Slashdot Mirror

Steven Milloy describes himself as the publisher of the Junk Science Home Page and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. "Milloy appears frequently on radio and television; has testified on risk assessment and Superfund before the U.S. Congress; and has lectured before numerous organizations," it adds, noting that he has also "written articles that have appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, Washington Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, and the Investors' Business Daily."

These facts are all accurate as far they go, but they say nothing about how Milloy came to be a prominent debunker of "junk science." This omission is undoubtedly by design, because it would certainly be embarrassing to admit that a self-proclaimed scientific reformer got his start as a behind-the-scenes lobbyist for the tobacco industry, which has arguably done more to corrupt science than any other industry in history.

Early in his career, Milloy worked for a company called Multinational Business Services, a Washington lobby shop that Philip Morris described as its "primary contact" on the issue of secondhand cigarette smoke in the early 1990s. Later, he became executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), an organization that was covertly created by Philip Morris for the express purpose of generating scientific controversy regarding the link between secondhand smoke and cancer.

After leaving Tozzi's service, Milloy became president of his own organization called the "Regulatory Impact Analysis Project, Inc.," where he wrote a couple of reports arguing that "most environmental risks are so small or indistinguishable that their existence cannot be proven." Shortly thereafter, he launched the "Junk Science Home Page." Calling himself "the Junkman," he offered daily attacks on environmentalists, public health and food safety regulators, anti-nuclear and animal rights activists, and a wide range of other targets that he accused of using unsound science to advance various political agendas.

Milloy was also active in defense of the tobacco industry, particularly in regard to the issue of environmental tobacco smoke. He dismissed the EPA's 1993 report linking secondhand smoke to cancer as "a joke," and when the British Medical Journal published its own study with similar results in 1997, he scoffed that "it remains a joke today." After one researcher published a study linking secondhand smoke to cancer, Milloy wrote that she "must have pictures of journal editors in compromising positions with farm animals. How else can you explain her studies seeing the light of day?"

In August 1997, the New York Times reported that Milloy was one of the paid speakers at a Miami briefing for foreign reporters sponsored by the British-American Tobacco Company, whose Brown & Williamson unit makes popular cigarettes like Kool, Carlton and Lucky Strike. At the briefing, which was off-limits to U.S. journalists, the company flew in dozens of reporters from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru and paid for their hotel rooms and expensive meals while the reporters sat through presentations that ridiculed "lawsuit-driven societies like the United States" for using "unsound science" to raise questions about "infinitesimal, if not hypothetical, risks" related to inhaling a "whiff" of tobacco smoke.

Milloy is also highly visible on the internet. In addition to publishing the Junk Science Home Page and a website for the No More Scares campaign, Milloy also operates a "Consumer Distorts" website devoted to attacking Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, which Milloy accuses of socialism, sensationalism, and "scaring consumers away from products."

• Secondhand smoke kills ###### people a year.
• The rich don't pay taxes.
• Cell phones cause cancer.
• There are # million homeless people in the US.
• Breast implants cause illness.
• Global warming will kill us all in ## years.
• Ozone depletion will kill us all in ## years.
• Overpopulation will kill us all in ## years.
• Women are paid $.7# cents for every dollar a man is paid.
• No one knew cigarettes were dangerous before 19##.
• Cigarette smoking costs the public $## billion for health care.
• Animals have Rights.
• There are ### species going extinct each day/month/year.
• It's ---------'s fault children are fat, not their parents' fault.
• Nuclear power is more dangereous than ------ power.
• -------- is dangerous in small doses.
• Vaccines cause autism.
• Organic food is safer.
• GM "frankenfoods" will kill us all in ## years.
• Air polution is getting worse.

If you want a hundred examples of outright leftist falsehood, you only need to look to junkscience.com. It's updated daily. They're not always right, but they seem to have brought back the concept of healthy skepticism.

This is not a defense of untruth by the right either. I've noticed just the opposite of your contention. Untruths are more a historical phenomenon for the right and more a contemporary phenomenon for the left.

The thing is, political falsehood is usually used to oppress people, not to free them. In general, modern conservatives in the US want more freedom, and modern liberals want more control over people. This represents a shift from the '60s, and it goes hand-in-hand with the shift in political untruth-telling.

