deniers ought to be experiencing cognitive dissonance that would compete with the "wind-induced" mechanical resonance that brought down the Tacoma-Narrows bridge in 1940.

While the denier editorial business thrives, last week Russia planted a flag in the Arctic, staking out future Gazprom profits, accessible with the melting waterway and the capital of foreign oil companies. The Financial Times itself reported on the opportunities in the Arctic and on various companies and countries chances of competing for oil in the article: "Arctic Ice":

"in a dreadful circularity, global warming, helped along by the burning of fossil fuels, is causing the Arctic's ice sheet to recede -- making any oil and gas there easier to access.

Spiegel, the German newspaper, wrote, "How much truth is there to the dire warnings of melting polar ice caps"?, asks the German newspaper Spiegel, in an article on the French Oil Company Total, a sponsoring explorer to the artic. The French company's stated purpose is to "measure the arctic melt" (and perhaps to send back pristine images for public relations efforts). Total is also working with Gazprom on Russian gas reserves in the arctic. Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States currently claim parts of the North Pole.

The Heritage Foundation noted that "a quarter of the world's oil", may be under the caps, and "if the ice caps melt and shrink", the newly available resources will fuel foreign "tension".

Is global warming real? No it's not, say deniers, but then they add that whoever gets to the Arctic and its oil as the ice melts wins. If you're dizzy from snapping your head around to follow first the one side of their argument, than the other, simply follow the money for the truth.

Or do we know the truth and just want to drive around in our SUV's a while longer?

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Acronym Required previously posted about climate change with:
"Cars, Buying Cognitive Dissonance"
"Green Spirit"
Communicating Climate Change
"Sea Change or Littoral Disaster"

To escape global warming you need to buy a new car. The automobile industry reminds me of this every day. In reality when I drive my "old" fuel efficient car, I end up on the highway, snagged in traffic with thousands of other cars. But all the car advertisements insist that if I would only buy a shiny brand new Ford or Chevy or Dodge, I wouldn't be stuck in that traffic jam. I'd be driving on the open road, in the mountains or the desert, not a car in sight, no smog, only the sunset baking the auburn canyons and the glint of sun off the new wax -- just me, the car, nature, (and my sunglasses).

Really, I seldom drive because I don't need to. I love to walk and I actually enjoy public transportation, with all its jostling and smooshing together of humanity. It's also a pragmatic choice, this "alternative" transportation. There's a lot of traffic congestion in my neighborhood, which at peak hours, involves mostly high-strung, work-ready parents dropping their kids off at school. Their idling SUVs jam the intersections for blocks. Each parent in turn deposits their child at school, with the lunch, and the homework projects, the gym bag, and the well-wishes. This inch-worming, stop and go and stop traffic wildly irritates the workmen and FedEx drivers. How and they deliver goods and services on time? People become frustrated and irritable and resort to crazy maneuvers and horn-blowing. So for me, it's often faster, cheaper and more relaxing to take the bus.

Sometimes when I'm out for a walk or run, I have to pass this restless line of SUVs and trucks and I try to hold my breath like I'm swimming under water until I get past the idling vehicles and short-tempered drivers, the restless children, and the impatient truck driver who wants to swerve around the whole line of cars and get through the intersection but then at the last minute -- can't. When I finally pass all the carbon monoxide emitting vehicles I eagerly gulp whatever air ends up in that space.

I should worry about the quality of that breath, I'm sure. How well am I oxygenating my lungs as an uncommon pedestrian in a sea of cars? In order to be a good citizen in a time of global warming, Time Magazine says you should live in the city. But if I were to take this advice to heart, would I become a naive martyr for the cause? Cities are polluted, and if I walk or take public transportation don't I make myself even more vulnerable to everyone else's choices to drive?

Plus, the new-car ads constantly tug at me, telling me to ignore reality and instead envision cars as a sort of personal utopia. Leggy models have long since been replaced by the rest of nature, and now I have confidence that if I buy any Infiniti, or Volvo, or Saab, the new vehicle will swiftly transport me from the smoggy present to a pristine, otherworldly mountain road. There I will switchback along, zooming past snowbanks and negotiating slick spots with the surest of handling, surrounded by the freshest air, forever warm and safe in the arms of mother nature.

