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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?"
Will this lead to a mistrust of the government? Umm, since when was the government actually trusted?
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
but most readers familiar with the way science "works" won't be all that shocked. Scientific results are frequently altered or completely made up for one reason. Money
Most science is funded by a sponsorship of some kind. Very little is done out of the scientist pocket. Because of this, science becomes a sort of business model. As long as the scientist is producing results, his funding continues. See where this is going?
Is this going to lead to a distrust of government.? Doubtful. It may wake up a few but the vast majority either know now, or will never know.
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Tell me again how a sheep's bladder may be used to prevent earthquakes!
the majority of studies suggesting a link between abortion and cancer
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
I don't blame them. According to the studies I've heard, I should be blind now. I haven't had any real problems other than needing to shave my hands once in a while.
I hate to be a party pooper, but there actually may be something to the abortion theory. To be fair, however, it probably has little to do with the act of abortion itself.
The human breast does not reach full maturity until at least one pregnancy is completed. If a person has multiple abortions and never carries a pregnancy to term, their risk for breast cancer COULD be higher, but it may be because of never having children; the fact that the woman aborted all her pregnancies is just the method. She could just as easily be a spinster or nun, and carry the same risk.
It's shortsighted to automatically assume that science is bad, simply because it contradicts some concept one holds dear. Look at the research objectively, and judge it on its merits.
Knowledge is Good.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The more I think about it, the more I like the system that Ecuador uses.
Voting is mandatory. You want the government services available to citizens? Vote, otherwise you get what's available to legal aliens. While I'd love it if everyone understood thieir civic duties as well as they do their civil rights, which would make this idea unneccesary, the fact is, people don't vote often enough, as a rule.
And I know there will be those screaming about secrecy of the vote, etc.Note: I didn't say keep track of who you voted for, I said keep track of WHETHER you voted or not. Should be easy enough to do, given the near-universality of SSN's and the like.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Q: Does masturbation cause you to go blind?
A: Not as far as I can see.
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).
Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
they make sex safer from unintended consequences.
All we need to do is apply this to guns, then there'll be more, but safer guns.
The conclusion is obvious. Nerf bullets.
KFG
According to revised estimates, implementing the Kyoto Treaty would increase gas prices in the USA upwards of 60 cents per gallon
That would be a good thing. I'm sick of kissing Saudi ass and funding terrorists so that commuters and soccer moms can drive around in 11mpg Lincoln Navigators. Bush and Cheney have made it clear that they have no intention of doing anything to encourage fuel conservation. So the only way it can be done is through consumer demand -- and that won't happen unless fuel prices go up significantly.
I have a VW Golf TDI. It gets 45MPG on average and I've broken 50mpg. It handles far better than the aforementioned SUVs and has plenty of power, with acceleration that bests most of them. The same engine and fuel economy is available in the two and four door hatchbacks (Golfs), four door sedans (Jettas), and four door station wagons (Jetta wagons). Honda and Toyota also make extremely fuel-efficient vehicles. So it's not like the vehicles aren't there. If fuel prices went up and many consumers converted to those vehicles, our reliance on foreign oil would go away and our air would be far cleaner (since SUVs are permitted to pollute far more than passenger cars).
More than that, the same thing happened in the opposite direction under the Clinton administration. It is one of the reasons that Ayn Rand (and no, I'm not a Randian; I think her books are lousy) claimed that government-sponsored science cannot be science.
That said, this problem is everywhere. Take a look at science news this week, for example. Every week, at least two of their articles are directly politically topics, mostly on the liberal end.
Or try Scientific American. Just in time for a big Democrat Party gun-control push, they came out with a whole issue complete devoted to the source of terrorist and revolutionary-army weaponry.
I have no inherent reason to believe the latest results any less or any more than the results that came out of the Clinton Administration, "proving" that condom use reduced the incidence of STDs, or anything else of a political nature, for that matter. The real benefit (if you want to call it that) of all this pseudo-scientific politics is that it allows anyone to believe whatever they want, and draws all of society away from reality into a fantasy land.
I'll go one step farther and personalize the statement: if this is the first time that you noticed anything, or if this is the first time you complained -- then you need to rethink whether what you call "science" really is science.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
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.'
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.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
The problem isn't just the administration, its the Republican echo chamber that chose the candidate, chose the policies and lied to the people to get him elected.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
That is why we have in the Whitehouse a Vietnam draft dogger who deserted his National guard post that daddy pulled strings to get, a man with a criminal conviction and a man who was investigated by the SEC for corruption who got off on a 'technicality' - if you call having daddy being Vice President at the time a technicality.
All of this was known during the campaign but the Republican echo chamber made sure that attention was instead focused on the 'real issues' of Gore's 'lies', like saying he went to Texas fires with the head of FEMA, not the deputy head, according to the Republican echo chamber this was an attempt to embelish his record, a vice president claiming to be on equal terms with an agency director! imagine!
Very little is being said about the fact that the SEC is currently investigating Cheney for corrupt accounting. One would thing that would be a big story, bigger than Lott's racist gaffe even. But no the big story the Republican echo chamber want to talk about is the alleged cost of Kerry's hairdo.
And so having made a mess of the economy and failled to catch Bin Laden the Administration is desperately trying to start a war in the hope that everyone (or at least sufficient numbers) can be fooled by the flag waving.
Question for the republican slashdot monitors - can you honestly claim that W, who deserted from the National guard would have served in the war he wants to start with Iraq?
