When I examine the wikipedia article for Montreal or History of Montreal, I find no absolutely no mention of Hazel, much less that Hazel "wiped Montreal out". Nor do I find any mention of Montreal under the entry "Hurricane Hazel".
Maybe instead of plugging the book "How to lie with Statistics" you should really be plugging "How to lie by just making shit up" since that's apparently the book you're really fond of.
The report says: “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The report says nothing about "budget cutbacks in response increase damages" [sic].
Obviously I encourage people to examine the numerous publications put forward by the scientific community, which has already clearly explained the connection between global warming and severe weather events. But since a lot of people are big believers in ludicrous conspiracy theories that encompass the entire scientific community, I'm giving them another source to consider.
Go back to basic physics. The atoms and molecules in Hurricanes are moving roughly in concert with each other. Thus it can be said to have kinetic energy. That energy originally came from someplace, and that place was the sun. Eventually the Hurricane will dissipate and through various forms of friction that kinetic energy will mostly become thermal energy. Through this process the hurricane releases warmth originally from the sun back into the earth. As a first order approximation, there is no net thermal gain or loss through the production of hurricanes.
Scientists have warned for years that global warming would increase the likelihood of severe storms hitting the northeast corridor which could flood low lying areas and cripple infrastructure. Then we witness precisely the kind of storm that scientists have been warning us about. But somehow pointing out the years of research that predicted these kinds of events is "sensationalizing" the event.
You've got it completely backwards. The storm was sensational on its own. If anything, it is the implications of the storm and the massive devasation that it wrought that has sensationalized the research. And rightly so. Now is exactly the moment to inform the public of the risks of global warming. Global warming isn't an abstraction, it's a fact that's already happening here and now.
This is exactly the kind of uninformed comment that convinces everybody else how full of BS the "skeptic" community is. Do you honestly believe that no scientist has ever thought to address those questions in the published scientific literature? Are you unaware that a simple search on google could answer your questions in minutes? Do you honestly think that your characterization of what you call the "global warming sales pitch" has basis in the arguments made by the scientific community? Use your head.
People are entitled to their own views, but they aren't entitled to spew their deliberately ignorant blather about the scientific community. Maybe next time you should do a simple google search before posting to slashdot instead of advertising how proudly ignorant you are.
On the one hand, we've got the world's largest reinsurance agency, Munich Re, frankly describing not only how global warming has increased the severity of weather in North America including heatwaves, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, but also the trend of weather related losses. Their report goes on to describe the stark risks insurers will need to address in the new earth climate.
On the other, we've got snotty ignoramuses and John Birch conspiracy theorists that can't even be bothered to RTFA.
It's settled then. In Texas international election observers will conducted under the auspicies of Heinekin, Becks, Fosters, Stolichnaya, Dos Equis, Guiness, Molson, Dom Perignon, Tsingtao, and, of course, Mr. Jose Cuervo.
What about inferring DNA by looking at several common extant descendants and using a statistical method to guess what the original DNA sequence looked like? Maybe it's limited because it will only work for species that have living descendents, but that should give us a good way to fill in DNA tree and drastically reduce the amount of data required to reconstruct extinct missing branches of the tree of life.
You can't disable a robust network by targeting a node. If you blow up a power plant it's going to put pressure on emergency sources of power which are even worse from a CO2 standpoint. If you blow up a bridge, you are just going to reroute cars and cause people to sit in traffic. In the minds of simpletons (climate deniers, for instance) violence and terrorism seem like good answers, but they are just not a feasible way to effect positive change.
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Really? Are you saying that your history class literally failed to cover the Mexican American War, slavery, and the systemic genocide of the native population? These were standard topics in American History when I was growing.
What sexconker is actually doing is demonstrating the fundamental premise of the article. People that fully ignorant aren't going to have strong opinions about something. But as soon as they start to learn just a little they become very dangerous in advancing specious arguments like
"Hey if there's so much plastic trash in the ocean, then somebody can make a lot of money recycling it" or "The second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution" or today's special: "CO2 is plant food, therefore the greenhouse effect doesn't matter"
All of these bullshit arguments require some basic amount of knowledge to process. And the more knowledge somebody has, the better quality bullshit they can generate.
