Morris E. Chafetz M.D.

Gaseous Pains

In Big Fat Liars I discussed the way the news media engage in selective coverage in hope of stirring up the crowd and thereby creating a bigger audience. No better example could be found than the one we're witnessing right now in coverage of the economy.

The fact is, the current unemployment rate, well below 5 percent, is extremely low. Far more people are working than ever before. The nation's productivity is rising. The Gross Domestic Profit is growing at a rate that promises economic health without much threat of inflation, meaning that savings are not likely to be frittered away by a decrease in the value of money. The stock market is near all-time highs, which means that those who have retirement plans can now feel more and more secure in those investments.

Yet consumer confidence in the economy is at a new low.

What's going on here? The economy is better than it has been in years, in some cases better than it has been in decades, yet people are gloomy. The media often say that people "don't feel" that the economy is doing well. This is like the weatherman reporting that people "don't feel" that it's raining -- whether or not it's raining isn't a matter of opinion.

A clue may be found in the "Media Reality Check" published by the Media Research Council. It reports that unless you looked for it, you probably were never told that the economy is growing and that employment is up. While the major networks devoted more than 180 reports in recent days to high gasoline prices, very few reports of good economic news managed to find airtime.

Just another example of why you need to look deeper than the popular media if you want to have facts sufficient to let you make an informed decision on . . . anything.

Science and the Stars

As you might imagine, it's unlikely that I'd ever quote an astrologer, but there's one today worth quoting. In a column today (updated daily, so it will soon disappear), the British astrologer Eric Francis speaks with delightful candor:

[A] horoscope column is made of the writer's thoughts, not those of the reader. If you identify with something that's said here, it's a glorious kind of divine coincidence called a 'synchronicity'. It hints at the possibility of an intelligent cosmic order, which may just mean two minds thinking along the same basic wavelength at around the same time. Yet as far as I'm concerned, you're free to take or leave anything I say about you, or for that matter, anything else anyone says. If the stars vibrate with one message this week, it is: know what is true for yourself, and honour it.

I disagree with Francis only on the matter of timing: knowing what is true for yourself and honoring it is important every day and every week.

What is so noteworthy about Francis's remarks is that he makes them at all. There is no reason to think that there is anything to astrology; in fact, the St. Louis Post Dispatch has a disclaimer that runs atop its astrology column: "NOTE: Horoscopes have no basis in scientific fact and should be read for entertainment, not guidance." What the paper doesn't say -- what no paper ever says -- is that much which is presented as scientific fact also has no basis in scientific fact. Much of the conventional wisdom as to matters scientific and medical has no more to back it up than do predictions of the future based on the positions of the stars.

The astrologer Eric Francis has come out and said it about his pursuit. This is one time when the scientists, the politicians, and the news media could learn much from reading the astrology column.

Other People's Laws

The media have been full these last few weeks with what is euphemized as the "immigration issue." It is not an immigration issue. It is a movement by people who came to the United States in violation of United States laws and who now want new laws passed which will allow them to get and keep the goodies.

The part these people play in our economy is widely debated. What cannot be debated is that these persons have actively demonstrated a willingness to violate such American laws as they find inconvenient. Fair enough, I suppose -- the prisons are full of persons who have been convicted of violating laws which they had decided they did not want to apply to them.

This time, though, there is a difference. There is no movement to legalize ("decriminalize" is the term chiefly used when discussing stylizh misbehavior) bank robbery or murder. There are no demonstrations in favor of driving while intoxicated or even for parking ticket amnesty. People who break the law and who get caught are generally unhappy about the latter but aware of the former. The drunk driver does not proclaim that his actions are good for the liquor, auto body, and undertaker industries and therefore he should be freed and even praised for his actions.

The breathtaking irony in the protests by illegal aliens -- the political incorrectness is deliberate -- is that these people who have already by definition violated U.S. law are seeking a law. Which by definition would apply only to those who, unlike them, do obey the law. The lawbreakers are seeking statutory power over those who are not lawbreakers. And the lawmakers, governed for the most part by political expediency instead of principle, stride boldly forth, finger raised to gauge the wind. It would not be surprising to see other people, for whom principle and an unwillingness to be herded actually matter, and who obey the law not because they especially like it but because it is the law, raising a different finger in reply.

Whatever arguments might be made in connection with the ease of moving to the U.S. or lack thereof, there can be no mistake: the people on one side of this issue are lawbreakers who wish to assert power over you, the law-abiding.

It doesn't seem as if anybody is pointing this out, so I thought I would.

