Denialism Blog

Author: MarkH

  • Is the surge working? (or why I need more metrics)

    Here’s an excellent opportunity to use the hive mind to look for classic techniques of deception for political benefit on the question of the “surge”.

    Reading the news stories about the progress in Iraq, I can’t help but notice a certain partisan nature to interpretation of events. You have the conservative Washington Times saying The Surge is Working, meanwhile, the liberal Washington Post (although as supporters of the Iraq war I feel this designation is non-descriptive for WaPo) indicates the results are at best mixed. We have a GAO report indicating poor performance with only a bare minority of benchmarks being achieved that is regarded as “strikingly negative”. And on top of all that the last three months in Iraq civilian deaths have been increasing. The proponents of the “surge is working” side seem to indicate that military victories and insurgents killed should be a measure of success. However, this is reminiscent of the death ratios in Vietnam which were ultimately meaningless in terms of “success”.

    So, what metrics do people feel are more informative? I am of the opinion that military victories are largely meaningless – we can win every battle and lose the war as long as no political solution is reached – consistent with the failings described in the GAO report. The pro-war types seem to think that as long as we’re killing the enemy we’re successful, however against an insurgency I don’t think this is a meaningful result. It’s just whackamole, and insurgencies are historically resistant to suppression by force.

    I would like to see the data from the pro-war side that demonstrates that progress is actually happening. I don’t want to hear about new hope in the streets, or markets safe enough for senators to walk through with a brigade of soldiers with them. I want to hear metrics that indicate Iraq is moving towards a peaceful stable state. Are there any?

    I guess what I’m saying is, I’m seeing all the signs of a belief forming that is due to wishful thinking, and no real hard data. All the pro-surge people seem to be using three of the tactics, cherry-picking data, getting positive reviews of the surge published in friendly publications, and moving the goalposts. Ad hominems and other fallacies are a given. All they need is a conspiracy and we’ll have a full-fledged denialist campaign to suggest that the Iraq war is being won, when all the data I see suggest the opposite. Increasing deaths, increasing magnitude of violent attacks indicate continued worsening of the situation. Last month a single attack killed 250 – possibly more – the deadliest attack since the beginning of the war. Suicide bombings for this August were almost twice what they were last August. If you look at our casualties there is no indication of a decrease – if anything this looks like the deadliest year yet.

    So we have a report indicating no political solutions emerging – the most critical factor for a lasting peace. We have increasing numbers and magnitude of suicide bombings. We have more civilian deaths. We have more soldiers dying. We have millions of refugees who have left the country. We have decreasing provision of public utilities and fuel. I simply can not find any data suggesting things are getting better. Instead, all the usual suspects, including Bill Kristol (or Krissandra – the mythical figure who is never right but is still listened to) are arguing it is working with no clear information to back it up.

    How is it working? Tell me. I’m asking in good faith because I want to know, where are the positives? Please, something more than whackamole with insurgents. Give me data. Prove to me this isn’t just a classic denialist disinformation campaign.

  • How to write a terrible science story

    Genomicron has an excellent description for how to write a terrible popular science story. I agree 100%. And when he hit #10, I had to cheer.

    10. Don’t provide any links to the original paper.

    If possible, avoid providing any easy way for readers (in particular, scientists) to access the original peer-reviewed article on which your story is based. Some techniques to delay reading of the primary paper are to not provide the title or to have your press release come out months before the article is set to appear.

    Damn right. It’s the internet age, it’s not only possible, but easy to include a single embedded link to the critical source material.

  • Making Booze II!

    Also this weekend we also made beer. So it’s time for another alcoholic photo-essay, this time on beer homebrewing and a brief history of beer in America.

    It all starts with a beautiful mixture of malted barley. Here’s about 20 lbs of barley, in Rick’s recipe there is a mixture of light and dark grains, all imported from Germany, in a Rubbermaid cooler which homebrewers have found handles hot temperatures well. Beer is made from 4 ingredients, water, malted barley, hops and yeast (though not part of the final product – used for the fermentation).

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    In this country, before prohibition, there were 1600 breweries in this country and in the late 1800s breweries peaked at about 4000. Basically, whichever immigrant group settled your area made beer. There was incredible variety and tradition in beer. Then prohibition came. Psychotic zealots like Carrie Nation ran around with axes attacking innocent cannisters of booze. People think alcohol is the cause of all of life’s problems and forget that it is also the solution to all of life’s problems.

    Since beer is mostly water you also need a big pot to heat some in- here’s a modified keg being heated by a big propane heater.
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    Rick tells us at this point that Anheuser-Busch beer is good for one thing – providing kegs to serve as cooking vessels.

    After prohibition ended, only the the big brewing companies survived, and the small local breweries, long driven out of existence, did not return. Beer was now a major industry, with only a few players. Many breweries reappeared after prohibition, but then died off in the face of competition from the mass producers. In 1950 there were about 500 breweries, in 1960 there were 230. Beer comes in cans, not bottles.

    More below the fold…
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  • Making Booze!

    This was a good weekend spent making lots of different kinds of booze. A long hot summer led to some really nice chardonnay grapes at the parents’ farm.

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    It wasn’t a large yield, but the sugar, or brix were really high, hopefully yielding a nice end product. If you want to see how we make white wine, more pics are below the fold.
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  • UD gets pwned

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    For a scene of pure hilarity and joy, get ye over to Uncommon Descent as they try spin the rejection of a “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” by Baylor University.