The number 1 green house gas in the atmosphere is water vapor.
That's 1 greenhouse gas. Another is CO2. They both effect temperature directly and the water vapor in the air is an endogenous function of CO2.
The only way to make CO2 into a problem is for the modelers to pull a positive feedback coefficient (for water vapor from CO2) from a dark place
Gotta love that one. It's the modelers that are making CO2 into a problem. It's not the greenhouse effect that's the problem. It's not increased temperatures we're seeing after dumping 32 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air every year that are the problem. The climate modelers are just making a big deal by describing a positive feedback loop.
Plants need CO2 to live. CO2 + H2O + Sunlight == glucose. Your CO2 is waste to you. It's mana from heaven for plants. Global warmers are some of the most scientifically and agriculturally illiterate people I've ever encountered
Plants also love shit. And yet somehow this fertilizing mana from heaven is considered pollution. PARADOX. We even have laws preventing people from dumping raw sewage into public waterway for some sort of environmental reason.
I just want to second what scot4875 said. You must feel really advanced such an idiotic strawman, pretending that your opponents want to eliminate CO2. I hope your sense of smug self-satisfaction feeds you when crop yields decline because of desertification
The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus.
On a per molecule basis there isn't much CO2 in our atmosphere compared to everything else. But the primary components of our atmosphere, Nitrogen and Oxygen, are not greenhouse gases. The second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is CO2. CO2 is directly responsible for 25% of the greenhouse effect and the CO2's contribution to warming also indirectly adds to the greenhouse effect by increasing the amount of water vapor in the air. Without our CO2, the earth would literally be a ball of ice. Tt doesn't matter if CO2 is a "trace amount" in absolute terms because ALL greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are in trace amounts.
I recognize that Minger doesn't think myocardial infarction belongs in a disease cluster with other diseases of affluent nations. But since myocardial infarctions, aka heart attacks, have long been one of the most common causes of death in the Western nations and not in poor nations, then Minger is obviously wrong on this point. If you think she's right, then show me validated data that demonstrates that the prevalence of heart attacks is greater in poorer countries than in richer countries. If you can do that then I'll accept Minger's criticism as entirely valid and I will even actively inform all my peers of what a bad book the China Study is. I'm waiting.
Look, you've clearly got your mind made up about Global Warming. If you want to pretend that the warming trend we've been experiencing my entire life has nothing to do with the 32 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases that we're dumping into the atmosphere every year, then you're making that decision. And the real question is this: is there any evidence that the climate denial community would ever accept as definitive proof of global warming? And the answer is no.
Moving on, here's Gary Taubes in his own words: "Lord knows I don't want to tell anybody not to eat their fruits and vegetables."
So it looks like you're completely full of shit, once again.
Name any combination of global average temperature and global average CO2 that would serve as a falsification of those models if observed next year. Models that are not falsifiable are not scientific.
Temperature is a realization of a stocastic variable and the underlying dynamics take more than a year's worth of data to assess. But at this point you can go back to papers written decades ago and validate their accuracy in predicting the warming trend we have experienced.
The absurd proposition has always been "fruits and vegetables are good, and animal meats and fats are bad".
Not even Taubes goes so far as to say this. You are, of course, free to invent delusional ideas of your very own, but not even your idol is going to back you up on that one.
I'm a little confused here. You just wrote several posts assailing Campbell claiming that he basically rigged the study by his method of clustering. Do you believe that Campbell's clustering should be based on rates disease prevalence or not?
That contradicts your statement that "There are a massive number of ways to cluster the data." Minger clearly shows that his arbitrary choice of clustering was just that - arbitrary. Expecting to find wisdom in a cherry-picked conclusion that can be refuted by the same data used to generate it is foolish.
No, there's no contradiction. There are massive number of stupid ways to cluster the data, but there is exactly one way to cluster the data by diseases of affluence vs diseases of poverty: examining the prevalence of diseases. How else would you do it? To cluster by any other method would be to inject subjectivity into the clustering. What Minger and you want to do is to develop some subjective criteria about what should constitute a disease of affluence rather than just looking at the prevalence of diseases and accepting the them for what they are. You and Minger are the ones promoting cherry picking because you want to subjectively exclude certain diseases from being considered diseases of affluence and introduce them into their own separate category.
