Pessimism

Wilkins is wondering when the real criminals will be punished—he’s talking about the abuses of power by the current Republican administration, ranging from the evisceration of civil liberties in our own country to criminal and unjustified foreign wars, with the concomitant loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. I think I can answer that one.

Never.

Bush will leave office with the praise of his sycophants ringing in his ears, and that will include the national media. He will go off to a happy retirement, smirking all the way, and will only ever appear at voluntary events hosted by other criminals who will be anxious to continue applauding him. Personally, I think that at every public event at which he shows his face from now on, people ought to spit on him…and he and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole rotten gang ought to be shipped off to an international war crimes trial today. It won’t happen.

One reason is the remarkably timid complacency of the citizenry. We have a president who signs away our liberties, and the people just yawn. This is a nation of sheep, bred to follow authority, no matter how odious or insane. It’s frightening how much reverence for authority people will grant to piddling wankers like Bush, or televangelists, or media figures—these people can do anything, and the public will rush to hush anyone who criticizes.

Another reason is historical. Read this account of what the United States has done in the past—along with the sheep, we are a nation of monsters. John Milton Chivington would have been an exemplary soldier in the War on Terror. But, you see, we don’t learn from history: our kids do not learn about the Sand Creek Massacre in school, and they will not learn about Abu Ghraib and habeas corpus in the future.

Our kids don’t even learn about Nixon, except that he was a president; if they are particularly diligent, they might discover some of the press hagiography about him. That’s it.

There’s a fantasy of America the rich and wise and powerful and gracious and self-sacrificing that has a powerful resonance in this country. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that we can close our eyes and wallow in the myth, and we don’t actually have to try and live up to it…and we haven’t. Ever.

Strange visitors arriving in Phoenix…

Prepare yourselves, Arizona! John Lynch, GrrlScientist, and I will be wafting into Phoenix tomorrow, and here’s a short version of our busy calendar:

  • All week: Science! I’ll plan on posting updates about various cool things I learn, as I’m sure my SciBlogs colleagues will also do.
  • Friday, 6ish: we’ll be at some place called Seamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub. That Lynch fellow is making us go, and he’s probably going to force us to drink Guinness. I think he’s buying, though, so it’s OK. Anyone can show up for this one.
  • Saturday, 5:30-8:00pm: Jim Lippard is hosting a social at his place. Limited space; contact him to RSVP and get directions.

I’ll be leaving Phoenix on Sunday for New York for a few days, and various social events there. It’s busy, busy, busy for the next week!

Scientific optimism!

Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is “What are you optimistic about? And why?“

There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the new supercollider, or climate change, or something specific to their discipline—while others are so general that they don’t say much (Humans will survive, somehow!). What I thought interesting, though, is that there was a bit of a trend to one particular kind of answer. Some of the people who answered in this particular way are:

In short, what all of these writers have in common is that they all believe people are going to WAKE UP. They’re going to appreciate evidence and rational thinking and skepticism and generally, science more — they’re going to develop more demanding standards for truth, and they’re going to look at what people tell them more critically.

What a splendid hope! It’s about time we had a new Enlightenment.

I’m not quite so optimistic about the possibility of it actually happening, but I can join in the wishful thinking — yes, these would all be grand changes to see occur. Let’s all work towards making it happen.

Unethical is too mild a word

Am I going to face the wrath of the anti-vaccination kooks for linking to this? Bring them on. Orac has an article that thoroughly disgusted me: a report on the infamous MD, Andrew Wakefield, who published an article in The Lancet that claimed to have found a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. I had no idea that it had such a strong effect.

Wakefield’s work for the lawyers began two years before he published his now notorious report in The Lancet medical journal in February 1998, proposing a link between the vaccine and autism.

This suggestion, followed by a campaign led by Wakefield, caused immunisation rates to slump from 92% to 78.9%, although they have since partly recovered. In March this year the first British child in 14 years died from measles.

Orac has a timeline that also includes this fact: in 2003, there were 4204 cases of mumps; in 2004, 16436; in 2005, 56390. That’s in addition to the death from measles. That’s an awful lot of misery. What did Wakefield get out of this? Was it the satisfaction of advancing the cause of science? Of revealing the truth? Of combating autism? It looks like the rewards were a little less lofty and a lot more venal than that: £435,000. He’s got a little consulting gig now, getting paid £1000 per day to testify against the wickedness of vaccinations for legal firms out to sue pharmaceutical companies.

Wow.

It got me wondering how much you’d have to pay me to make 50,000 children sick, and maybe kill a few. There isn’t any sum you could funnel to my bank account to get me to do that, but Wakefield would do it for the low sum of about a million dollars. Who knew evil could be had so cheaply?

Another thing that appalled me was that one of the referees for one of his papers was paid £40,000 for his review. I thought we were supposed to do this anonymously, and for free! Next paper, I should call up the author and get bids on a positive review…and if ever I should do that, strip me of my degree, fire me from my job, and throw me out on the street in disgrace. The “scientists” who perpetrated this fraud are vermin, and ought to be similarly drummed out of the ranks.

One set of things not mentioned, though, are the identities of the lawyers and the law firms who threw millions of pounds at scientists to corrupt them, and gin up the grounds for a lucrative lawsuit. There should also be an ethics investigation of those people, and a loss of their right to practice law in any way.

Ron Numbers, another tool of the religious establishment

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He’s another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can’t even follow through on his own chain of logic.

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Impending Major Developments in Pseudoscience!

Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a ‘research center’ at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking, revolutionary new scientific paradigm, as they like to think of it, that’s nothing—when they crow about their triumphs, all they can do is mention a few PR efforts, and they’re so paltry that you could count them on the fingers of one partially maimed hand? John Lynch mocks their feeble vision, and offers a few suggestions for trivial additions which we know they will not produce.

After you’re done laughing at that silliness, here’s some more: Howard Smith is looking for the ethical imperative in cosmology and the kabbalah…it’s another respectable scientist suspending his credulity to build a pseudo-scientific link between reality and the fantasies of medieval mystics. It’s going to be very interesting when the Christian IDists like Dembski finally rout the entire mainstream scientific community with a couple of books and a church-sponsored room at a bible college, and then they have to turn and deal with the non-Christian heretics.

How can they screw up this badly?

Why is it that I, nasty ol’ atheist who is completely ignorant of theology and religious history, can see the parallels in the execution of Hussein, but our theocracy-sympathizing leaders bumble along, failing to see the damning errors of their position? Glenn Greenwald’s post on the ineptitude of the lynching is chilling.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.'”

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what’s the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don’t they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they’ve apparently done the execution at a time when it is “religiously unacceptable”, and we’ve got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

I know. They must all be hardcore atheists over there.