Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Faith Healing Trips…Funded by an Insurance Company

    John W. Miller reports in the Wall Street Journal about an unusual, insurance company funded program that brings many to Lourdes:

    In an unusual scheme, [VGZ] the Dutch company spends about $280,000 a year to fly 600 of its sickest and most disabled clients to Lourdes. The company doesn’t expect the Virgin Mary to intercede. It hopes for a different sort of miracle.

    “Lourdes leads people to compassion and friendship,” says Johan Rozendaal, a VGZ board member. “They remember what it’s like to have somebody really care about them.”

    It’s difficult to quote from this article, because it’s mainly a human interest story, and it’s quite touching. It’s about a man who was disabled in his teenage years, who dreams of regaining his vision through a trip to Lourdes, but in the end, the trip helps him face the fact that he won’t see again.

  • It's Time to Free Wireless Phones

    All that stuff that the wireless industry says about being competitive is baloney! Cell phones in the US are big and stupid, and deliberately crippled to get you to pay extra for things that are natively supported in devices, like custom ringtones. And most Americans don’t know any better because they’ve never used the higher quality phones and networks available in other countries! For a deeper dive on this, see Tim Wu’s Wireless Carterphone, but for an overview of the problems, Walt Mossberg’s column in today’s Journal explains how the industry stifles innovation. This is an area where the deck of cards could be used to protect consumers, because clearly, competition and openness would benefit the landscape: i-c2389d448fdaa3a787a1059c5a46809d-6c.jpg

    A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

    Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it’s hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes. While power in other technology sectors flows to consumers and nimble entrepreneurs, in the cellphone arena it remains squarely in the hands of the giant carriers.

    […]

    We also need much greater portability of phone hardware. Because the federal government failed to set a standard for wireless phone technology years ago, we have two major, incompatible cellphone technologies in the U.S. Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. use something called CDMA. AT&T and Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile use something called GSM. Except for a couple of oddball models, phones built for one of these technologies can’t work on the other. So that limits consumer choice and consumer power. If you want to switch from AT&T to Verizon, you have to swallow the cost of a new phone.

    But the problem is even worse. The government didn’t require the CDMA companies to include a removable account-information chip, called a SIM card, in their phones. So, unlike people with GSM phones, Sprint and Verizon customers can’t keep their phones if they switch between the two carriers, even though they use the same basic technology. And, the government allows the GSM carriers to “lock” their phones, so a SIM card from a rival carrier won’t work in them, at least for a period of time. Techies can sometimes figure out how to get around this, but average folks can’t.

    The carriers defend these restrictions partly by pointing out that they subsidize the cost of the phones in order to get you to use their networks. That’s also, they say, why they require contracts and charge early-termination fees. Without the subsidies, they say, that $99 phone might be $299, so it’s only fair to keep you from fleeing their networks, at least too quickly.

    But this whole cellphone subsidy game is an archaic remnant of the days when mobile phones were costly novelties. Today, subsidies are a trap for consumers. If subsidies were removed, along with the restrictions that flow from them, the market would quickly produce cheap phones, just as it has produced cheap, unsubsidized versions of every other digital product, from $399 computers to $79 iPods.

    The Federal Communications Commission is selling some new wireless spectrum that will supposedly lead to fewer restrictions for technology companies and consumers, but it’s far from certain that the carriers, with their legions of lobbyists and lawyers, will allow such a new day to dawn. Google Inc. is making noises about trying to bust open the cellphone prison, with new software and services, but that’s no sure bet either.

  • Telcos Pump Cash into Rockefeller's Coffers

    Over at Threat Level Ryan Single reports that all of a sudden, Senator Rockefeller, the putative custodian of legislation to give telecommunications companies immunity from privacy lawsuits, is getting lots of cash from such companies. And most of these donations come from out-of-state donors (Verizon and AT&T employees who do not live in West Virginia). Suspicious! Single reports:

    Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

    In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.

    But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.