BTW, Minger never claimed that Campbell's clustering was arbitrary, she just claimed that her way would be better than Campbell's. But Minger didn't show her way was better quantitatively, she just asserted it without any evidence whatsoever.
What Minger points out is that there were other statistically significant results Campbell *didn't* highlight, that contradicted his basic premise that plant-based diets were superior for health.
No, Minger didn't show any other clustering would have statistically significant results. She didn't do statistical analysis whatsoever. I'm beginning to wonder if you even read her critique.
Campbell was concerned more about his career than with science. The scope of his project was arbitrarily limited to avoid any contradictory information to his basic conceit. Don't you see that as a problem?
In the early 90s there was a major question as to why affluent countries suffered much higher rates of certain diseases than impoverished countries. This study addresses that critical question and does so in the natural way. The NIH made the right call to fund this work to address this question and Campbell properly executed the research and obtained valuable results. The scope of the research was chosen by the NIH and Campbell to address this mystery of diseases of affluence. I don't know what "contradictory information" you think the NIH wants hidden, but maybe you or Minger could actually do some analysis of the data rather engaging in conspiracy theories about the NIH hiding data?
What you've been doing is giving Campbell a pass, for what I'll assume is either naive deference to authority, or some sort of ideological alignment with his basic conceit.
No, if I was giving Campbell a pass I would have just informed you that Minger has zero formal education in the field while Campbell is an established expert and then I would have called you a dipshit and left it at that. But in fact I patiently drudged through Minger's bitching and then looked up Campbell's paper and then read it and then and then found, lo-and-behold, that Campbell made exactly the right call in clustering the diseases according their prevalence in affluent versus impoverished countries, and then I patiently explained this to you twice appealing to your sense of reason. If you call that "deferring to authority" then up must be down in your world.
But asserting that because the greenhouse effect exists that human CO2 emissions are going to cause catastrophic increases in temperature over say, 100 years, is a jump of logic that isn't justified, and must be subject to the strict scrutiny of falsifiable hypotheses.
Climate scientists have already examined this issue and produced models of the very warming we are currently experiencing.
Did you read his book? His point isn't that refined sugars are a serious health problem - his point is that we've misdiagnosed the causes of obesity and the diseases of civilization, and blamed dietary fat (which makes "common" sense but isn't true), and instead should be looking at dietary carbohydrate.
Taubes rightly points out that singling out one macronutrient to blame for all our problems is a absurd proposition, and then foolishly decides to myopically single out a different macronutrient for all our problems. Taubes never sees the limitations of his simplistic understanding of balanced nutrition. This is what leads people to absurd propositions that fruits and vegetables are "bad" for you and that bacon is "good".
But look, you're not very bright. If you want to ingest a huge amount of carcinogenic meat and deprive your body of fiber, antioxidants, exercise, and every other tool the body has to rid itself of toxins, then go for it. I'd much rather have you wasting away of cancer in a hospital bed than, say, voting.
Well, creationism actually goes together with the whole Church of Global Warming (neither area having falsifiable hypotheses). As for bacon is health food, we've clearly established, by empirical evidence, that it is
The Greenhouse effect has a falsifiable premise. It was investigated and verified back in by John Tyndall in 1858. Coincidentally, this is the same year that Darwin published his theory of Natural Selection. Some people just don't like to listen to the facts, I'm afraid to say. They prefer to get their information from sources like quacks and 3rd-rate internet satirists. And they imagine that because they condescend so freely to their detractors, then they must be the more correct.
I agree with Gary Taubes that refined sugars are a serious health problem. But just because sugar is bad doesn't imply bacon is good.
Campbell's analysis didn't come from the data, it came from how he decided to torture it
How is it "torturing the data" to cluster diseases of affluence and diseases of poverty by their respective prevalences in affluent versus impoverished countries? Campbell clustered the data in exactly the right way to investigate his question and his clustering is far more natural than the entirely subjective three-way categorization that Minger proposes. The results Campbell showed were statistically significant. And it's trivial for Minger (or anybody) to claim without any evidence that her way would produce much more significant results.