It would really be nice if reporters would bone up on this stuff and give us the science and the facts, not hearsay.

For lots more debunking of just about every "science" fad, check this out.

It would really be nice if reporters would bone up on this stuff and give us the science and the facts, not hearsay.

For lots more debunking of just about every "science" fad, check this out.

Interesting points. Could be junk science. Personally, I never believe headlines and I won't even pay attention until there have been several studies from independant sources.

The problem is we see this stuff published every day - it often gets retracted, but that rarely makes the news.

I just got back from a little road trip across the southwest, and from all the nothing you see out there, you would think that 83% is a bit high.

Of course it's high. This is typical junk science from the special interests.

Though western reason and science has brought us to a level of health and comfort not dreamed of in the past, those who hate man's accomplisment and progress continue to try and saw the limb off behind us with blind and ignorant fear.

Finally. I've been looking for this for a LONG time.

Freon. How you've been lied to by the EPA, and how easy it is to convince an environmentalist something fine is bad.

Environmentalists are nothing but a corps. toy boy. What could be better than PhDs who won't spend the extra time to verify their work? Who will "speak out" on an issue before they're 100% certain of the truth? Philip Morris showed us just how useful doctors like these can be...

I'd trust a greenie if they'd just do some fully qualified reasearch. Instead all we hear is "CFCs are bad because when they mix with ozone they harm it -- no, we don't know how they get there, we think they just do. No, we haven't run any tests, but we must be right, JUST LOOK AT THE BIG HOLE. Oh, and chewbacca lives on endor.".

I think South Park put it best (but not about CFCs, I guess we'll have to wait for that):

Doo-doo-doo, da-da-do-do-wow!
There's a place called the rainforest that truly sucks ass
Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast
You say 'save the rainforest', but what do you know?
You've never been to the rainforest before!
Getting Gay with Kids is here
To tell you things you might not like to hear
You only fight these causes 'cos caring sells
All you activists can go fuck yourselves.

Someday if we work hard boys and girls..
There'll be no more rainforests left in the entire world..
Getting Gay with Kids is here
To spread the word, and bring you cheer
Getting Gay with Kids is here
Lets knock down the rainforest, whaddaya say?
It's totally gay, It's totally gay!

Measurable, yes. But does the fact that you can measure it (parts per billion? trillion?) mean that there's a (human or other wildlife) health hazard from it?

And if there is a hazard, is that risk outweighed by the (newly-increased) risk of West Nile to humans in North America, and the (massive, known, documented) number of deaths due to malaria in the Third World.

(Note: These are three different questions. For instance, mosquito bites are annoying, but harmless - the risk of encephalitis has always been pretty minimal, and DDT probably wasn't justified for mosquito control in the West until recently. Before West Nile, DDT may not have been justifiable for mosquito control in the West. That risk/reward equation is changing now as West Nile spreads. And finally, the risk/reward of applying DDT to our mosquito problems has nothing to do with the risk/reward of malaria in the Third World, which IMHO more than justifies the use of DDT there.)

> Anything that lurks in the soil that long can't be nice stuff.

Depending on the quantities still there, probably not. (And yes, I do agree that it's long-lived. On the other hand, you don't have to apply it every week like newer pesticides. Another risk/reward tradeoff.)

Meantime, do you have anything more substantive than that to back up the assertion that it's harmful? Here's some contrary evidence that's come out since the 60s and 70s that refutes notion that it's anywhere near as dangerous to humans or wildlife as it was claimed to be.

(Of particular note - studies in 1999 are pretty consistent in demonstrating that there's no link between DDT and cancer in humans or primates. IMHO there never was.)

Summary
Gamma radiation dose rates were measured at several locations in and around the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Library of Congress buildings in Washington, D.C. A qualified radiation surveyor used a Bicron MicroRem meter for measuring. Dose rates inside the Capitol building and outside the Thomas Jefferson Building were measured at 30 microrem per hour. This dose rate: (1) exceeds local background radiation dose rates; (2) is up to 550 percent greater than the typical dose rate "at the fence line" around nuclear power plants; (3) is about 13,000 times greater than the average individual dose rate from worldwide nuclear power production; (4) is about 13,000 times greater than ongoing worldwide exposures to radiation from the Chernobyl accident; and (5) exceeds the dose rate associated with the radiation protection standards proposed for the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste facility. The measured level of radiation is associated with up to a 0.5 percent increase in cancer risk, according to U.S. EPA risk assessment methods.