    Yesterday, the Baylor University administration shut down Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab because the lab’s research was perceived as linked to intelligent design (ID).

    Hah. Perceived as linked? It probably doesn’t help to have Dembski linking it as his one example of an ID research program. That’s a little damning. Continued:

    Robert J. Marks II, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, had hoped that a late-August compromise would save his lab, but the University withdrew from the previous offer yesterday morning. While President Lilley was not at the meeting, an insider senses his hand in the affair, noting that Lilley was the only person with the authority to overturn what the Provost, who was at the meeting, agreed to.

    You see, when a Christian University, and a Baptist one at that, decides that ID is so distasteful and unscientific, that they won’t even lend their name to an off-site, non-existent lab associated with ID, this is a dark day for the cranks. It’s a real bind. Their usual refrain to events like these is to yell Conspiracy! Or even better yet, persecution! They’re like Galileo! But they can’t say that given how religious a university Baylor is. They can’t turn on the Baptists after all, that’s half of their constituency.

    Denyse still manages to crazy it up, and her take is pretty crankerific, ranging from “thought control” to evil materialist conspiracies.
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  • Contrarians?

    I think Naomi Oreskes is being charitable when she calls denialists “contrarians”, but to each their own. Stranger Fruit has her response to the latest nonsense being spread by these liars.

    They’ve tried this before, and it was swatted down rapidly, basically the only way they can show any significant disagreement with the consensus on global warming since 1990 is to lie and dissemble. This time appears no different.

    Maybe that’s why they’re cranks. They just keep cranking out the same nonsense over, and over.

  • Finally someone understands me

    This is an accurate depiction of what is happening in my head when I see this commercial.

    And you know, this idea that applying an analgesic to your forehead is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Your forehead and your brain are separated by a thing called your skull, and they’re even on different branches of the carotid artery. Headaches do not occur on your forehead, even if that’s where you feel the pain referred.

  • WSJ and anti-government conspiracies

    Leave it to AEI writing for the WSJ editorial page to allege a grand conspiracy of the government against pharmaceutical companies. Their proof? The government wants to compare the efficacy of new drugs to older ones to make sure they’re actually better.

    The reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), created in 1997 to cover children from lower-income families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, is up for renewal this fall. Tucked into page 414, section 904 of the House bill is a provision to spend more than $300 million to establish a new federal “Center for Comparative Effectiveness” to conduct government-run studies of the economic considerations that go into drug choices.

    The center will initially be funded through Medicare but will soon get its own “trust fund.” The aim is to arm government actuaries with data that proponents hope will provide “scientific” proof that expensive new drugs are no better than their older alternatives. The trick is to maintain just enough credibility around the conduct of these trials to justify unpopular decisions not to pay for newer medicines.

    While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this sort of fiscally minded clinical research, Medicare is no ordinary payer: It dictates decisions made in the private market. So as the government begins tying its own payment decisions to the results of its own studies, there’s a great temptation to selectively interpret data and arbitrarily release results. Clearly, this obvious conflict of interest demands even more outside scrutiny and transparency than has been the usual fare when it comes to government research.

    Yes, because private research is so much more transparent than studies performed by the government. Gottlieb’s example of a government hit on expensive drugs, was of all things, the Women’s Health Initiative.

    More insane conspiratorial nonsense from AEI and the WSJ below the fold.
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  • Accidental Honesty from UD

    Granville Sewell describes the UD approach to science – in a word, quit early.

    In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?” (Of course, I believe we have found thousands of such features, but never mind that.)

    If the answer is yes, we just haven’t found any such thing yet, then all the constantly-repeated philosophical arguments that “ID is not science” immediately fall. If the answer is no, then at least the lay observer will be able to understand what is going on here, that Darwinism is not grounded on empirical evidence but a philosophy.

    The actual answer is that this is an idiotic question and exposes the fundamental misconceptions that IDers have about science. In fact, I think this is one of their most accidentally-honest posts yet.

    In science, if a problem emerges that we don’t have the technology or tools to understand we don’t throw our hands up in the air and say “god did it”. Historically this tactic is always premature.

    You want proof ID isn’t a science? There are few better examples this Sewell’s post.

    Also note Factition’s take on this very post.

    We refer to this in science as an answer that is uninformative. Sure, you’ve failed to divide something further, but what does that mean? That’s why “irreducible complexity” isn’t really a useful metric, and if the intelligent design movement is truly serious about science, they will abandon this metric as a measure of whether or not something is designed.

    You can’t base the test of your hypothesis on an uninformative answer. Just like I can’t base my understanding of bacteria based on my failure to find a particular bacterium. You have to base science on positive outcomes (otherwise known as informative outcomes).

    Damn right.

  • TJ fans check out Brayton's blog

    Ed Brayton’s discussion of the historical validity of claims of Thomas Jefferson’s support of a “Christian Nation” is illuminating.

    Turns out, it’s a myth. A story passed down third-hand to a pair of people who were under 10 years old when it happened (and substantial cause to misremember), and inconsistent with Jefferson’s writings and known activities.

    Further, the cherry-picking to suggest he attended services in Capitol each Sabbath day is downright hysterical. Read it, it’s golden.