And that's clearly why you don't understand. You've essentially outsourced your judgement to someone you believe is an authority figure, and haven't bothered to look at the actual data.
I just did go back to look at the actual data. I got the original paper. I critically examined Minger's gripe. I saw that Campbell's methodology made the most sense to address the question he had been granted research dollars to investigate. I saw that Minger's gripe was just a bunch of petty bitching because Campbell didn't explicitly structure some experiment 21 years ago to account for her personal philosophy of nutrition. I saw that if Campbell had actually conducted the analysis the way Minger wanted then he probably would have seriously damaged his career by wasting money conducting research outside the scope of his project. I saw that Minger's complaints bore absolutely no resemblance to your accusation that Campbell "hid" data.
If you want to get your nutritional advice from some sophomoric English major, fine by me. But claiming that people who disagree with you are "outsourcing their judgement to an authority figure" is a cynical smear. If you think Minger's critiques are so scientifically devastating, then why don't you defend them on their merit instead of making baseless accusations?
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2012: Slashdot commenter rs79. Total Bullshit.
When I examine the wikipedia article for Montreal or History of Montreal, I find no absolutely no mention of Hazel, much less that Hazel "wiped Montreal out". Nor do I find any mention of Montreal under the entry "Hurricane Hazel".
Maybe instead of plugging the book "How to lie with Statistics" you should really be plugging "How to lie by just making shit up" since that's apparently the book you're really fond of.
The report says: “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The report says nothing about "budget cutbacks in response increase damages" [sic].
Obviously I encourage people to examine the numerous publications put forward by the scientific community, which has already clearly explained the connection between global warming and severe weather events. But since a lot of people are big believers in ludicrous conspiracy theories that encompass the entire scientific community, I'm giving them another source to consider.
Go back to basic physics. The atoms and molecules in Hurricanes are moving roughly in concert with each other. Thus it can be said to have kinetic energy. That energy originally came from someplace, and that place was the sun. Eventually the Hurricane will dissipate and through various forms of friction that kinetic energy will mostly become thermal energy. Through this process the hurricane releases warmth originally from the sun back into the earth. As a first order approximation, there is no net thermal gain or loss through the production of hurricanes.
Scientists have warned for years that global warming would increase the likelihood of severe storms hitting the northeast corridor which could flood low lying areas and cripple infrastructure. Then we witness precisely the kind of storm that scientists have been warning us about. But somehow pointing out the years of research that predicted these kinds of events is "sensationalizing" the event.
You've got it completely backwards. The storm was sensational on its own. If anything, it is the implications of the storm and the massive devasation that it wrought that has sensationalized the research. And rightly so. Now is exactly the moment to inform the public of the risks of global warming. Global warming isn't an abstraction, it's a fact that's already happening here and now.
This is exactly the kind of uninformed comment that convinces everybody else how full of BS the "skeptic" community is. Do you honestly believe that no scientist has ever thought to address those questions in the published scientific literature? Are you unaware that a simple search on google could answer your questions in minutes? Do you honestly think that your characterization of what you call the "global warming sales pitch" has basis in the arguments made by the scientific community? Use your head.
People are entitled to their own views, but they aren't entitled to spew their deliberately ignorant blather about the scientific community. Maybe next time you should do a simple google search before posting to slashdot instead of advertising how proudly ignorant you are.
On the one hand, we've got the world's largest reinsurance agency, Munich Re, frankly describing not only how global warming has increased the severity of weather in North America including heatwaves, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, but also the trend of weather related losses. Their report goes on to describe the stark risks insurers will need to address in the new earth climate.
On the other, we've got snotty ignoramuses and John Birch conspiracy theorists that can't even be bothered to RTFA.
Guess we'll never know who's right.
It's settled then. In Texas international election observers will conducted under the auspicies of Heinekin, Becks, Fosters, Stolichnaya, Dos Equis, Guiness, Molson, Dom Perignon, Tsingtao, and, of course, Mr. Jose Cuervo.
What about inferring DNA by looking at several common extant descendants and using a statistical method to guess what the original DNA sequence looked like? Maybe it's limited because it will only work for species that have living descendents, but that should give us a good way to fill in DNA tree and drastically reduce the amount of data required to reconstruct extinct missing branches of the tree of life.