Lots of Numbers

There was an interesting article in last Wednesday's Washington Post, dealing with a new encyclopaedia of statistics about the United States.

The compendium is the Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. It proposes to distill the history of the country into five volumes of statistics. (One important statistic: it costs $825.00!) What it largely does, it seems to me, is demonstrate the backward causality assigned to statistics.

Don't get me wrong -- in neither of my books have I decried statistics as useless, though in both books I have decried the way they are too often used. When the scientific method is properly employed, a prediction might be made in development of a hypothesis. That prediction might well be put in statistical terms. Statistics might then be gathered in support -- not proof, but support -- of the hypothesis. If the wrong numbers come up, it could be evidence that the hypothesis is erroneous. But too frequently it goes the other way: a statistician comes up with a number and researchers then try to fashion a hypothesis which explains it. (Which they then publish, and which the newspapers then pick up, and before you know it, this preliminary guess is accepted as fact, interested parties pressure lawmakers, and goofy laws and regulations come into being.)

What makes the article linked to above so fascinating is that it illustrates the absurdity of trying to learn anything either true or worth knowing by juggling and comparing statistics. By taking numbers and trying to impose meaning upon them.

"Counting things may have started as an act of faith, giving us control over the universe. If you can count the days, you can determine how much food and firewood you'll need until spring returns, giving you control over nature, or so the builders of Aztec temples and Stonehenge believed," concludes writer Joel Garreau. "But the world doesn't really look like numbers, although it does obey Einstein's laws."

Here Comes the Apocalypse -- Again

Seems like just yesterday, the last time we were told that the apocalyptic exhaustion of the world's oil supply had arrived and that what few of us survived would soon be living in mud huts, eating whatever we could find living under rocks. (Why we weren't going to build homes from the rocks and grow food in the dirt was never quite explained. Apocalypses are like that.)

In fact, it was about 35 years ago. Respectable magazines ran articles describing how we might want to take one last, fond look at civilization. (In one sense, they were right: 35 years ago was about the time when common sense in our national discourse was packing its bags and preparing to head for parts unknown, to be replaced by feelings over fact and political correctness over evidence. Thus did one of the most useful aspects of civilization disappear.) Without oil, we were told, we were no better than the monkeys swinging in the trees, as soon we would find out.

It didn't work out that way, of course. The oil supply remained robust. We did endure times of shortage, as arose in 1974 and 1979, but those were political, not geological, in origin. They were based on the unhappy fact that more than three-quarters of the world's known oil reserves are owned and controlled by national governments rather than corporations. (Which right there ought to put a stop to any ideas that government can somehow "solve" the problem of high gasoline prices. From hurricanes to epidemics -- there seems to be no problem that cannot be made worse by government intervention!)

The experts who warned us a generation ago that the last drops of oil were issuing from the spigot, perhaps realizing that at some point their predictions will have to be right, have dusted them off and reissued them. In a deep and convincing article Reason magazine's science correspondent Ronald Bailey says they're . . . consistent:

The good news is that the peak oil doomsters are probably wrong that world oil production is about to decline forever. Most analysts believe that world petroleum supplies will meet projected demand at reasonable prices for at least another generation. The bad news is that much of the world’s oil reserves are in the custody of unstable and sometimes hostile regimes. But the oil producing nations would be the ultimate losers if they provoked an “oil crisis,” since that would spur industrialized countries to cut back on imports and develop alternative energy technologies.

Why are oil prices so high? The most basic economic theory, supply-and-demand, suggests that demand is such that the market will support the higher prices. That can be no surprise. Nor, sadly, should we be surprised that elected officials, from the president down through a particularly shameless handful of senators, are seeking to replace petroleum with snake oil, promising all manner of investigations and palliatives which will not and cannot solve the problem. The price of our oil is not set here, but by the countries from whom we purchase oil. The developing nations of the world are demanding more and more oil. The solution to the problem is to increase the supply.

Nor would increasing the supply be particularly difficult. There are vast, untapped resources that people who have never been there claim will cause environmental troubles were they to be harvested. These are most notably in a very small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. There is not the slightest speck of evidence suggesting that drilling for and pumping out the oil there would be of any harm to any plant or animal. Yet the government, posturing about the problem, cannot bring itself to do the one thing within its power to help: grant oil leases in ANWR. Add the United States to Bailey's list of nations unfriendly to our oil needs.

The article by Bailey is well worth reading. It's well worth considering, too, just why it is that your elected representatives will not let your country sell some of your oil -- to you. The answer is the thesis of Big Fat Liars and : They want you to live in a mud hut, to rely upon them for everything -- which they can deny you unless you do as they say. Remember that the next time an elected "representative of the people" appears on television insusts that something be done about the high price of gasoline, while opposing the acquisition of oil from our own reserves, bring the supply up and the price down.