Marketing with animals is effective marketing, and automobile marketers don't shy away from piling on animals as well as nature. Infiniti ads once featured woodpeckers that flew into the car to peck at the wood on the console. I'm not sure what happened to the birds, but I remind myself that it's not only the Queen of England, with her privilege and idle time, her Landrover and a vast territory of heaths and heathers, who can see a fourteen-point buck in the countryside. There's nothing to stop me from doing the same. I can purchase a new Subaru from my local dealer any day of the week and crash through beautiful forests in four wheel drive comfort. Then, according to one Subaru ad, a deer will emerge magically from the forest, stand next to my windshield and gaze at me appreciatively, the two of us, bonded by nature and my new car.

With all the marketing talk of blue skies, I'm always convinced that there's a very very environmentally hospitable, economical car just around the bend. I turn each magazine page expectantly, hoping to see this dream car of mine.

You would think my dream car would materialize, they've been "working" on it for decades. The time is ripe. News articles are suddenly unanimous, definitive and grim about global warming. Newpapers and online news shows feature photos of cars, bumper to bumper, in cities obscured by brown smog, with people on scooters wearing gas masks, sometimes coughing. But the automobile industry still natters away with the very same antithetical vision -- large gas-guzzling vehicles zooming silently through pristine, untouched nature. And how did they get that Jeep to the top of that precious precipitous canyon, so much cliff and sky, without a trace of car noise or exhaust?

At some point perhaps, we can be swayed, along with the auto industry, to conjure up any vision, no matter how absurd. To wit, you can place you and your imaginary new car into a scene from "An Inconvenient Truth" without a trace of remorse or irony. A recent magazine ad did this very thing, featuring an Aston Martin Roadster parked in front of a glacier, similar to Grey Glacier and Lago Grey, bits of ice floating by the car. (You can see the ad in this PDF. )

Of course the Aston Martins is the classic luxury car-- sporty, fast, and expensive; you would need to pay to realize this dream. The flagship "Vanquish" model lists for $255,000. It gets about 11mpg in the city and 17mpg in the country, but notably has outstanding horsepower and reaches speeds of 165 to 225 hundred miles per hour. All the better to blow by glaciers with. Naturally, for that price you have your choice of leather seat color, from among hundreds of nature's finest shades, including Falcon Grey, Kestrel Tan, Quail Grey, Red Fox, Sandstorm, Shark Blue, Bison Brown. I think their "Arctic Blue" succinctly complements the glacier theme. By immersing yourself in such dissonance, carbon credits would be a distant afterthought.

We know better than to think that the Vanquish is melting earth's glaciers, and to be honest, given the chance by some benevolent spendthrift, we'd probably be all too happy to take the Roadster for a spin. But while emissions soar, fuel economy standards remain the same, decade after decade. The auto industries fights tooth and nail for the right pollute, and we the people of habit collude with polluters by resisting change. The automobile industry, like an aging Faulknerian belle, forever insists on miring us in their beloved automobile myths. But there must be some breaking point. The further they attempt to pull us into the wilderness, the greater our cognitive dissonance. Then at some point we'll collectively snap and insist on change, insist on a new reality for transportation.

Summary: 'We don't believe them anymore, those CEI authors who insist with a straight face that global warming science is a plot of "socialists and communists". We're wise to their tactics. Nevertheless, we feel sorry for them when they pathetically claim that because of their "efforts to educate the public, Greenpeace has repeatedly targeted [them], by stealing their garbage on a weekly basis...."'

Climate Change Communication-- Does It Work?

The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) met last week in San Francisco, California and convened a panel on communication of climate change. The AAAS website summarizes the panel's take home message: "More communication of climate change science won't spur problem solving, says CU researcher". The panel was based on a book by coeditors Lisa Dillings and Susanne Moser called: "Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change." According to the AAAS panel press release:

"The notion that more information about the science of human-caused climate change will spur effective problem solving by American society is just flat wrong, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder climate policy analyst."

As Dilling put it: "What we do know is that handing out fliers about the consequences of climate change and assuming people will change their ways doesn't work". She added that most people don't connect their own energy consumption with CO2 emissions.

We were eager to delve into the book, to learn about these issues, pull out pithy quotes and interesting facts and share them with you, but since the book is listed for over $100 on Amazon, so you'll have to buy it yourself. For now, we'll make assumptions based on the bits of the book that Amazon gives sneak previews of.