Dude did you learn nothing from the article? it is pointless to use logic when engaging with Denialists.
You can't disable a robust network by targeting a node. If you blow up a power plant it's going to put pressure on emergency sources of power which are even worse from a CO2 standpoint. If you blow up a bridge, you are just going to reroute cars and cause people to sit in traffic. In the minds of simpletons (climate deniers, for instance) violence and terrorism seem like good answers, but they are just not a feasible way to effect positive change.
Really? Are you saying that your history class literally failed to cover the Mexican American War, slavery, and the systemic genocide of the native population? These were standard topics in American History when I was growing.
What sexconker is actually doing is demonstrating the fundamental premise of the article. People that fully ignorant aren't going to have strong opinions about something. But as soon as they start to learn just a little they become very dangerous in advancing specious arguments like
"Hey if there's so much plastic trash in the ocean, then somebody can make a lot of money recycling it" or "The second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution" or today's special: "CO2 is plant food, therefore the greenhouse effect doesn't matter"
All of these bullshit arguments require some basic amount of knowledge to process. And the more knowledge somebody has, the better quality bullshit they can generate.
That's 1 greenhouse gas. Another is CO2. They both effect temperature directly and the water vapor in the air is an endogenous function of CO2.
Gotta love that one. It's the modelers that are making CO2 into a problem. It's not the greenhouse effect that's the problem. It's not increased temperatures we're seeing after dumping 32 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air every year that are the problem. The climate modelers are just making a big deal by describing a positive feedback loop.
Plants also love shit. And yet somehow this fertilizing mana from heaven is considered pollution. PARADOX. We even have laws preventing people from dumping raw sewage into public waterway for some sort of environmental reason.
I just want to second what scot4875 said. You must feel really advanced such an idiotic strawman, pretending that your opponents want to eliminate CO2. I hope your sense of smug self-satisfaction feeds you when crop yields decline because of desertification
On a per molecule basis there isn't much CO2 in our atmosphere compared to everything else. But the primary components of our atmosphere, Nitrogen and Oxygen, are not greenhouse gases. The second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is CO2. CO2 is directly responsible for 25% of the greenhouse effect and the CO2's contribution to warming also indirectly adds to the greenhouse effect by increasing the amount of water vapor in the air. Without our CO2, the earth would literally be a ball of ice. Tt doesn't matter if CO2 is a "trace amount" in absolute terms because ALL greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are in trace amounts.
I recognize that Minger doesn't think myocardial infarction belongs in a disease cluster with other diseases of affluent nations. But since myocardial infarctions, aka heart attacks, have long been one of the most common causes of death in the Western nations and not in poor nations, then Minger is obviously wrong on this point. If you think she's right, then show me validated data that demonstrates that the prevalence of heart attacks is greater in poorer countries than in richer countries. If you can do that then I'll accept Minger's criticism as entirely valid and I will even actively inform all my peers of what a bad book the China Study is. I'm waiting.
Look, you've clearly got your mind made up about Global Warming. If you want to pretend that the warming trend we've been experiencing my entire life has nothing to do with the 32 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases that we're dumping into the atmosphere every year, then you're making that decision. And the real question is this: is there any evidence that the climate denial community would ever accept as definitive proof of global warming? And the answer is no.
Moving on, here's Gary Taubes in his own words: "Lord knows I don't want to tell anybody not to eat their fruits and vegetables."
So it looks like you're completely full of shit, once again.
Temperature is a realization of a stocastic variable and the underlying dynamics take more than a year's worth of data to assess. But at this point you can go back to papers written decades ago and validate their accuracy in predicting the warming trend we have experienced.
Not even Taubes goes so far as to say this. You are, of course, free to invent delusional ideas of your very own, but not even your idol is going to back you up on that one.
I'm a little confused here. You just wrote several posts assailing Campbell claiming that he basically rigged the study by his method of clustering. Do you believe that Campbell's clustering should be based on rates disease prevalence or not?