Yes, read that again. The pedestal for the statue of Roger Williams (Rotunda/Senate Chamber Hallway, U.S. Capitol) gives off about 30 microrem per hour... more than the proposed standards for radiation at the perimeter of Yucca Mountain. Just to put in perspective.

(Various disclaimers: Yes, the Steve Milloy's JunkScience.com site does usually have a politcal agenda. However, that does not, in itself, make their claims any less true. And yes, you should take into account alpha vs. gamma radiation. And for what it's worth, the radiation study was made possible by a grant from Citizens for the Integrity of Science. An opposing viewpoint can be found here.)

An increase in CO2 can therefore be assumed to increase the amount of heat trapped by the earths atmosphere, since CO2 has been doing that since the beginning of time.

Then why don't satellites show a net change of external energy input and output over the past 20 years? There are studies which show that no net changes are observed, and other studies which detail that surface temperature changes are not uniform, as you would expect CO2 to be; but rather, may be more due to urban concrete heat sinks and soot. Global warming is happening, and we may indeed be able to do something about it and/or be causing it -- but let's make sure we're addressing the proper issue before jumping into anything.

So let's try to sum this whole thing up: Organic farming is "better" because it produces ~20% less yield but there are more bugs in the ground. Yeah.

But let's delve deeper into the actual methodology. How big was the plot of land that they studied. One would assume that they would devote several hundred acres so that minor local anomalies would skew their results. Well, one would be wrong. The plot was about 3.5 acres. And what about the "ecological benefits" that make the smaller yields palatable? How was this actually measured? Did they look at chemical content in the earth? How about in the crops? No, they counted the number of worms and insects. How is that ecologically meaningful, especially with such a small sample size?

While there is a need for greater efficiency in the chemicals and methods of modern day farming, this "study" proves nothing. If anything, it shows that anyone who buys "organic" crops is getting ripped off. After all, if "organic" farming is so much more efficient (get a load of how they caculated that!) why do they cost more at the store!?

This, and other garbage science, is debunked on a regular basis at JunkScience.com

So let's try to sum this whole thing up: Organic farming is "better" because it produces ~20% less yield but there are more bugs in the ground. Yeah.

But let's delve deeper into the actual methodology. How big was the plot of land that they studied. One would assume that they would devote several hundred acres so that minor local anomalies would skew their results. Well, one would be wrong. The plot was about 3.5 acres. And what about the "ecological benefits" that make the smaller yields palatable? How was this actually measured? Did they look at chemical content in the earth? How about in the crops? No, they counted the number of worms and insects. How is that ecologically meaningful, especially with such a small sample size?

While there is a need for greater efficiency in the chemicals and methods of modern day farming, this "study" proves nothing. If anything, it shows that anyone who buys "organic" crops is getting ripped off. After all, if "organic" farming is so much more efficient (get a load of how they caculated that!) why do they cost more at the store!?

This, and other garbage science, is debunked on a regular basis at JunkScience.com

Alternative medicine

Psychic hotlines, Syliva Browne and the National Enquirer

Advertising

USA Today's 'science' section

Every other mainstream publications 'science' sections for that matter

Medical journals - even the refereed ones sometimes (see the part about the latest miracle food that decreases cancer risk)

Most of what the EPA does

The Green Lobby - you know, global warming, dioxin, alar and such...
I could go on....

Clifford Stoll said this a lot better than I could. We would be better off removing the distraction of computers from the schools and teaching them 1337 4n41y71c 7h1nX0r1n9 5k1llz instead. You know, basic stuff like "correlation != causality". If I had a million billion trillion dollars for lawyers, I'd put up a web page discrediting bogus thinking ever-where and take up the occupation of teaching people how to make lawyers look dumb.