Communication Doesn't Work -- Really?

Taken at face value, the conference press release states the antithesis of what we've observed over the years. We read it and thought -- Really? Communication isn't working? True, once we would have agreed with this premise. For years, it seemed as if peoples' concerns over climate change were diminishing even as more and more scientific evidence for global warming piled up. Intelligent people, our friends even -- with no ExxonMobil holdings at all-- dismissed the facts of climate change!

Last April, in considering my options for gloomy posts on this sorry state of affairs, I had half a mind to just post a link to HappyNews.com and call it a day. Instead Acronym Required published a weary review of the so called "two sides" of the climate change debate and titled it "Sea Change or Littoral Disaster". We noted: "Each headline that shows more evidence of warming is greeted with hope from those who believe that the naysayers really, really do need one more piece of evidence to convince them. Then the barrage of squawky letters to editors follows from the people who insist the science is all flawed."

Since that post, there has been a palpable, almost surprising change in public acknowledgment of climate change. Yes, we have a year's worth of research, but as well, there's corporate attention, the movie "The Inconvenient Truth", more evidence of warming and melting and extreme weather events, an election that put leaders who recognize the importance of the climate issue in charge, as well as the bi-annual report from the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC. All of these communication efforts have all helped sway public perception. The media has also changed its tune, from the relentless and nonsensical even-steven coverage of the so-calld both sides, to a more truthful representation of the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

When we reflect back on 2006, it seemed that this tangible change in recognition of climate change was one of the most hopeful events of 2006. As opposed to the conclusions of communication panel, I credit this sudden recognition with ALL the skillful and urgent communications. Am I naive? Granted, the authors in the AAAS paper talk about communication not representing people's willingness to change. But isn't the first step towards a solution just acknowledging the problem? Perhaps, if we dare believe it, communication is actually working wonderfully.

Communication Works

Challenging the AAAS authors' point, if communication doesn't work, then why do the CEI and AEI and conservative public relations firms, not to mention individuals like Horner, work so hard at communication? If communication didn't work, why has ExxonMobil pumped $19 million dollars into disinformation campaigns about global warming? If communication doesn't work, then why do all these organizations put so much effort and money into getting their messages across? If communication doesn't work than why is every other ad on television for a shiny new automobile, as the automobile industry insists on selling SUVs, despite global warming.

To make her point, Dilling says that 90% of people think that global climate change is serious or very serious but only 1/3 of people find this "worrisome" -- a number that the authors say has been growing smaller until "very recently". But perhaps this corresponds to the oil companies' political campaign over the same time period which sought to present global warming as "not a problem"¹. Is it completely coincidental that people surveyed responded with the exact answer that was the message of the conservative groups against global warming¹? And perhaps the "very recent" increase of people who find global warming worrisome corresponds to "very recent" surge in communication and research about the problem -- Gore's movie, IPCC, etc.

The message of climate change skeptics protects the status quo by presenting an easy action item for the public -- do nothing. If you choose to do nothing your evidence is that somebody says climate change is not a problem. That's arguably an easier, more appealing action item than the effort required to cut back on CO2 emissions. Cutting back on consumption threatens our "core values", those directly advertised everyday on TV, in magazines, from media attention on consumption by celebrities, as well as core values expressed by President Bush. Anti-consumption is a hard sell these days. Regardless, communication has undoubtedly spurred the change in attitude. Where would we'd be if we hadn't made the effort?

Dilling's book probably goes into good detail as to the reasons why climate change scientists felt like the message wasn't getting across. But perhaps the multi-million dollar campaign pushing the conservative line, "don't worry"; overpowered the alternative message with the grim vision about "changing our lifestyles".

Communication from the Ideological Right

Clearly not everybody has acknowledged climate change, most disturbingly, The White House. The Bush administration won't step forward on the issue, perhaps because they're still all ears to their loudest constituencies. Fox News trots out the party line and occasionally breaks from serving up fare such as "What it's Like to be a Hooters Calendar Centerfold", to advise the Bush White House on climate policy. The Fox News blog "Junk Science" agitated noisily when the White House announced it was considering a measure to list Polar Bears as an endangered species last December:

"Rather than issuing the proposal in a tentative and low-key manner, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne issued a media release and reigned over a press teleconference."