No, there's no contradiction. There are massive number of stupid ways to cluster the data, but there is exactly one way to cluster the data by diseases of affluence vs diseases of poverty: examining the prevalence of diseases. How else would you do it? To cluster by any other method would be to inject subjectivity into the clustering. What Minger and you want to do is to develop some subjective criteria about what should constitute a disease of affluence rather than just looking at the prevalence of diseases and accepting the them for what they are. You and Minger are the ones promoting cherry picking because you want to subjectively exclude certain diseases from being considered diseases of affluence and introduce them into their own separate category.
BTW, Minger never claimed that Campbell's clustering was arbitrary, she just claimed that her way would be better than Campbell's. But Minger didn't show her way was better quantitatively, she just asserted it without any evidence whatsoever.
No, Minger didn't show any other clustering would have statistically significant results. She didn't do statistical analysis whatsoever. I'm beginning to wonder if you even read her critique.
In the early 90s there was a major question as to why affluent countries suffered much higher rates of certain diseases than impoverished countries. This study addresses that critical question and does so in the natural way. The NIH made the right call to fund this work to address this question and Campbell properly executed the research and obtained valuable results. The scope of the research was chosen by the NIH and Campbell to address this mystery of diseases of affluence. I don't know what "contradictory information" you think the NIH wants hidden, but maybe you or Minger could actually do some analysis of the data rather engaging in conspiracy theories about the NIH hiding data?
No, if I was giving Campbell a pass I would have just informed you that Minger has zero formal education in the field while Campbell is an established expert and then I would have called you a dipshit and left it at that. But in fact I patiently drudged through Minger's bitching and then looked up Campbell's paper and then read it and then and then found, lo-and-behold, that Campbell made exactly the right call in clustering the diseases according their prevalence in affluent versus impoverished countries, and then I patiently explained this to you twice appealing to your sense of reason. If you call that "deferring to authority" then up must be down in your world.
Climate scientists have already examined this issue and produced models of the very warming we are currently experiencing.
Taubes rightly points out that singling out one macronutrient to blame for all our problems is a absurd proposition, and then foolishly decides to myopically single out a different macronutrient for all our problems. Taubes never sees the limitations of his simplistic understanding of balanced nutrition. This is what leads people to absurd propositions that fruits and vegetables are "bad" for you and that bacon is "good".
But look, you're not very bright. If you want to ingest a huge amount of carcinogenic meat and deprive your body of fiber, antioxidants, exercise, and every other tool the body has to rid itself of toxins, then go for it. I'd much rather have you wasting away of cancer in a hospital bed than, say, voting.
The Greenhouse effect has a falsifiable premise. It was investigated and verified back in by John Tyndall in 1858. Coincidentally, this is the same year that Darwin published his theory of Natural Selection. Some people just don't like to listen to the facts, I'm afraid to say. They prefer to get their information from sources like quacks and 3rd-rate internet satirists. And they imagine that because they condescend so freely to their detractors, then they must be the more correct.
I agree with Gary Taubes that refined sugars are a serious health problem. But just because sugar is bad doesn't imply bacon is good.
How is it "torturing the data" to cluster diseases of affluence and diseases of poverty by their respective prevalences in affluent versus impoverished countries? Campbell clustered the data in exactly the right way to investigate his question and his clustering is far more natural than the entirely subjective three-way categorization that Minger proposes. The results Campbell showed were statistically significant. And it's trivial for Minger (or anybody) to claim without any evidence that her way would produce much more significant results.
I just did go back to look at the actual data. I got the original paper. I critically examined Minger's gripe. I saw that Campbell's methodology made the most sense to address the question he had been granted research dollars to investigate. I saw that Minger's gripe was just a bunch of petty bitching because Campbell didn't explicitly structure some experiment 21 years ago to account for her personal philosophy of nutrition. I saw that if Campbell had actually conducted the analysis the way Minger wanted then he probably would have seriously damaged his career by wasting money conducting research outside the scope of his project. I saw that Minger's complaints bore absolutely no resemblance to your accusation that Campbell "hid" data.
If you want to get your nutritional advice from some sophomoric English major, fine by me. But claiming that people who disagree with you are "outsourcing their judgement to an authority figure" is a cynical smear. If you think Minger's critiques are so scientifically devastating, then why don't you defend them on their merit instead of making baseless accusations?