Eco-Nazism Rears Its Ugly Head

In his syndicated column, the brilliant Mark Steyn pretty well crystalizes the current state of play in the environmental establishment:

From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight global cooling. That's why the doom-mongers decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.

And yet, amazingly, we've survived. Why? Because in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming. So in the '80s, the doom-mongers cast off their thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and wired their publishers to change all references to "cooling" to "warming" for the paperback edition. That's why, if you notice, the global-warming crowd begin their scare statistics with "since 1970," an unlikely Year Zero which would not otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.

But then in 1998 the planet stopped its very slight global warming and began to resume very slight global cooling. And this time the doom-mongers said, "Look, do we really want to rewrite the bumper stickers every 30 years? Let's just call it 'climate change.' That pretty much covers it."

In the column, he describes what I told about in somewhat greater detail in Big Fat Liars. There is something else he mentions, though, which is even more frightening. He quotes Dr. Sue Blackmore from the Guardian, a British newspaper:

[W]e should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.

Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population . . .

Sound familiar? Does anyone remember the experiments of the last century involving the sterilization of those who were "defective" in some way, so as to improve the gene pool? How about an effort just over 60 years ago to wipe an entire religion (plus those who were deemed "defective" for other reasons) from the map of Europe?

Indeed, a few weeks ago a college professor in Texas gave a talk in which he advocated elimination of 90 percent of the Earth's population of human beings. He spoke warmly of his hope that the panic over "bird flu" would prove as bad as the worst guesses estimate. He hopes for a plague. (At least he does not seem to be adding the eugenics component to his prescription for the planet, save, maybe, for those who might have a predisposed immunity yo bird flu.)

Two crackpot "scientists" do not a movement make. But I daresay that we'll hear more and more of this kind of talk, perhaps to the point where it becomes a movement.

It's worth pondering whether your life and the lives of your family are something you'd be willing to sacrifice in the name of a theory put forth by the environmentalists, whose dire predictions have thusfar been, without exception, wrong.

Celebrating Earth Day

Not that you'd notice it from the majority of the coverage, but it may be that the things that troubled environmentalists when they started Earth Day are largely diappearing. There's a pretty good take on it all in today's Opinion Journal.

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%. All of this has been accomplished despite a doubling of the number of cars on the road and a near-tripling of the number of miles driven, according to Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute.

As I manifestly suggested in both The Tyranny of Experts and Big Fat Liars, the citation of statistics does not mean that the statistics are true, and even if the statistics are true, we mustn't read into them more than they say. I have no special knowledge of the veracity of the statistics quoted above. What I do know is that those statistics are not included in public discourse with anything like the emphasis that is given to more pessimistic accounts. Surely the environmentalists would want to cite numbers which suggest that their campaign has been effective, wouldn't you think?

Maybe not. The article continues: "But environmental activists don't want to believe their own success, much less advertise it. They need another looming catastrophe to stay relevant, not to mention to keep raising money."

There is another possibility, and that is that saving the environment isn't the purpose of the environmental movement at all. Evidence in support of this view is found in a Washington Post article by Anne Applebaum. In it, she describes the movement by "environmentalists" who oppose the generation of power through the use of windmills. Wind is non-polluting, renewable energy, of that there can be no doubt.

Applebaum writes:

The problem plaguing new energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" movement. The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything."

Why would groups who have for decades claimed that their sole motive is a clean environment now oppose technology which would contribute to exactly that? Your speculation is probably as good as mine, so I'll leave it to you.

But in that today is again "Earth Day," it is at least worth noting that by one set of statistics, and by at least some standards, the problems that were the putative reason for that first Earth Day may be well along toward being solved. So perhaps the day should be celebrated.

Environmentalist: Oops!

When the first "Earth Day" was conducted nearly 40 years ago, many of the signs carried by demonstrators demanded more nuclear power. And there was some reason behind the desire that more power generation come from nuclear sources. Nuclear power can be safe and clean, requiring no fossil fuels.

Indeed, a desire for more nuclear power plants was deemed politically correct through much of the 1970s, with articles extolling the virtues of such things as "fast breeder" reactors, which would actually produce more fuel while also generating electricity.

