Category Archives: Pseudo-science

Pseudoscience

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pseu·do·sci·ence
ˌso͞odōˈsīəns/
noun
noun: pseudoscience; plural noun: pseudosciences; noun: pseudo-science; plural noun: pseudo-sciences
  1. a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.

We see more and more psuedoscience being presented as science every day. All too many folks accept pseudoscience without question. Just look at the controversy over Global Warming. It’s been proven time and again that man-made global warming does not exist. The climate models used to support man-made global warming were manufactured to fit the alarmists agenda. And some frauds, like Algore, made hundreds of millions of dollars pushing the hoax.

But, anyone with half a brain now knows that man-made global warming is a fraud. It’s unfortunate that the same people taken in by global warming will swallow the next piece of pseudoscience without hesitation.

Case in point. On today’s Drudge Report is a headline:  WIFI 'MAKING PEOPLE SICK'. When you read the actual article, you will see what is the truth. The claim is based solely on "feelings" and emotion.

News Seen At 11: Woman Says Her Wi-Fi Connection Is Making Her Sick

May 20, 2015 11:30 PM

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — From using cell phones and computers to watching movies online, wireless technology has made life easier. But now, some say there is a serious downside.

As CBS2’s Maurice Dubois explained, there are those who claim that exposure to wi-fi is making people sick, and some people don’t even know it.

“Brain fog. That’s my worst problem. A brain fog,” Suzanne Hoyt said.

The media, CBS News in New York, presented this head line as fact. Most folks just skim the headlines and think, “Wow! My Wi-Fi is making me stupid.” I would submit that something else is causing your stupidity but if you believe the headline, you really are stupid. CBS had to search awhile to find a doc to support their agenda. They found one who says, “It’s real.” He’s sure he can prove it if he has enough funding. Again, emotion, not fact.

Other doctors counter that the evidence connecting wi-fi to illness just isn’t there. It’s only when you actually read the article, near the end, that you see facts.

“It’s a psychological phenomenon,” neuropsychologist Dr. William Barr said.

Dr. Barr said some people may have symptoms, but what causes them is something else altogether. He said the power of suggestion may play a role.

“They essentially establish a belief that something has the potential to cause a symptom, and then when they come in contact with the cause they develop those symptoms,” he explained.

That statement is true of so much we see in our society. People in dire circumstances want to blame something, anything, for what ails them. In some cases the belief in pseudoscience allows one to shift blame for their own shortcomings. In other cases, people can’t accept that sometimes life just isn’t fair. And their refusal to accept fact is a child’s reaction when reality strikes.

There are other elements in the growing rise of belief in pseudoscience. Education, or the lack of real education instead of rote-learning, is a factor. Schools no longer teach logic nor rational thinking. Education is geared toward passing standardized tests—and that’s all.

Regardless, the battle between real science and fact will continue against pseudoscience and emotion. The battle will never end, the stupid live among us. It’s not hard to find them.

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Second takes…

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I was listening to a local radio station this morning. The host was on a tirade about the flu and hospitals. The flu is in full swing in the KC area at the moment. Elsewhere, too.

A news item said that a woman had died of the flu. However, when you read the body of the announcement, it said she died of a staph infection as a complication of the flu. The situation is not uncommon. People, weakened by disease, often fall to other conditions as a side effect of their primary contribution of their death.

Then the host went off on the hospital. It said the woman died of a ‘staff’ infection, an infection the woman had acquired from the ‘staff’ in the hospital. I think someone took him aside and explained to him the difference between ‘staff’ and ‘staph’. One is people, the other is a class of infectious bacteria, staphylococcus. A few minutes later he attempted to backtrack and then wandered off onto another topic, immunizations, repeating the myths and ‘urban knowledge’ of falsehoods about that subject. The ignorance and outright stupidity of presumed adults continues to astound me. It’s a reminder of the degradation of education over the last fifty years.