Correlate which way the steering wheel is pointed with whether you are too far left or right in your lane. All it takes is a feedback system with something aproximating intelligence and your very good model can get things backwards.

Yeah! what we need is a completely LINEAR universe! :)

You're trying to keep benzene out of the water and toxic shit out of the air.

This is exactly the kind of environmentalist junk science that scares me. Most environmental toxicities are greatly exaggerated through years of assumptions, questionable research practices, and the environmentalist lobby. This is documented. It's time to face facts and realize that if what we've been doing is wrong then it probably would have killed us by now.

The earth is very big and rather aged, by contrast you are a mere blip on its lifespan. Passing new restrictive laws is arrogant and dangerous, it implies that your naive assumptions are worth risking my life and everyone else's. People need food and jobs before anything else.

As though "environmental" groups don't have their own, self-serving agendas?

The Sacremento Bee did a five part report on the environmental movement back in April, 2001, called Environment, Inc. The Bee notes that "Five other major groups -- including household names such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club -- spend so much on fund raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards set by philanthropic watchdog groups."

I'm too ignorant to judge claims made by most environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They may be right. But the implication that their motives are above reproach is laughable.


Junk Science reported big chunks of ice back in October 1998:

Large icebergs not new
Submitted by Paul Jensen

On October 16, it was reported that an iceberg the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica. Of course, this was attributed to global warming.

For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as "The Bowditch."

The text reads "In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic."

Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little "ice cube" noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant.

So last week's iceberg was not so extraordinary -- except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.

(Also at http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/1998/oct19_25.html and http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/environment .shtml#030899 )

The right-wing publication Scientific American, in an article about rising ocean levels in the August 1998 issue, noted that there is "some evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet may, in fact, have melted at least once before. Between about 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, when the last shared ancestors of all humans probably fanned out of Africa into Asia and Europe, Earth experienced a climatic history strikingly similar to what has transpired in the past 20,000 years, warming abruptly from the chill of a great ice age."

(This is by the same author who wrote the cover story of the March 1997 issue about rising sea levels. That article is not available online, and I don't have it here at work with me).

I also applaud you for posting this. The pettition you refer to has not received enough attention (see also). But even more important is to look at the data.

-- MarkusQ

I also applaud you for posting this. The pettition you refer to has not received enough attention (see also). But even more important is to look at the data.

-- MarkusQ

Summary
Gamma radiation dose rates were measured at several locations in and around the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Library of Congress buildings in Washington, D.C. A qualified radiation surveyor used a Bicron MicroRem meter for measuring. Dose rates inside the Capitol building and outside the Thomas Jefferson Building were measured at 30 microrem per hour. This dose rate: (1) exceeds local background radiation dose rates; (2) is up to 550 percent greater than the typical dose rate "at the fence line" around nuclear power plants; (3) is about 13,000 times greater than the average individual dose rate from worldwide nuclear power production; (4) is about 13,000 times greater than ongoing worldwide exposures to radiation from the Chernobyl accident; and (5) exceeds the dose rate associated with the radiation protection standards proposed for the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste facility. The measured level of radiation is associated with up to a 0.5 percent increase in cancer risk, according to U.S. EPA risk assessment methods.

You might enjoy these pages about global warming and how the corrlation between tempature and solar events is rather high.

The Wall Street Journal

Penn State University

The Dark Winter scenario apparently was based on some screwy statistics regarding rates of infection. Steven Milloy of Junkscience fame wrote an editorial on the subject.

Dark Winter assumed every infected person would infect 10 additional people. This was based on a couple of statistically abnormal infection events. A more reasonable infection rate of 2 people is what the CDC believes more likely. This obviously would reduce the catastrophic victims exponentially.

These sites are pretty annoying right wing rants, but the basic idea fuelling them is right - that there is money to be made by creating panic, and that's why newspapers (and "scientists") do it.

... just imagine what kind of poor information we must be getting about those domains.

Amen!

These days there seems to be more pseudo-science than real science making the news. Of course, the perpetual stereotype of the "scientist-who-wants-to-play-God-and-rule-the-worl d" probably doesn't help dispell the FUD surrounding biotech and medical science ...