"It's a futile gesture that only signals a weakening in the Bush administration's heretofore strong stance against global warming hysteria."

Heretofore we would know that the moment "Junk Science" published those words "global warming hysteria", we'd be hearing them in future conversations with our climate change challenged friends, who would spew the exact phrase in their tedious argumentation. Now, it's not as likely. Last April we wrote about "George Will and his ilk" and the relentless climate change denial brigade. Now his ilk have less of an effect on our opinions.

Not to say that all the forceful naysaying has simply melted away under the bright lights of the IPCC report. Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), for instance, who in the past found an audience in the Senate for his negative opinions of international climate treaties, is making media rounds publicizing his book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalists". Horner says he never denied climate change, it's just that the climate changes and that's not proof of anything. The difference between now and last April, in my opinion, is that these arguments aren't salable to the general population.

To my point, Horner appeared on Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, where he insisted to an unimpressed audience, that climate change is large scale plot of conspiring anti-capitalists. The audience sat, silent, tense, disbelieving, except the time they just broke out laughing. That was after Horner said that "wherever the so-called socialists and communists are in governments anywhere then they are in coalition with the Greens".

Horner proposed that the only reason that industry might appear to be complying [by acting on climate change] is to obtain a "get out of jail free card" from the Greens. "The powerful Greens??", Stewart scoffed. Stewart and his audience weren't buying any of it. Horner appeals to a self-selecting audience, for instance stating on his website that because of his "efforts to educate the public, Greenpeace has repeatedly targeted Mr. Horner, by stealing his garbage on a weekly basis...." That is sad.

We've long been educated and are now familiar with tobacco's denials of the links between cancer and smoking and also know that the same denialists have been recruited for the global warming cause. We've read the papers, we've seen the oil profits, we've heard the scientists and the bloggers. But when, exactly, did the campaign to discredit global warming lose its edge? When public opinion got nudged into a downward spiral by the Bush administration's blatant mendacity in Iraq? The federal and state bungling of Hurricane Katrina? Gore's movie? The newspaper editorials? The freakish storms and extreme weather events? Somewhere along the line communication changed public opinion.

Communicate but Don't Relax

While we think we see the tide turning, we're not smug or righteous. To Americans, Horner may sound nuts. But in context of a European audience (where the Green Party actually has a place in government) his neo-liberal parry makes more sense. In fact, even the Democratic Party of the United States has worked to undermine the already quite small Green Party of the United States. The Democrats have blamed the loss of key races on the Green Party, and when one mayoral race in California became quite close three years ago they sent Bill Clinton, Al Gore and a parade of Democrats to campaign for the Democrat candidates to stand up to a viable Green Party contender. In Europe, social-democratic governments are foundering economically but the governments that have Green Party representation are also the ones that ratified Kyoto. Is Horner trying to appeal to the Democratic Party? Is he trying to link the global warming movement to a marginalized political party? To the Europeans?

But even corporations are responding to current climate change. Business practices that save energy and makes environmental sense, and business sense. Given that Horner represents business interests, he's unreasonably fixated on a outdated and ideological message, if not certifiably paranoid about what he called the "Communist threat". Nevertheless, he's unyielding and clever in his goal to garner allies for his cause He's perhaps too easy to underestimate.

They'll Fix it

If we've moved beyond the climate change "debate", however, as I argue we have, we've only entered another stage. I'm not sure what to call it, but it if we appropriated something like the familiar five stages of dealing with catastrophe- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, then maybe people have moved on to some sort of denial/bargaining phase. People's minds fill their minds with ideas about how we can buy our way out, with some carbon credits, some alternative energy, or some prizes. Again, this is procrastination. If buying our way out doesn't work, at least we've bought some time.

Companies have visibly increased their marketing budgets to make it seem like they're "green". Electric companies put up websites with ads that urge people to take the bus. ExxonMobil runs full page ads in the Wall Street Journal that state: "actually, we're working to reduce emissions for 6.5 billion people". The stock market swoons, not at that happy little marketing message, but because aside from the message, there are glorious ExxonMobil oil profits, in the range of $36.1 billion in 2006 -- $1,146 per second -- $6 dollars per year of oil profits for every human on earth. One money manager frothed: "I think if oil prices stay north of $50, this company is going to continue to have tons of cash... this company is going to be minting money."