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In 1967, Adam Clayton Powell was unseated from the US House for corruption. The House and Senate has the right to not recognize members for specific reasons. Powell subsequently sued and was reelected in 1969. Congress then passed more legislation to solidify the process and justification for refusal to seat a member. That legislation was a result of the Powell controversy. It was a pyrrhic victor for Powell. He died in 1972.

Another New York City Congressman is in a similar situation.

U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm will resign from the House this week after having pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion, the New York Daily News reported Monday night. — The Washington Times.

At first reports, Grimm stated he would remain in Congress. Evidently, someone spoke to him and explained to him the realities of his situation.

Perhaps, NYC Mayor de Blasio should take a tip from Michael Grimm and resign, too. It has been said that no Mayor of a large metropolitan city can be successful without the support of the police. De Blasio has lost that support in New York City.

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John Boehner thinks he has the Speakership in the bag. Truth is he is probably right. Not everyone, however, will rollover, unlike our local Vicky Hartzler, and rubberstamp vote for Boehner next week.

Conservative Lawmakers Plan To Vote Against Boehner For Speaker

Alex Pappas, 9:57 PM 12/29/2014

Some disaffected conservative House Republicans are planning to rebel and vote against John Boehner for speaker of the House when the new Congress convenes next week.

The official speaker’s election is set for Jan. 6., when the House will convene for a public floor vote to open the new Congress.

While the vote is usually just a formality, these conservative lawmakers are planning to vote for someone other than the Ohio Republican who has been speaker since 2011. (The column continues here.)

The Daily Caller can’t be labeled a conservative news outlet. Given that, they usually are more balanced that most of the MSM. I’m happy to see that there are still a few ‘Pubs in Washington who stand by the principles that elected them to office.

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s a Will Rogers World

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I may alienate some folks today, but I’ve kept silent for a long time. Our country, our culture, and most of the world, is afflicted with…pseudo-science. What is pseudo-science? It is a belief based on unproven or manufactured facts and studies that are presented as real science. We used to call such practitioners of pseudo-science as “snake-oil” salesmen.

We on the right laugh and point to Algore and his Holy Church of Global Warming. It is a prime example of pseudo-science. But many on the right, good conservatives all, have fallen for ideas based on pseudo-science, GMO crops and disease immunizations that cause autism, for example.

I’ll leave the GMO topic for another time, but the anti-immunization people are endangering millions and it is all based on pseudo-science. I wouldn’t have brought this subject up today if I hadn’t noticed an article in the Redstate website.

In 1998, the Lancet, a British Medical Journal, published an article that MMR (Mumps/Measles/Rubella) immunizations caused autism in children. The subject was extremely controversial and a large number of laboratories and agencies, among them the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,[8] the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences,[9] the UK National Health Service,[10],  reviewed the study and attempted to duplicate it. They all failed.

When the author, Andrew Wakefield, and his study was investigated, the research fell apart. It had been fabricated. Wakefield was denounced widely and publicly.

Investigations by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer revealed that Wakefield had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest,[2][3] had manipulated evidence,[4] and had broken other ethical codes. The Lancet paper was partially retracted in 2004 and fully retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and was struck off the Medical Register, meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor.[5] — Wiki.

But the damage had been done. Around the world, charlatans perpetuated the myth, many producing more studies that supported Wakefield and every one, in some form or another, cited Wakefield’s fraudulent study as proof of their contentions.

People believed these charlatans. Some because they were unaware of the original fraudulent study, others because the fraudulent study supported their own beliefs. Some because they wanted someone or something to blame for afflictions that developed in their children. Over the years, a cult following has developed in the belief that immunizations cause more harm than they help.

The anti-vaccine cult

By: streiff (Diary)  |  September 30th, 2014 at 03:00 PM

One of the interesting things about the elevation of science to a secular religion is watching as science begins to mimic the behavior of religion on the eve of the Thirty Years War. In its purest form science is devoted to discovery. Truths are proven. Axioms are tested and retested. Science today has become a hodgepodge of beliefs that have more in common with the methodology of an aboriginal shaman than they do with actual science. Earlier we looked at the behavior of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and his followers. No discussion of this phenomenon would be complete without acknowledging Michael Mann and his fellow travelers.