    Source: Threat Level

    What’s so amazing is how it doesn’t take a lot of cash to influence politics…A few thousand here and a few thousand there, and you’ve got yourself something.

  • Living the Bible, Literally

    While Mark is in Begas, attempting to use his big brain to make money, you people are at my mercy!!1! Let us begin!

    Check out today’s Times for a book review of A. J. Jacob’s The Year of Living Biblically, One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, the story of a secular Jew who attempts to incorporate rules from the good book into modern life:

    …”If I wanted to understand my forefathers, this year would let me live like they did, but with less leprosy,” he writes, sounding like Woody Allen on a bad day. So he made a list of scriptural strictures, the more peculiar the better, and set out to fulfill them as a 21st century New Yorker. This mission is exotic to him, he acknowledges, pointing out, “I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings.”

    With that mea culpa for any seriously religious readers, Mr. Jacobs goes about creating a methodology. He acknowledges having obsessive-compulsive disorder and loves the idea of following rules. Seventy-two pages later he has typed out every instruction he can find in the Old and New Testaments and set up a month-by-month plan to try them out…

    […]

    Other trips, notably to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., and to Jerry Falwell’s church in Lynchburg, Va., carry Mr. Jacobs beyond his own secular Jewish outlook and engage him in difficult theological questions, however briefly. “In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist,” he writes, after grilling one such scientist about Noah’s Ark.

    Ha! A lukewarm review, but probably worth a read!

  • Denialism in Vegas

    Today I’ll be leaving for Las Vegas until Sunday so I’ll leave it to my brother to post the next couple of days.

    Until then, have fun, and don’t let the cranks run wild in the comments.

  • Attacking consensus – a sure sign of a crank

    Sandy Szwarc continues to wage her war against the “obesity myth”, and has fallen into the classic crank trap of the attack on scientific consensus. It’s right up there with attacking peer-review as a sure sign you’re about to listen to someone’s anti-science propaganda.

    She cites this article at the financial times by John Kay which lauds the Crichton view of science.

    Michael Schrage’s comment on politics and science (September 26) struck a raw nerve: and provoked an extended response from the president of the UK’s Royal Society. Lord Rees advocates that we should base policy on something called “the scientific consensus”, while acknowledging that such consensus may be provisional.

    But this proposal blurs the distinction between politics and science that Lord Rees wants to emphasise. Novelist Michael Crichton may have exaggerated when he wrote that “if it’s consensus, it’s not science, if it’s science, it’s not consensus”, but only a bit. Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one.

    Readers of this blog will remember that line comes from Crichton’s infamous anti-global warming crank speech “Aliens Cause Global Warming”, which is one of the more pathetic crank attacks on science of all time. It’s just one long Galileo gambit that suggests whenever scientists agree, you’re being hoodwinked. This is, of course, total nonsense. Scientists strive for consensus on difficult topics. Review papers essentially are statements of consensus by people familiar with the field. Consensus conferences are routinely held to pour over data and determine things like the best treatments for a disease, or policy recommendations. The attack on scientific consensus is illegitimate, and is more or less, a subtle Galileo gambit. The article also has this great line:

    Often the argument will continue for ever, and should, because the objective of science is not agreement on a course of action, but the pursuit of truth…

    Boy I bet the cranks would love for this to be true. Sorry to burst their bubble but HIV causes AIDS, humans evolved, the CO2 causes global warming, the holocaust happened, and we landed on the moon. This idea that scientific concepts should be debated endlessly is absurd. If the data do not fit the theory, that’s when you have a debate. If new methods and new findings show a theory is limited, that’s when you have a debate. You don’t have a debate because some people don’t like what they hear.

    And remember what I said about not trusting people who attack peer review?

    Peer review is a valuable part of the apparatus of scholarship, but carries a danger of establishing self-referential clubs that promote each other’s work.

    And if that wasn’t enough:

    Statements about the world derive their value from the facts and arguments that support them, not from the status and qualifications of the people who assert them. Evidence versus authority was the issue on which Galileo challenged the church. The modern world exists because Galileo won.