With much fanfare, Richard Branson offered a $25 million dollar prize to someone who can figure out how to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. He delivered the announcement standing next to a smiling Al Gore, who in "The Inconvenient Truth" mocked those who would continue polluting, then try to the earth cool down with giant ice cubes.

There are actually technology schemes that are underfunded and might have potential. People talk about storing CO2 in caves, about "artificial trees with "leaves" that absorb the gas, solar-powered scrubbers, and carbon-sucking towers in Antarctica".This is all very optimistic, but I can't help but be reminded of a chef acquaintance, a consummate practical joker. When new assistants started working in his kitchen he would invariably ask them to run an errand for him. It was an emergency, he'd explain, waving his arms frantically, a mishap with his soup de jour...Could the assistant kindly run like the wind, across town to Chez Chez and ask them for a huge favor - to borrow their pepper extractor? The Chez Chez kitchen would comply with a straight face, sending back some useless tool, a slotted spoon say, explaining to the underling its hidden powers. It wasn't a serious culinary lesson about the futility of trying to remove spice that has been too exuberantly applied to a vat of soup, just a failing source of amusement to most involved (except the exhausted assistant). Nevertheless it has a familiar ring.

Branson acknowledges that the schemes might not work, and that people need to curb their output. But that's not the dominant message. Like most businesses, he's more keen on continuing his own company's growth, and significant pollution, than having his freedom to pollute curbed by carbon regulation. Silicon Valley businesses are currently very active hosting alternative energy panels at venues in the Bay area, that quickly sell out at $20 and up per ticket. Businesses are more eager to pursue profitable energy "alternatives" for the future, than to stop pouring carbon into the air now. Citizens are happy to let business figure it all out for them. This new bargaining is an extension of the last message actually -- you don't need to worry. You don't really need to do anything, lets see if someone can invent something. Change is too difficult and no fun, lets not think too hard about that, lets try to buy or bargain our way out -- I can pick up some milk and butter and carbon credits at the store on the way home honey....

Not everyone is controlling the communication about climate change, but some people are, and consumers are busy acting according to the messages they're receiving from those strong communicators.

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¹McCright, Aaron, Dunlap, Riley, (PDF) Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative. Movement's Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy. (PDF) 2003, in Social Problems Vol 50(3) 348-373. (McCright is one of the authors of the book, this is a interesting study that he co-authored (that's not in the book))

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Some related Acronym Required articles:

On Climate Change denial: Sea Change or Littoral Disaster

Business and Climate Change: "Carbon Emissions Disclosure Project"

Ice core research to study atmospheric conditions 650,000 years ago: "Holocene Days"

Politics and climate change: "Will Loose Lips - Or Global Warming - Sink Ships?".

Carbon emissions regulation after Katrina: "The Environment & Katrina-Slick Oil Fallout"

Drought in the "Amazon", and in "Australia".

Science research communication and climate change: "Research, Politics and Working Less", and "Science Communication".

The Perfect Storm, Corporate IT vs. Determined Employee

Kaiser Permanente employee Justen Deal noticed few months ago that the custom implementation of the health care provider's Epic Systems records management system, dubbed "HealthConnect", was costing billions of dollars but was plagued by persistent problems that effected health care delivery. In addition, the employee projected future operating expenses and expected revenues and asserted that Kaiser faced a $7 billion dollar deficit in the next couple of years. He wrote some letters to individuals in charge of corporate oversight, to the board, and to various internal parties who he thought should be concerned. They said they'd investigate his concerns, they warned him not to talk to the board, they said he was mistaken, and at times claimed they didn't understand his complaints. He sent more evidence. Finally Kaiser lawyers said they investigated his complaints and said they were all baseless. Not satisfied, he sent letters to several California state agencies. All of these communications are now posted at his site called www.fixkp.org, and make for very interesting reading. Finally he sent a letter to over 50,000 employees, again listing his concerns.

In response, the CEO of Kaiser, George Halvorson, wrote a letter of his own to all 151,000 employees refuting Justen Deal's allegations. "The person who wrote the e-mail is a young man relatively new to KP whose job involves publications...", he starts out. "Overall, the e-mail was an unfortunate combination of partial facts, old data, incomplete data, "conspiracy" thinking, and naivete´.", he ends. He addresses the complaints. Responding to Justen's comments about his replacement of the board right after he was hired at Kaiser, he says, "I suspect he hasn't evaluated very many Boards."