Junk Science has some interesting articles if you're trying to sort through the hysterical reports about GMOs, pesticides, etc.

YS.

Tin foil hats are perfect headgear for those that believe the sky is falling. But like I said in my previous post, Who are these "vast majority of scientists"? They are always touted but never known by name. Your are right, go home, nothing more to be seen about Global Warming. By the way, where is the Ice Age that was predicted in the 70s by the same groups of Chicken Littles that are now promoting Global Warming?

I think you might do well to visit Junk Science and re-educate your Hollywood polluted mind.

Globally it is likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year recorded (since 1861). Certainly this seems to be the case in the northern hemisphere not simply since 1861 but for the last ten centuries.

Yep, I hope so. We are still coming out of a little ice age, returning to the higher temperatures which were the norm when the Vikings grew grapes in Newfoundland. The scary thought is that we might find out, in 100 years, that the temperatures are really going down.

You point out that the EPA and UN-funded scientists have found evidence of global warming. Notice where their funding comes from. If Exxon was paying the bill, these same guys would no doubt have found the opposite. Government and industry researchers don't get tenure.

There are literally thousands of responsible scientists who work in these fields who believe that any sort of costly action to "avert global warming" is a bad, irresponsible idea. Some of them are Exxon employees, but certainly not all. Here and here (loosely related) are a couple of random links which might help make the point that it isn't a settled issue in the minds of people who understand it and aren't funded by the Government or Greenpeace (HINT: both these groups find it easier to get money from the public if they can claim that the sky is falling.)

In short, ad homenim arguments are less productive than usual here, since we see the usual suspects on each side of the issue. The energy companies are pushing their issue, Greenpeace is pushing theirs, and so on.
We need to consider the consequences of being wrong. Seeing the global temperature rise by 1 to 2 degrees C is probably going to make the world a better place to live in the long run. That's the maximum likelihood prediction from most of the models that folks on either side take seriously. The doomsday 5+degree C senarios have very low probabilities under most models.
Consider the cost of "taking action": Millions of people around the world, most of them already desperately poor, will die earlier and more miserably if we do anything to limit energy use. The only thing I can think of to reduce greenhouse gasses without causing disaster is replacing coal with nuclear power. That isn't going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately, because of the same agenda that is driving the "its getting hotter" side of the issue.

Might want to look up whether you're really correct first. Start by debunking everything you read at junkscience.com. And saying "they're all liars funded by evil corporate interests" doesn't count. (E.g. The world is flat because the people who say it's round "are all liars and funded by evil corporate interests". "It's just common-sense." :)

Visit http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm for full background and debunking of the "DDT Kills People" Myth.

Synopsis: DDT has saved infinitely more lives than it has ever cut short. Rachel Carson, the person who is single-most responsible for the outcry against DDT, based her books on faulty experiments. DDT was *not* proved to cause eggshell thinning for wild birds, and was *not* proved to cause cancer in mammals at rates 33,000 times higher than average exposure.

The banning of DDT was a political expedient not based on science; by not allowing its use today, we are condeming to malarial death any number of adults and children in developing nations. See the link above for an exhaustive, detailed debunking of the "DDT Kills" myth.

Now, onward to the discussion of accuracy of various suppliers of "journalism"...

"...fission produces isotopes which give off a tremendous amount of radiation and which have to be buried for thousands of years."

They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.

Or just bury the waste outside the U.S. Capitol building, where it's already more radioactive than outside a nuclear plant.

"Imagine the fun when a curious six-year-old takes Daddy's screwdriver and tries to see how the basement fission plant works."

"Son, do you know why the lights went out? Oh, good, you found more billiard balls."

"Nature" is a magazine that has one agenda, and one agenda only .. and that is to uphold the liberal/atheist scientific dogma that their far-left political views require. This includes things like evolution, global warming, heliocentrism, etc. If you wanted the truth on this issue (and on other issues as well), you would not limit yourself to a single source of information. Somebody who is unwilling to look at all of the evidence has clearly demonstrated that they have already made up their mind and are unwilling to consider that they are wrong.

He is a member of the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, an United Nations institute like Unesco. He showed hard data and science, and there is no doubt about it: the climate is indeed changing.

