U.S. Pushing Conservative Science

mozumder writes "Does abortion lead to breast cancer? Does condom use lead to increased sexual activity? According to the government, the answer is now inconclusive. The New York Times has a story on how the government is altering low-level scientific conclusions to satisfy conservatives. Will this lead to a mistrust of the government? Or is the government now correct?"

Comments

Re:Not surprised

[mferrare]

Then you have lazy, ignorant, and just plain stupid people voting just becuase they have to and circling a random name on the ballot.

Australia has compulsory voting. We have it at the federal and state levels. It hasn't bred the random name thingy you mention - in fact, quite the opposite. People become dyed-in-the-wool Labor (kinda like Democrats but more leftish) or Liberal (kinda like Rebups but more leftish) voters. Most elections are left up to a small percentage of 'swinging' voters to determine who forms government. This may sound bad but it's actually quite good. Why? Because, as people are becoming more educated and aware of the impact of the government on their lives they are starting to think more about their vote. As a result, the amount of swinging voters is growing which is a good thing - it keeps the government on its toes. Doing so has led to a Labor government implementing rightist policies (selling off our nationalised bank and airlines in the 80's) and has led the Liberal government to implement leftist policies (increasing tax on the rich (in for form of the super guarantee and medicare levy for those over $x,000 with no private insurance)).

Having compulsory voting makes you vote. This in turn makes you pay more attention to what the government does. And judging by the increasing number of swinging voters, people care. Making voting compulsory has removed the barrier of voter apathy (to an extent at least).

Global warming and ideology

[theolein]

Since a lot of people seem to make some sort of bond between this topic and global warming, I agree that there isn't much proof that the planet is warming, in an abstract theoretical sense. However I consider what I experience as proof for me:

When I got to Europe in 1986 from Africa, Winters were blisteringly cold in Berlin in Germany, and I remember one Winter in particular, 86-87, where the temperature went down to -29 Degrees Centigrade. I remember summers here being a balmy 26 to 28 Degrees Centigrade, on a hot summer. I mived to Switzerland in 1989 in time to see a small lake near to Zurich freezing over for most of the Winter for the last time.

Since then, in the countryside near to Zurich, the last time the small ski-stations had enough snow, anytime in winter for people to ski for more than a week was 1992. I remember sitting outside in the sunshine at 14 degrees Centigrade in a T-shirt, playing my bass guitar, on January 14th 1998. Summers have, since the mid to late 90's, regularly broken all time high records and almost every summer since about 1998 has reached 30 to 32 Degrees Centigrade.

On top of this the weather has become increasingly chaotic. Autumn and Spring storms that regularly reach huricane strength, each couple of years breaking the record of the last set of storms a few years ago, meandering cold fronts going off their usual west-east course in Winter and bringing a week of sudden (in the space of one hour) freezes of down to -14 Degrees Centigrade which last a few days and the temperature then suddenly boucing back up to 10 Degrees Centigrade. Almost every year now has major flooding in central Europe.

That was my experience here in Europe. My sister in Australia tells me that the country is getting dryer all the time and the bush fires bigger every year.

That does make me think, and I don't think that any piece of strange, backward legislation by a somwhat dubious Dubya is going to change that.

Re:Well it should be OBVIOUS

[TygerFish]

I disagree completely with the moderator's scoring this, 'informative' for the reasons below.

Yes, an abortion is bound to do strange things to hormonal cycles in women, however, the question the post poses, and to which the times article refers, is whether or not the government is altering scientific data on health-related sites to suit a conservative agenda. The answer The Times article gave can be summed up with the words 'it seems so to many people including pro-choice politicians.'

Having got that out of the way, we can examine the poster's statements to extract an implicit argument.

There's almost always a fair amount of internal damage when tools are used, depending on the method of operation.

This is not accurate. According to one site, the discomfort associated with a D and C procedure (dilation and curettage, the most usual procedure in early stage abortions) is similar to the discomfort of menstral cramps. With this in mind, what the poster says makes things sound like major surgery is going on. That is weird, but things only start to get really hallucinatory when the poster writes about 'the vacuum device.'

The vacuum device (sorry.. don't know the name) that collapses the skull has a sharp edged attachment and it's difficult to maneuver. That's a pretty confined space to work in, after all.

Technical and clinical sounding, and gruesome enough to get your adrenaline pumping, but it has no substance: it is wet and sloshy when it comes to the facts.

This description of the procedure presupposes a long wait before the decision to terminate the pregnancy in question is undertaken. A long wait before one makes the decision is a possible pathway to abortion but it is by no means a necessary one despite the writer's implicit assertion. Dilation and curettage is only one of a number of options open to women in the United States and there is no reason to assume that abortion involving skull-collapsing sharp things that no one knows the name of is the only option or in any way the norm.