He dismisses Justen's questions about an audit of his position at a previous employer, a Minnesota managed healthcare organization called Health Partners. The Minnesota Attorney General's Office's audit was "critical" his $5.5 million dollar compensation package when he left and his financial oversight as the CEO. But Halvorson said the 'routine' audit cleared him: "no actions, no citations, no regulation violations and no mandatory results of any kind."

Justen Deal also criticized the CIO of Kaiser for simultaneously serving as a director of a company hired as a consultant for Kaiser, while he was employed at Kaiser. Halvorson's letter declared that the CIO "was not, in fact, a principal or Board member of the "Tanning" company when they did our systems evaluation work. However, "J. Clifford Dodd", the CIO of Kaiser, was indeed at Kaiser when he hired Tanning Technologies, a consulting company that lists him as director "John C. Dodd", at least according to Tanning's own SEC filing in 2002.

Mr. Halvorson also addressed the technical problems implementing Epic Solutions system that Deal outlined: "KP HealthConnect issues are both inaccurate and wrong". The HealthConnect system is working well, he said. However a ComputerWorld author wrote an article titled "Problems abound for Kaiser e-health records management system: An internal report details hundreds of technical issues and outages", which details a few of the hundreds of problems listed in the 722 page internal report on the system's issues and outages. The system has been down for hours at a time causing various critical disruptions within the Kaiser healthcare system:

• "On May 10, a power outage that lasted for 37 hours and 9 minutes affected multiple facilities [causing pharmacy and tracking problems]..If a patient were transferred during this time they would need to track their location manually [and]....users are reporting that multiple patients are showing in the wrong beds"
• March 26, for 3 hours and 51 minutes, "users in multiple locations..were unable to access patient info or update patient info"
• April 10 for 1 hours and 23 minutes, drug information is not population for nurses, pharmacists, and technicians in one office and they "cannot see patient updates for new [drug] orders or changes in meds, such as stopping orders..."
• "On June 7, for 6 hours and 34 minutes, labs were unable to collect data, run tests and provide test results."
• "On Oct. 10, for 3 hours and 24 minutes, doctors and nurses in several facilities were unable to retrieve critical medical information to treat patients."

These were only a few of the issues. IT is tough business, especially for critical systems in healthcare and banking. Clearly, this is a massive system subject to significant challenges. Kaiser Permanente has 151,000 employees, 37 medical centers, 12,000 physicians, 8.6 million members and $31 billion in operating revenue. The plan to get the system up and running in three years was ambitious. So someone like Justen, who is not accustomed to the thorny business of IT would be rightly shocked at the messiness of it all. That the system was supposedly written in "MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) -- a health care programming language originally developed in the 1960s", may or may not be relevant, but the software had certainly never been scaled to this size organization. Various sources report different issues, architecture, planning, personnel and management failures.

Throughout his communications, Justen Deal expressed concern about a projected $7 billion dollar deficit that Kaiser was facing. Halvorson said in his letter, "The memo leads off with a mention of our financial future. Interestingly, that's the one area where the e-mail may have done us all a service". Halvorson says he warned about the looming deficits in internal memos. The projected deficit was news to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published a story about Deal's email and the impending deficit titled: "Kaiser: Critical need to cut rising costs $7 billion in losses if no action taken, HMO report says". Halvorson told the Chronicle that Kaiser has started cutting costs -- that wouldn't affect patient care.

Many, many of the details of this story are unknown. In the end, similar to Katrina, if there's a massive hurricane brewing off the coast, then FEMA's assurances that they're prepared and everything is fine will only subdue the masses until the storm hits. Kaiser will hopefully get the system up and running -- and if so it will be a feat. In the meantime, the turmoil is very real. The CTO, Cliff Dodd, resigned the day after Deal sent his mass email. Kaiser denies that the Chief Technology Officer's resignation is at all related to Justen's allegations.

Business and the Web 2.0 Generation?