Wrong!

Over the last several weeks the IPCCs recently published paper has been blown out of the water by a lot of real scientists.

Not being a real scientist myself, I'll have to point you to this site, which has links to more hard science about Global Warming than you can shake a stick at...


MadMorf - Not a real scientist but I know one when I read their papers...

I think you should read Junkscience.com's DDT FAQ.

I think you should read Junkscience.com's DDT FAQ.

Whatever, boss. The site is pretty clearly Milloy's project. And the whois record still lists him as the owner. So the fact that a number of big polluters pay his bills is still relevant, even if he isn't doing the day-to-day work.

And speaking of which, according to you, who is? And what's your evidence for claiming that Milloy's not in charge?

"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible."

(I added the bold.)

Have a look at JunkScience.com for more on this.

My take is this:

We're being asked to believe an assertion by some people. They are trying to prove something that can't be observed, because it hasn't happened yet, can't be reliably seen to be happening, and has been repeatedly exploited, exaggerated, lied about, and then coined into gold by political extremists.

Perhaps some skepticism is in order.

"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible."

(I added the bold.)

Have a look at JunkScience.com for more on this.

My take is this:

We're being asked to believe an assertion by some people. They are trying to prove something that can't be observed, because it hasn't happened yet, can't be reliably seen to be happening, and has been repeatedly exploited, exaggerated, lied about, and then coined into gold by political extremists.

Perhaps some skepticism is in order.

We have from this website:

Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...

Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.

May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."

All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?

We have from this website:

Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...

Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.

May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."

All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?

We have from this website:

Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...

Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.

May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."

All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?

Of course, that turns out to be not quite true. This link points out the idiocy of having banned DDT.

Randall.

Maybe they just remembered that the strain of influenza that killed from 27-50 million (some say 21 million but some articles say 26mil died in India alone) in 1918 was closely related to the swine flu.

"The virus apparently was a mutation that evolved in American pigs and was spread around the globe by U.S. troops mobilized for World War I. "
Here's a link to the full article.

I can understand taking out the suicides, but why the accidents?

Look, this is off-topic for the MP3 thread. It's a topic I care about, but we are abusing /. by discussing it here. I'll answer your questions, but if we want to continue this, we need to take it somewhere else.

In the first place, an unknown number of gun cleaning "accidents" are actually suicides, done as a fake accident so that life insurance will pay off despite a no-pay-for-suicide clause. In the second place, people who quote the "43:1" statistic often say you are 43 times more likely to be shot, not to shoot yourself by mistake, so I think it is valid to pull those out. Third and finally, the number of accidents was so few in the Kellerman study that it doesn't really matter if we leave them in or out.

The 75:1 ratio is a myth too of course. By presenting it this way you make believe that without guns, those 75 people would have died.

This seems fair to me, since the anti-gun folks are claiming that in the 43:1 case that none of the gun suicides would have committed suicide using some other means than a gun, and none of the murder victims would have been murdered by some other means, and so on.

If you read the link I put to Dr. Lott's article, you will see that actual research has shown that resisting violence with a gun is the safest thing you can do. ("Give the attacker what he wants" is, for a woman, 2.5 times more likely to result in harm. Even for a man, it is 1.4 times more likely to result in harm.)

See you on some other forum if you want to keep this discussion going.

steveha

People with guns in their house are 43 times more likely to be shot in their own home than people without a gun in their house. You're better off without the gun.

This turns out not to be the case. The 43:1 ratio is a myth. If you take out the suicides, accidents, and justifiable homicides, and consider actual murders compared to actual killing in self-defense, the ratio looks more like 4:1. But most gun owners avoid shooting people as much as they can, and 98% of the time defend themselves without killing anyone, so the actual ratio looks more like 1:75 (75 people saved by guns for each one lost). Follow the link for support of the 1:75 claim. See also here.

Dr. Lott has shown that using a gun to defend yourself gives you the best chance to escape an attack unharmed.

steveha

There's disputed research by Kawachi et al. that caffeine users might commit suicide less. I mean, they can only commit suicide once, but they are less likely to try. Junkscience.com has a cite for, and a short summary and discussion of, the original paper.