Current in-home pregnancy tests can allow a woman to know that she is pregnant within 10 days of conception and the poster works hard to describe a procedure that would note be necessary to abort the fetus after tens of weeks have gone by when in truth, during the second month of pregnancy, during the eighth week, the fetus is a legless thing measuring, 0.63 inches long from crown to rump and weighing four hundredths of an ounce.

The right of men and women to plan and control their reproduction--to control if, when and under what circumstances they will become parents, is an important one. If one is to present arguments where one's tacit assumption is that it's alright to rewrite the conclusions of scientific papers or throw out ideologically inconvenient statistics, one should try to get at least *some* of his facts from somewhere other than pro-life websites or the big book of urban legends.

Re:Why should this surprise anyone?

[jdreed1024]

Who modded this Interesting? -1 Flamebait is more like it.

The poster has no concept of history whatsoever. First, some things to clear up. In the 1948 election, Strom Thurmond was not running as a Republican OR a Democract. He was running as a semi-independent. A group of Southern Democrats, who thought Harry Truman (a democrat) was going too far with his civil rights policies, broke from the Democratic party and formed their own party with their key point being the "right of the States". In practice, the only States' Right they cared about was the right to allow segregation. (These were unofficially known as "Dixiecrats".)

Second, the Democratic Party nominated Eisenhower as a candidate and wanted him to face Truman in the Democratic Primary. Eisenhower (as a national WWII hero) knew that he would win, but declined the nomination. He threw in the towel, and is reported to have discussed this with Truman, saying he (Eisenhower) would decline the nomnation provided Truman did not seek a second term in 1952. We all know the rest of the story - Truman rode around the county, decrying the Republican Congress; the media picked Dewey (Republican) as their favorite; and Truman won by a landslide.

Now, on to your original post. You claim:
the last time that the president and both houses of Congress were republican was then - In the Eisenhower administration.
This was only the case for the first half of the first term of Eisenhower's administration. The 83rd Congress was Republican, but just barely. (In the senate it was a margin of 1 (with 1 independent), and in the house, a margin of 5 (with several independents))
Do you really think the whole Trent Lott fiasco was because he "misspoke himself"?
Yes. Lott has a history of misspeaking himself. Regardless of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to agree that Lott is the kind of person that shouldn't be allowed to speak without a teleprompter. Furthermore, Lott did not say "If we'd had segregation in 1948, things would be better.", nor did he say "Strom, if your platform had been carried in '48, we'd all be happy." He merely said that if Thurmond had been president, we wouldn't have had "these problems" today. He didn't say what problems. It's conceiveable he was talking about Korea, for example. If Thurmond had been elected in '48, it's likely that a) We wouldn't have gone into Korea at all; or b) We would have gone in, but Thurmond wouldn't have fired McArthur like Truman did. He could have been talking about anything at all. Fact is, there's no way in hell Thurmond would have even been elected, given the strong Democratic support for civil rights. Second of all, even if he _had_ been elected, there's no way he would have passed any anti-civil rights stuff with the do-nothing 80th Republican Congress, and by the time the 81st Congress rolled around, it was strongly controlled by Democratic advocaters of Civil Rights, which is what allowed Truman to pass the order of de-segregation for the U.S. Armed Forces so quickly.

Also, Lott was 5 or 6 in 1948. How many of you paid attenton to politics when you were 5 or 6? How many of you in college now remember the detailed platforms of the '84 election? I sure don't.
Fact is, whatever Lott's remark meant, it got blown out of proportion. The reason it took 3 days for ANYONE (on either side) to get upset at his remark, is because they had to go back and look at the '48 election, and figure out what the hell platform Thurmond was running on, because nobody remembers. Regardless, he should have known that anything he says as a politician is going to get misinterpreted, and that's why you keep your mouth shut unless your speechwriter and spin doctor are with you.

Re:Outright lies from the left

[Hauptkov]

"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."

Ah, Steven Milloy. Webmaster of junkscience.com, and tobacco industry shill.

PR Watch had a huge article on Milloy, which you can read here.

Basic story: "the Junkman" got his start through Phillip Morris's dealings with PR firm Burston-Marsteller when they started creating phony scientific groups to oppose inconvenient research into the harmfulness of tobacco, and phony grassroots citizens' groups to make it appear there was a public groundswell of support for tobacco companies. Guess who was on board some of the groups to give "scientific weight" to what they said.

Here are some excerpts of the article:

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."

And here are some more PR Watch articles on Mr. Milloy.