Over where I come from we have words for people like W, they are Hypocrite, Liar and Coward.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I wouldn't. In fact, I teach 17- and 18-year-olds, and every year I tell them this: They should vote even if they're uninformed -- provided that they truly vote randomly (if uninformed). Here's my rationale: If lots of people vote truly randomly, then it'll basically cancel out. But voter turnout will have risen -- and the politicians won't know which votes were random. From their point of view, they'll have to conclude that voter interest really is rising, which means that voters count -- which will de-emphasize the current "play to my base" logic.
Let's be honest here: Many of the ills of American democracy follow from the pathetically low participation rate. Corruption, ideology triumphant, slash ads
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It's funny how people believe in capitalism
In the long term, one of two things happens:
PolluteCo gets wise, invests in cleaner technology, reduces its emissions, and so escapes the need to buy credits. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
PolluteCo never wises up, remains dirty, fails to invest in clean tech, continues to pay for the credits. CleanCo continues to derive economic benefit from its clean technologies, so it maintains its lower prices and draws more of the market to it. PolluteCo ramps down production (due to falling orders) and/or eventually goes out of business. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
Either way, pollution credits lead to the desired result. And amazingly they do so through clear, clean market efficiency. (For those who complain that the setting of credits is an intervention, I riposte that costs and prices are measures of desires, which lie outside the market paradigm. Why did everyone want a beanie baby? Not due to market forces.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense. We could've ruled the world long ago. After WW II, we were the only real power left on Earth. It would've been easy to establish the first truly global empire and rule the entire planet. Instead, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, then went home. You can find a much more cogent argument here.
Are you kidding, or just ignorant? Russia has more nukes than us, and the only biological and chemical weapons we have left are used for training and research only, not research into new weapons mind you, but how to defend against them.
Yes, we are still the only country to use nuclear weapons in war. However, it probably saved the lives of 5 million American and Japanese soldiers who would've died in an invasion, and it ended the war.
First, we actually do allow the UN and Russia to inspect our weapons of mass destruction. They ensure compliance with several arms control treaties.
If you think all countries should disarm, you're incredibly naive. Someone else would always rearm and try to assert their power. This is partly what we're seeing now with Al Qaeda, a non-governmental organization waging war across international borders. As long as there are humans left, there will be war and violence. Your utopia will never exist, and besides, I wouldn't want to live there.
You also have a severe misunderstanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset. The reason they even attempted 9/11 is they thought the US was a "paper tiger." Throughout the 90s they kept escalating their attacks, but Bill Clinton never retaliated quickly or decisively enough. The most he ever did was lob a few cruise missiles at empty training camps and pharmeceutical factories.
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.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Well, you haven't really said anything here about Bush, just about yourself... But then, the "Bush sucks" posts don't say anything about why he sucks, so most of those are equally invalid.
No, what's more interesting is the stuff about how Bush went AWOL during a war for over a year - potentially an act of treason, how Cheney's accounting scandals have been swept under the rug, etc. Refute those, and we can start discussing Bush's suck-factor.
* Second, if you believe in global warming, find some real evidence. Yeah there may be an elevated level of CO2 in the air now, but CO2 is a piss poor 'greenhouse gas', methane and water vapor work way better. If there is a global warming trend I'd be inclined to think that it's the sun causing it as there is evidence that Mars is warming, also.
From the EPA's Global Warming site:
A warming trend of about 1F has been recorded since the late 19th century. Warming has occurred in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and over the oceans. Confirmation of 20th-century global warming is further substantiated by melting glaciers, decreased snow cover in the northern hemisphere and even warming below ground.
Now, OTOH, what's that mean? Average temperatures have increased slightly, but that could be a natural cyclical trend - records don't go back long enough.
Rather than saying "find some real evidence" - plenty exists - you should be saying "what does that evidence really mean?"
Incidentally, on the last Talk of the Nation Science Friday (from NPR), they had a segment on Antarctic science that mentioned global warming studies. Interestingly enough, though parts of the continent are warming, others are cooling, and there's about a 60% cooling trend across the continent.
Global warming is happening - but we have no idea what that means yet.
* Thirdly. What's the best way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? Condoms or Abstinence? Maybe there was a leftist bias on those pages to begin with and they really do refect more acurately scientific evidence?
Depends on your definition of "best". What is the surest way to prevent pregnancy? Abstinence. What is the one that most people would be willing to follow? Condoms.
Look, if what's going on with the Catholic Church is any indication, not even priests can maintain a vow of chastity. To believe that anyone else can is wishful thinking at best and self-delusion at worst.
People will have sex. Teenagers will have sex. While abstinence would be best, they aren't going to do that. We might be able to get them to compromise and wear condoms, and that is much more preferable to the alternative.
Similar is dieting - obesity is a huge [pun intended] problem in this country. The obvious solution - eat less, eat more nutritionally, exercise more, etc. is very tough for a lot of people to do. Humans, in general, tend to lack the willpower for self-denial. So, though people know that they're slowly killing themselves, they continue eating Super-sized big mac meals.
Likewise smoking - anyone who doesn't know at this point that smoking is harmful is an idiot and has been living in a shack for the past sixty years. Nonetheless people still smoke. It takes a whole lot of willpower to change behaviors, particularly when you have to deny yourself immediate gratification - such as the Big Mac, the Marlboro, or the blow job - in exchange for a few possible extra years on your life... at the end, particularly when you don't know if you'll be hit by a bus or drafted and not get to die of natural causes.
In short, this is why condom use is the best way to prevent pregnancy and STDs - it's the one people will actually follow.
-T