There's disputed research by Kawachi et al. that caffeine users might commit suicide less. I mean, they can only commit suicide once, but they are less likely to try. Junkscience.com has a cite for, and a short summary and discussion of, the original paper.

Try running some statistics; the poor in the year 2000 are better off than the middle class in 1971. The average work week has gone DOWN by about 2 hours in the last 30 years.

Since 1900, we've gone from 76% of out income being spent on food, clothing, and shelter to 37%, which is why we have *twice* the income to spend on goodies like cars and computers. If you want a workweek half as long, just give up those toys. More good news like this here.

Here's another tidbit. Did you know that bank's create wealth. Say a ``rich person'' puts a billion dollars in the bank. That money gets loaned out to people who buy goods which funds your salary. You, and a million other people put a thousand in the bank. Guess what? There's now two billion in the bank. So what if they have a billion in the bank? You have your thousand in the bank. Who controls more wealth? Your million friends of the big evil rich person? You both have the same wealth; wealth that you wouldn't have had had then not invested it. What does it matter, unless your envious?

That's what annoys me about all this inequitable distribution of wealth crap. If someone has money, they either do one of two things with it. They spend it, funding other people's salaries, or they invest it, where it gets multiplied 10x; with most of that going to other people's pockets.

The federal reserve is the one thing that's kept this economic expansion going so long. Fundamentally, if you make the competetion for labor sufficiently intense, the cost of labor goes up. Businesses then have to raise prices to compensate for the higher labor costs. This raises the cost of living and makes people demand higher wages. IE: inflation. Inflation is hideous, it can wipe out fixed incomes. (If you're retired and have to live on $500/month, having prices double over 5 years is nasty). It forces interest rates up, as banks have to hedge against being paid back in dollars that are worth less. It also makes long-term planning in any contract. If you agree to sell a million playstations for $300 over the next 3 years, and find out that the dollar is worth 1/2 as much near the end; you've wiped out your profit margin. There are places where inflation has been so severe, that prices have doubled every week; people got paid twice a day to help keep up. Either way, lending rates go up discourage lending, and the economy slows down. One's just nastier than the other.

Now, I will agree that a lot of the crap that corporations do should be stopped. I hate corporations railroading over honest people or freedom just because they're bigger. I hate corporations that lie and manipulate people or are hypocritical (like Ben and Jerrys unsafe, dioxin laced ice cream. ). I dislike the WTO or the MPAA.

But on the other side, I dislike the sabotage, terrorism and, most critically, the lies spread by the anti-corporations side.

Like any other human-made system, capitalism and corporatism isn't perfect. The system needs tuning and fixing once in a while. But, overall, it's the best way to run things that we know about. It's not a fundamentally broken system.

Spreading misinformation or lies around just to scare people into joining you is not the way to win. Spreading the truth is. Ultimately, in a democracy, the government answers to the people. If enough people demand something, it will happen.

an article from the Wall Street Journal at junkscience.com. I like the last paragraph of the article that says: "Car accidents resulting from using a cell phone while driving are 'much more of a problem at this point' than radio emissions".

Another good one from junkscience.com

an article from the Wall Street Journal at junkscience.com. I like the last paragraph of the article that says: "Car accidents resulting from using a cell phone while driving are 'much more of a problem at this point' than radio emissions".

Another good one from junkscience.com

Recent geologic studies have shown that the temperature of the Earth is normally 8-10 degrees warmer than it is now. We're still coming out of the last ice age! Try http://www.junkscience.c om/news/william-the-conqueror.html or http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/ge olog.htm Hell, hit any major search engine and you'll see that the scientists are split into two camps; The camp using models saying that we'll see a dramatic warm up, even though the models can't even figure out the current weather correctly from the 1960-70 statistics, and those that point out the fact we're ony a few thousand from the last Ice age and that man-made greenhouse gas accounts for less than 1% of that produced in a year.

What public transportation? The nearest bus stop is twenty miles further than my employer, in the opposite direction! And is riding a bicycle 90 miles/day actually feasable? Some of us still live in the great wasteland that is Suburbia because we can't afford $1,200/month apartments in the major cities.