While this can be amusing, one has to keep in mind that listening with open mouthed credulousness to charlatans is not harmless. Mann and his ilk seek to destroy the economy of the industrial world. Guys like Paul Ehrlich aim at reducing the human population by the billions. One of the more dangerous groups are the anti-vaccine advocates who are not satisfied in killing their own kids but want to kill yours as well.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT.  Across California, thousands of children and babies are coughing so violently that their bodies convulse, uncontrollably wheezing and fighting to breathe for weeks. Nearly 8,000 pertussis cases have been reported in 2014 to the state’s Department of Public Health as of Sept. 2, and 267 of those patients have been hospitalized, including 58 requiring intensive care.

Adults can contract the disease, but 94 percent of all cases reported statewide involve children — and the youngest suffer the most. So far this year, three infants under 2 months of age have died statewide from pertussis, a disease commonly known as whooping cough (named for the high-pitched sound that kids make when they inhale after coughing).

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is at the front line, with 72 pertussis patients this year. “A number of them have been in the ICU and very, very sick,” says CHLA infectious disease specialist Dr. Jeffrey Bender. “They cough so hard, it turns into vomiting and broken ribs; they end up intubated, to ventilate their lungs.”

Whooping cough was once a very common disease which became rare after the advent of a vaccine for the disease. Only a few years ago, whooping cough was touted as being on the verge of being eradicated. Now it is back with a vengeance.

vax whooping

The same is true of measles, a disease that was declared eradicated in 2000:

Measles cases are on the rise in the U.S. this year, 14 years after national leaders declared that the disease had been eliminated within the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed many of the 592 measles cases and 18 outbreaks in the U.S. this year to parents not getting their children vaccinated.

Since the CDC said there were no measles cases in the U.S. in 2000, there have been reported cases. There were more than 200 in 2011, in part, due to a large outbreak in France that saw infected people travel to the United States, according to the agency. This year, a large, ongoing outbreak in the Philippines is impacting the jump in measles cases in the U.S., which has spread across 21 states.

vax measles

The genesis of this phenomenon can be laid at the feet of the anti-vaccine movement. While there has long been resistance to mandatory vaccinations from small religious sects, the current opposition to vaccines is much more prevalent among parent who are relatively well off and should be well educated.

Unvaccinated children tended to be white, to have a mother who was married and had a college degree, to live in a household with an annual income exceeding $75 000, and to have parents who expressed concerns regarding the safety of vaccines and indicated that medical doctors have little influence over vaccination decisions for their children.

The Hollywood Reporter shows that the pertussis outbreaks are clustered in the most affluent areas of Los Angeles

vax whooping riskHistorically, this kind of dissent has not emerged from affluent communities. “A century ago, much of the resistance was coming from the working class, who were most targeted for compulsory vaccination: in steerage compartments on steamships rather than first class, in public schools rather than private schools, in factories rather than offices,” says Brandeis professor Michael Willrich, Ph.D, author of Pox: An American History. “But the contours here are anything but. It’s the story of the well-educated, upper-middle class or upper class.”

Today, on the Westside, those who abstain from vaccinating their kids see refusal through their own socio-anthropological lens. “They’re well intended — the people that only want to do the best for their child. They want only natural products, organic foods, attachment parenting, family beds,” says Dr. Lisa Stern, a Santa Monica pediatrician. Observes Dr. Neal Baer, a trained pediatrician and veteran TV writer-producer (ER) who wrote an episode of Law & Order: SVU about the public health consequences of vaccine refusal, “It’s about not wanting to have anything that isn’t ‘natural’ in your child — this whole notion of the natural and holistic versus the scientific.”

Childhood diseases are serious. No matter what your feelings and beliefs about vaccines, the stark fact remains that vaccines are safe. They work. And the risk a child faces from a vaccine is infinitely smaller than the risk of not being vaccinated. The old reasoning of “if everyone else is vaccinated, my child doesn’t need vaccines” no longer applies as we see the number of unvaccinated children rise to endanger the efficacy of herd immunity.  Relying on the anti-vaccine movement for advice on your child’s health is like going to Michael Mann for climate science or hiring Jerry Sandusky as a coach.