    And there we have a Galileo reference! Of course, on these topics it’s the denialists who use status and qualifications rather than data and evidence.

    Kay Ends with this stunning piece of naivete:

    The notion of a monolithic “science”, meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus”.

    Again we have the annoying appeal to some perfect ideal of debate club. The problem is that some people are liars. They are not honest brokers in the debate. They aren’t interested in providing evidence and data for their point of view. Instead, they lie, cherry-pick evidence, and smear the opposition. This idea that consensus isn’t real and instead we need to debate denialists, and cranks as if they have something to contribute is absurd. What we need is to arm people with the knowledge to detect nonsense when they hear it, and accept that the expertise of bodies of scientists is preferable to the ramblings of hacks paid by groups like AEI or CEI. One recognizes, also, a conspiratorial tone in these attacks on consensus. As if scientists, when they have conferences on such topics, aren’t actually evaluating data but trying to figure out how to attack political enemies. This is absurd. When scientists gather to debate a consensus they do just what Kay advocates, they fight it out and argue over what the data says. When cranks respond by covering their ears and yelling “Al Gore is fat!”, that’s not an alternative presentation of data, it’s just useless bullshit, and is rightly impugned and ignored.

    Now, this is not to say that increasing obesity or its links to morbidity is even one of those difficult questions that we need to have consensus conferences on. We’re way past that. It is known, it is real. It causes illnesses like diabetes and hypertension, increases morbidity and mortality, and we should pursue methods to prevent obesity from developing because, as we’ve discussed, once obesity has developed it is difficult to reverse. No one seriously doubts the link between obesity and these consequences, and Sandy’s latest foray into the classic crank realm of attacking consensus is just another great example of why she’s not a real skeptic at all. Like her fellow CEI fake skeptic Steven Milloy, her site exists to muddy the waters on the science rather than clarify it. They would love for us to believe that it’s our duty as scientists to perpetually debate them as if they honestly had something to say. I think we’ve made the point with this blog that this is not a wise course of action or a good use of time.
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    P.S., I’m heartbroken Reasic has disappeared and his beautiful take down of Michael Crichton’s speech is gone with him. If you’re still out there Reasic, forward me that post and I’ll preserve it here.

  • Another monkey put in charge of the zoo

    WaPo reports on the appointment of Susan Orr:

    The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.

    Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

    In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

    The Family Research Council. Why should I be surprised? When they’re not sending Charmaine Yoest out to lie about Plan B, or trying to hide where their chief Tony Perkins looks for political support (*cough* David Duke *cough*), they’re bashing gays or women’s rights.

    Yes, fertility is not a disease, but it is a problem. Women simply don’t want to push out a baby a year for their entire reproductive lifetime. And who can blame them?

    The motives of the FRC are pretty clear, disempower women, suggest they’re bad parents if they don’t stay home at the beck and call of their rugrats, keep them pregnant for 30 years, out of the workplace, and subservient to men. Think I’m kidding? Why the vehement opposition to birth control? It prevents conception – you’d think they’d approve. Why should they oppose contraception if not to tie women down by the uterus? Or to deny them from possessing sexual power equivalent to men?

  • Quote Mining from the 9/11 Loons – NIST needs to learn to anticipate this crap

    Pat at Screw loose change brings us the latest dishonesty (or carefully reinforced self-delusion) from the 9/11 troofers.

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology released this letter (PDF) in response to the troofers, but failed to realize that the troofers will stoop to pretty pathetic lows to misrepresent what they say.

    I’ll present this as a quiz. Here’s the full section from letter, guess which sentence the troofers quoted out of context to suggest that NIST failed to explain the collapse of the buildings.

    The final section of your request asserts that the WTC Report’s stated goal and overal analysis violates the Data Quality Act and OMB/NIST Information Quality Standards. The basis given for this assertion is that NIST did not fulfill its responsibilities under the NCST Act because the focus of the investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. The NCST Act, as you note in your letter, requires NIST to “establish the likely technical cause or causes of the building failure.” In the case of the WTC Towers, NIST has established that the failures initiated in the floors affected by the aircraft impact damage and the ensuing fires resulted in the collapse of the towers. This conclusion is supported by a large body of visual evidence collected by NIST. Your letter suggests that NIST should have used computer models to analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of the deflections and the number of failures occuring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution.