Then came March 28, 1979, and a problem at the Three-Mile Island unit 2 nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. It was a serious accident, to be sure, but it probably received much of the publicity it did because a then-new motion picture, "The China Syndrome," gave a fictional account of a reactor "melt down," with the reactor's core burning through its containment and heading for the center of the earth, to the consternation of one and all. News coverage of Three-Mile Island soon blurred into theories promulgated in the fictional movie account. (In fact, at Three-Mile Island no one was killed and no one was injured.)

It could be argued that this was the point at which the environmental movement became the openly anticapitalist movement (though the environmental movement had all along included retreads from the antiwar movement and similar organizations). In any case, the calls for more nuclear power quickly stopped. Some nuclear power plants were shut down. The promise of nuclear power seemed destined, due to negative publicity much of which was from a movie, never to be realized.

One of the leading groups in the environmental movement, beginning with their activities intended to halt nuclear weapons tests in 1971, was Greenpeace. Valiant crusaders or craven eco-terrorists depending on one's point of view, Greenpeace caught the attention and imagination of the news media who, by the mid-1980s, would virtually swoon at mention of the organization.

Now a founder of Greenpeace has written, in effect, "never mind."

"In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots," writes Patrick Moore. He goes on: "Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change."

It is amusing, in a way, that he refers to "catastrophic climate change" instead of "global warming"; back when Greenpeace was foursquare against nuclear power, the concern was not global warming but global cooling.

But I do not wish to be hard on Moore. He makes a very good case for nuclear power. Admitting that the environmental movement has been wrong on the subject is a brave and useful thing for him to do. Where I have issue with him is his supposition that "catastrophic climate change" is real, that it derives from the actions of humans (there being in the fossil record evidence of numerous climate changes which took place long before there were humans to trigger them), and that he cleaves to this view with the same certainty that a generation ago we were told about global cooling. Indeed, that a generation ago Moore and his comrades told us about the evils of nuclear power.

The Right to Be Fat

"Goodbye, war on smoking. Hello, war on fat." So begins an interesting column by Slate's William Saletan in today's Washington Post.

Saletan makes note that the busybodies who desire to dictate how you should live your life are, well, moving to criminalize fatness.

"The one thing you're not allowed to do in a culture war is win it, so we [here he speaks of the busybodies not, apparently, for himself] searched the mortality data for the next big menace." Lots of damage having been done to the tobacco industry and those who choose to smoke having been labled babykillers and worse, the people who claim to know more about you than you do have looked for and found a new way to make you more to their liking.

(Saletan doesn't make note of the fact that we're actually no fatter; instead, the government has redefined obesity.)

It will be a little more difficult for the high priests of meddling this time around, Saletan says. "Something about food--the fact that it keeps us alive, perhaps--makes its purveyors hard to hate. For that matter, the rationale for recent bans on smoking is the injustice of secondhand smoke --and there's no such thing as secondhand obesity." I'm not so sure about that second part. It is only a matter of time before someone, either at a "think tank" or at a class-action law firm, decides that the acceptance of fatness comprises a kind of "second-hand" obesity, encouragement of the non-fat to pile on the pounds. This will make portly Americans simultaneously victim and villain. Hey, it worked with smoking, even though there's no convincing evidence that "second-hand" smoke ever harmed anyone.

The chief villains shall be companies who -- horrors! -- have actually made a profit by selling to people things that people wish to have and consume. And that, at its base, is what all this is about: no one should make a profit and no one should have the right to decide what they'd like to eat or drink.

Of course, none of this is new to you if you've read The Tyranny of Experts and Big Fat Liars.

Dissenting Experts

Far be it from me to claim responsibility -- common sense will out, sometimes, by virtue of its being so obvious -- but a group of Canadian scientists has petitioned their government, and they're sounding very much as if they read the global warming chapter in Big Fat Liars:

“Climate change is real” is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural “noise.” The new Canadian government's commitment to reducing air, land and water pollution is commendable, but allocating funds to “stopping climate change” would be irrational. We need to continue intensive research into the real causes of climate change and help our most vulnerable citizens adapt to whatever nature throws at us next.

This in an open letter to Canada's prime minister. The scientists note that "It was only 30 years ago that many of today's global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas." Here they make the point exactly: much of the climate change whoopla has nothing to do with climate change, but instead is merely another attempt to achieve political ends by claiming scientific necessity.

This is dangerous, of course, on its face, because it means that those promoting the political agenda believe that it would never be accepted if it were honestly presented. Who am I to disagree? They surely know the quality and palatability of whatever it is they want. But it's dangerous for another reason, too: using the claim of scientific fact to promote a lie, they disincline us to believe it should there ever be a real crisis demanding our attention and acquiescence. By claiming to protect the world, the global warming scaremongers are in this way potentially endangering it.