The alleged research behind the anti-vaccine movement is, like Ehrlich’s population explosion fearmongering, simply political agenda dressed up as science. It embodies the definition of faith as being belief in the absence of proof. It operates as a cult. And it is no coincidence that the anti-vaccine movement is most successful among the same people who believe in climate change, oppose GMO foods, and advocate for “green” solutions; people who mistake their self professed virtue for intelligence.

To paraphrase Will Rogers, “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that isn’t so that does.” Words to remember.

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It’s not what you know, it’s…

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…what you know that is wrong!

That is a paraphrased quote attributed to Will Rogers. It’s one all too many people overlook. It reminds me of a TV commercial where a woman claims that everything on the internet is true. I hate to disappoint folks, but that could not be further from the truth.

Even the most cynical of us get taken in at times.  My wife and I realized last night that we’d been taken in on one, too. Morgan-FreemanWe like Morgan Freeman, the actor. We don’t care for his politics but we do like his acting. We’d heard a few months ago that he’d died. We checked some sources and they confirmed his death. They were wrong. He’s alive and well.

I noticed that he’s in a number of movies that are just now being released and wondered that he knew his end was coming and tried to finish as many as he could given his remaining time. That lead to question of what caused his death.  I did some research and, lo!, discovered Morgan Freeman is alive and well and the numerous reports of his death were hoaxes.

Like I said at the beginning, It’s not what you know that causes problems, it’s what you know that is wrong that causes problems. We see examples all around us. Global Warming is a good example. The climatologists who started the hoax cherry-picked data to support their position. They claimed that Himalayan glaciers were shrinking. The half dozen they chose for examples were shrinking. However the hundred-plus other glaciers in that mountain range weren’t—in fact they were growing!

Then there was the reports of average temperature rising. They were—at the points being measured. What they failed to inform the public was that many of the monitoring stations that had been in rural areas were moved to metropolitan sites to aid aeronautic weather reporting. Locally, our Lees Summit airport now has automated reporting for pilots. That station didn’t exist a decade ago.

When more automated stations are located in or near metro area, the averages—of those stations, will rise. However when you average ALL of the weather stations, no temperature rise was found.

Metro areas do have higher temperatures than rural areas—all those people, cars and concrete to absorb heat from the sun. When you manipulate the source of the data collection, you change the validity of that data.

Collectively, I call these examples as exercises in pseudo-science. All too often, we believe what we want to believe contrary to the facts. Those beliefs can extend from the belief that cell phones interfere with electronics and sound systems, to the belief that vaccinations cause autism. I was taken to task for that last one, vilified and attacked for pointing out that the original study that created the belief of vaccinations causing autism, was based on a hoax.

Retracted autism study an ‘elaborate fraud,’ British journal finds

By the CNN Wire Staff ,January 5, 2011 8:14 p.m. EST

(CNN) — A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession,” BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.

…

The now-discredited paper panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children getting the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates dropped sharply in Britain after its publication, falling as low as 80% by 2004. Measles cases have gone up sharply in the ensuing years.

In the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than in any other year since 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 90% of those infected had not been vaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown, the CDC reported.

“But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it,” the BMJ editorial states.

Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them. Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers — a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. After years on controversy, the Lancet, the prestigious journal that originally published the research, retracted Wakefield’s paper last February.

I’ve heard that a number of lawsuits have been filed against physicians and vaccine manufacturers based on his hoaxed study. Given human nature to try to find blame, somewhere, for their misfortunes, I wouldn’t be surprised.

We’re in an era of exploding scientific research and exploding dissemination of information without restraint nor constraint. We cannot take individual reports at face value, we must do our own due diligence and validate, as best we can, our information and sources personally.

Always remember…

“It’s not what we don’t know that hurts. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

― Will Rogers

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