    Your letter contends that NIST’s report violates the Information Quality Standard of “utility.” NIST believes that the report has utility. In fact, the codes and standards bodies are already taking actions to improve building and fire codes and standards based on the findings of the WTC Investigation. As we mentioned previously, we are unable to provide a full explanation- of the total collapse.

    See for yourself their read of the letter.

    It’s amazing that they can read a letter that is essentially a laundry-list of reasons why their crank nonsense is being summarily dismissed as the product of diseased minds, and they read it as a victory because they were able to select a single sentence that out of context that suggests NIST doesn’t have an explanation for the collapse. Further, this non-admission then logically (ha ha) points to controlled demolition. I think their tinfoil hats are too tight.
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  • Al Gore and the Attack of the Global Warming Cranks

    I’ve postponed writing about Gore/IPCC Nobel largely because I wanted to see how the denialists would respond, and it has been interesting.

    The problem is worsened by what Paul Krugman called Gore Derangement Syndrome:

    So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

    He makes a few mistakes in the essay. For one he repeats the myth about Hansen rather the the corrective information. Hansen’s ethics can were impugned wrongly, and the smears were immediately falsified. Krugman also neglects to mention a lot of people on the left are pissed at Gore for backing down too easily in Florida, and not running more aggressively throughout the 2000 race. But he’s mostly correct.

    We should start our coverage of the inevitable Gore smears with the most recent myth which Tim Lambert and DeSmogBlog have really stayed on top of. That is, that a UK court found nine errors in Gore’s film. In reality, the decision was an overwhelming endorsement of the film. It does have some errors, for instance, Kilimanjaro is a poor example of a real problem. Glaciers are shrinking, yes, but the Kilimanjaro mechanism is thought to be different. No big deal, unless you’re a crank that is more interested in celebrating every perceived instance of scientific fallibility rather than communicating the truth. Even 9 real errors would be relatively minor in such a data-rich presentation. But when you actually read the decision, rather than quote-mine it (or repeat the quote-miners credulously), you see the judge was putting “errors” in quote marks, and was saying they may be points of contention, while not judging them to be actually incorrect. From DeSmogBlog:

    Justice Burton says, “I have no doubt that Dr. Stott, the Defendant’s expert, is right when he says that: ‘Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.”

    We also find, not surprisingly, that this court case wasn’t just a spontaneous incident, but a yet another orchestrated attack from denialist organization linked to the George C. Marshall institute and the “Great Global Warming Swindle”.

    Continued…
    (more…)

  • Weirdest Headline Ever

    Archbishop apologizes for giving Communion to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

    And what a great article too! PZ would love this group.

    On Oct. 7, Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the Eucharist to members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – an activist group whose motto is “go forth and sin some more” – prompting cries of outrage from conservatives across the country and Catholics in San Francisco.
    …
    The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in San Francisco in 1979, are known for their white face paint, outrageous costumes, theatrics and support of the gay community. They adopt names such as Sister Chastity Boner and Sister Constance Craving of the Holey Desire and have mottos such as, “It is not wise to say no to free drinks, cheap jewelry, discount cosmetics or pretty boys.”

    It’s also great to see all the shock and horror for what is, in the end, the accidental deliverance of a holy cracker.

    Conservative Fox news commentator Bill O’Reilly, who has disparaged “San Francisco values,” called the latest flap another example of how the city is run by “far-left secular progressives who despise the military, traditional values and religion.”

    On his Friday news show, O’Reilly called San Francisco “a disgrace on every level.”

    You’d think Bill would be down with San Fran, but then, it’s quite likely he’s desperately repressing his urge to be violated with a falafel, whatever. Let’s hope the sisters open up a chapter in every state!