On one hand Justen Deal believes he's preventing another Enron, which is arguably an idealistic or grandiose idea. Its easy to imagine that he was infected by disgruntled IT employees whose project was canned in the decision to license Epic. It's easy to argue that he's young and naive, which is the tack that Kaiser took in their correspondence. However, while anyone can make these points, a reading of the letters on the www.fixkp.org website shows that the organization handled him abysmally. One letter written by outside counsel addresses just one of his complaints by curtly listing about 30 other organizations using the Epic System, followed by: "Do you have any concerns that you can list with us about the decision-making process used by these providers to select Epic?".

It was clearly a fishing expedition and Deal quickly questioned why the lawyer, who Kaiser used to defend itself against wrongful termination suits, was fielding operations questions addressed to the board. He writes back in a letter posted on his site that his opinions of Kaiser's Epic selection processes are "irrelevant" and that engineering documents addressed this. Obviously he couldn't answer her question about other organizations' decisions, he said. He did offer information about the relative sizes of some of the organizations she listed. Some had several hundred members, compared to Kaiser's 8.6 million, others had several hundred doctors, compared to Kaiser's 13,000, doctors, etc.. In this view then, the system wasn't proven to scale or architected to an organization the size of Kaiser.

Clearly, his opinions of the system aren't isolated, since outages have caused turmoil across the organization. A recent article in Harvard Business Review talks about different IT implementations including enterprise systems that impose process changes at all levels of the organization. The author gives the example of another health care organization that failed:

"In 2002, a Boston-based hospital set up an IT system that replaced handwritten prescriptions with online orders. ...Even though studies had demonstrated that the system would reduce medication errors, physicians bitterly resisted. They complained that the computer-based process was slower and less convenient than paper-based ordering and that the built-in error checking didn't work. They protested so strongly that the hospital was able to roll out the system in only a few departments. Today, most of the doctors continue to write prescriptions on paper and fax them to the hospital's pharmacy..."

It wasn't the only Healthcare IT project to fail. On a larger scale, Britain's 2002 healthcare initiative evidently wasted $24 billion, and apparently two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster." The author of the Harvard Business Review article says, "In fact, the biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work." He quotes a CIO, who said '"I can make a project fail, but I can't make it succeed. For that, I need my [non-IT] business colleagues."' Successful system implementations need to broad support at all levels. This may be even more important in the future.

Deal was definitely a thorn in Kaiser's side, someone who was young, unintimidated, and apparently not yet appropriately practical (or cynical, depending on your view). Kaiser's tactics, aimed at quieting him, seemed to have the opposite effect. The internet gave easy public access to SEC statements, newspaper articles, attorney generals' audits. He dug deeper, found more evidence, wrote precise, articulate letters, and did not back down. He thought he had important insight that was being ignored. In a way, Kaiser executives underestimated both technology and Mr. Deal.

Twenty somethings virtually grew up with the internet. Deal's identity is available at his blog, and anywhere else on the internet, which is typical to many people his age, who for better or worse, have markedly different attitudes about privacy then previous generations. The attitude that information, personal, corporate or otherwise is free and accessible, flies in the face of a certain corporate theology in which information is coveted and hoarded, and top down management restricts open exchange especially between personnel levels. In this age, is this an effective way to manage? Is it an effective structure with which to implement an enterprise wide system? The corporation's attitude about information clashed with today's information accessibility.

Is Justen Deal and Kaiser an isolated event or a new trend? Either way, it could be a wake up call for organizations. But whether Kaiser is contemplating this, or as we speak rewriting the employee handbook rules and toiling over their public relations effort, remains to be seen.

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Acronym Required has written other articles about management issues here.

South Africa's Wealth/Health Paradox

South Africa, where approximately 1 in 9 people are afflicted with AIDS, has a paradoxical economic development profile. It is considered an upper middle income country based on its healthy Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The World Bank ranked South Africa's GDP 27th of 177 countries in 2005, putting it in about the 85th percentile for GDP. The International Marketing Council of South Africa, with the slogan "South Africa, Alive With Possibility", describes the country as the "economic powerhouse of Africa".

Yet about 800 people a day die from AIDS in this country. Life expectancy in South Africa has decreased by four years and deaths from AIDS continue to decimate populations of young women under age 35 and men in their 30's and 40's, people who are in their prime and who -- from an economic perspective -- are in the most productive years of their life.

Now more bad news. An alarming study from Statistics South Africa's shows yet another dramatic increase in deaths from AIDS in South Africa. The report analyzed death rates from unnatural and natural causes and found that the death rate from communicable diseases of South African women aged 30-45 had increased by about three times, from 500 per 100,000, to 1500 per 100,000 between 1997 and 2004. Male deaths from communicable diseases had also increased and had even doubled in some areas. Some of this bad news was predicted. Since there is a lag between infection and full blown AIDS, it was assumed that the death rates would not decrease until 2008. However the figures are still stunning - as they were last year, and the year before...

The expectations of economists and politicians was that post-apartheid Africa would rebound and that the health of South Africans would improve. Indeed according to economic measures Africa is doing better and foreign investment has skyrocketed. But even compared to Russia, where life expectancy decreased as a result of political upheaval and economic downturn, the current patterns in South Africa indicate a dire state of affairs. For scientists and doctors, the increases in deaths are distressing since there are few signs that action is being taken to stem the epidemic.

South Africa AIDS Policies

With full knowledge of the toll of South Africa's AIDS policies, international public health officials, scientists and doctors are taking South Africa to task and rightly so. Historically, the government has denied that the HIV virus caused AIDS, and it has been slow to implement treatment programs for AIDS afflicted patients. Despite pleading from world leaders, South Africa's AIDS policy remains one of obfuscation and denial. Health minister Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang often insists that nutrition will beat AIDS, and regularly pushes garlic, beets and lemon, and African potatoes as effective cures. Since patient treatment via antiretrovirals now costs less that $130 dollars a year. South Africa's health policies are out of step with the modernity and prosperity that it claims.

The country was condemned at the AIDS conference in Montreal this year for displaying a basket of this produce in its booth, initially without antiretroviral drugs. Earlier this year the country banned two non-governmental organizations (NGO's) from a UN AIDS conference because they were particularly critical of Mbeki's policies.

In the most recent international public plea for policy change, a group of 81 doctors wrote a letter to President Mbeki asking the president to replace the ineffectual health minister, Dr Tshabalala-Msimang. In response to the recent letter, the health minister complained that the international community was undermining the country's efforts. She has long defended her nutrition advice as "the truth", and allegedly doesn't mind her moniker- Dr. Beetroot".

In response to the outcry against him, the president has assigned a new committee to oversee the AIDS program, according to an associated press article (South Africa Scales Back Health Minister's AIDS Role). But the health minister denies that she has been demoted, and in typical sidestepping form, a government spokesperson, Themba Maseko, said: we need to shift the focus from saying the problem is the Minister of Health".

Effective AIDS Policies

AIDS programs succeed in countries because of many deliberate actions by leaders. It is imperative that there is strong leadership to combat AIDS at the very, very top levels of a government. So in South Africa's case, if the problem is not with the minister of health then it is with the president.

People have said that effective AIDS policies will be pushed to the fore by governments who realize that deaths impede economic progress. It's hard to imagine that South Africa, where 1 in 9 people on average are affected by the deadly disease and only a small fraction receive drugs, has not come to terms with this economic reality. Any government which claims that beetroot is as effective as antiretrovirals is, as Stephen Lewis put it: "obtuse, dilatory and negligent."

Once it seemed intuitive that a higher GDP could be linked to greater general welfare of a country's citizens. Economists now recognize that GDP doesn't always correlate with overall broader measures of prosperity. South Africa is a telling example of this phenomenon. The United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI) rates quality of life factors such as education, the status of women, morbidity, and mortality. South Africa's comes in at 121sh out of 178 countries. This puts it in about the 33rd percentile of all countries, in the company of many countries who have far fewer resources. Therefore in terms of HDI, as opposed to GDP, South Africa's is in the same band of countries that its pro-business groups lord over with their "economic powerhouse" status.

In this "post-apartheid" era, we would not expect this chasm between the HDI (where it lies in the 33rd percentile) and GDP (where it is the 85th percentile). We would not expect the travesty of preventable AIDS deaths. We only wish that such a sorry state of affairs would convince those at the top levels of the government that only an active AIDS program will assure that South Africa truly is, as its marketing campaign says: "alive with possibility".

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Acronym Required previously wrote about AIDS in Not in Paradise Anymore - AIDS in Africa - Reason for Optimism?" - in response to a David Brooks column and optimistic prognosis for the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. We also wrote about AIDS in Zimbawe, in Burma, as well as in other articles.