MMR Vaccine and Autism

The story of the MMR vaccine and its purported relation to autism just got even more outrageous.

As you probably saw, the study on which the purported connection between the MMR vaccine and autism was found to be, not just wrong, but fraudulent. Now it comes out that the doctor involved (Andrew Wakefield) almost immediately (and secretly) tried to cash in on the "finding," even while the first child was still in the hospital.

This will surely be one of the most infamous cases of fraud in scientific history, perhaps worse of all because of all the needless worry and concern it caused parents.

Two lessons:

1) Science is self-correcting -- perhaps slowly, but it eventually and always corrects errors, usually with dispassionate, devastating force.

2) Like the case with crop circles, some people will never be convinced even when the errors and fraud are directly revealed. Jenny McCarthy writes:

For some reason, parents aren't being told that this "new" information about Dr. Wakefield isn't a medical report, but merely the allegations of a single British journalist named Brian Deer.

That's untrue. The paper was retracted. Andrew Wakefield was found guilty by the UK General Medical Council of dishonesty and flouting ethics protocols. Such retractions and findings happen after a lot of investigation and are far more than the findings of a single journalist.

And the incidence of measles is way up in the UK and elsewhere.

More on 2010

So 2010 was not only the warmest year in the records, but the wettest as well (both NASA and NOAA data). NYT:

It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

...over all the year was not as exceptional in this country [USA] as for the world as a whole. In the contiguous United States, for instance, the NOAA figures showed that it was the fourth hottest summer on record and the 23rd hottest year.

Of course, it's the long-term trend is the most worrisome, as James Hansen said in a NASA press release:

Certainly, it is interesting that 2010 was so warm despite the presence of a La Niña and a remarkably inactive sun, two factors that have a cooling influence on the planet, but far more important than any particular year’s ranking are the decadal trends,” Hansen said.

The release also has a nice summary of the differences between the different temperature sets and base periods and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Beside the Point Now

Jonathon Capehart in the Washington Post:

So far, there's no connection between alleged murderer Jared Lee Loughner and the extremes of the Tea Party movement. But that's beside the point now, if you ask me. The horrific violence in Tucson saw Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) go from being in the crosshairs of opponents metaphorically to literally being gunned down on Saturday. As a result, we are now finally engaging in a long overdue conversation about the violent rhetoric and imagery polluting national political discourse.

Indeed, the reason so many people instantly thought of Tea Party/Angle/Palin/Jesse Kelly-type rhetoric when they heard about the Tucson shooting is exactly because it was/is so shocking and so recent that no one was surprised that it might lead to such an event.

That it might not have (which still needs to be sussed out) directly led to the Tuscon shooting makes it no less unacceptable, dangerous, and in need of discussion.

US vs European socialism

"The Global Budget Race"
by Douglas J. Besharov and Douglas M. Call, Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2010

A common misconception is that Europe is home to socialized medicine, probably because it has long provided universal health care. But with a few notable exceptions, such as Britain’s National Health Service, most European systems require consumers to pay more money out of pocket for medical care than Americans do. According to Jacob F. Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, “In reality, America’s health care system is already more ‘socialized’ than in most European and other developed countries.”

Although U.S. employer-provided health insurance plans increasingly require beneficiaries to bear more costs themselves—through paying deductibles, coinsurance, and direct payments to medical professionals—such cost sharing is still much more common in Europe. In 2006, out-of-pocket payments made up about 12 percent of total U.S. health care expenditures. The average in Europe was about 17 percent, with a low of six percent in the Netherlands and a high of about 31 percent in Switzerland.

In many European countries, patients often make direct payments to physicians—to purchase treatment that is excluded from coverage, to move up in the queue, or to get better service. In France, individuals directly pay between 10 and 40 percent of their own costs, with different rates for drugs, lab work, and other services. Such cost-sharing requirements are means tested. In France, low-income consumers are eligible for free government-provided supplemental insurance that pays for any cost sharing, and in Switzerland, households receive an income-based subsidy.

Frum: What Palin Needed to Say After Giffords’ Shooting

David Frum:

Palin failed to appreciate the question being posed to her. That question was not: “Are you culpable for the shooting?” The question was: “Having put this unfortunate image on the record, can you respond to the shooting in a way that demonstrates your larger humanity? And possibly also your potential to serve as leader of the entire nation?...

Of course, Palin has yet to give the answer called for by events. Instead, her rapid response operation has focused on pounding home the message that Palin is innocent, that she has been unfairly maligned by hostile critics. Which in this case happened to be a perfectly credible message. And also perfectly inadequate. Palin’s post-shooting message was about Palin, not about Giffords. It was defensive, not inspiring. And it was petty at a moment when Palin had been handed perhaps her last clear chance to show herself presidentially magnanimous.

Right Next to Manson

This picture will certainly go down in the annals of our fucked up culture, won't it? Right next to Charles Manson....


A photograph of Jared L. Loughner released by the Pima County Sheriff’s Office:

The tragedy wouldn't change this basic fact....

George Packer in The New Yorker:

"...the tragedy wouldn't change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn't a big-government liberal—he's a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He's also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.

"This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We’ve all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

"The massacre in Tucson is, in a sense, irrelevant to the important point. Whatever drove Jared Lee Loughner, America's political frequencies are full of violent static."

Well Worth Thinking About

Stephen Budiansky
http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-us-cont.htm :

"For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle."

Methane Update

Remember methane?

It has 22 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, though it resides in the atmosphere for much less time.

Anyway, its atmospheric level went mysteriously flat over much of the '00s. But it's back on the increase -- here is NOAA's latest data:

(The gray values are preliminary....) Nevertheless, this doesn't bode well (especially if it's a result of Arctic tundra melting....), and it's never good when scientists don't quite have a handle on what's going....

2011's Taxation Without Representation

Did you know that one of the first acts of the new (Republican) House leadership was to deny voting rights to millions of Americans who pay taxes?

House GOP ends floor voting rights for delegates

(Associated Press, Jan 5, 2011)

Loughner's Reading List

Can we please stop the growing meme that Jared Loughner's reading list alone paints him (alone) as a kook or a left-wing radical?

Andrew Klavan in City Journal:

He read books by Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell, among others. He did not believe in God.

Look, any intelligent young person ought to be reading Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell. And much more. I suspect most of you here have read most of Loughner's favorite books, and if you'd listed your favorite books when you were his age it'd probably look equally bizarre. Remember The Hundredth Monkey?

Here's his own list of favorite books, from his YouTube channel:

I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

I don't know about you, but were assigned to read Mein Kampf in high school history class. Also Marx's Communist Manifesto. Also Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Trotsky, Trevor-Roper, Kissinger, and many others I've surely forgotten. I did have a truly great history teacher, but I think any intellectually curious young person ought to be reading these writers.

(Though maybe listing Mein Kampf as a "favorite" is a little suspect.)

Just Asking

From the Portland Mercury blog:

Surveyor Symbols?

natthedem: Of course they were surveyor symbols, because we all know how
much time Sarah Palin spends doing cartography.

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/natthedem/statuses/24202089898975234

On those Crosshairs....

ebertchicago: Let's say those weren't cross-hairs on a gunsight. Let's
say they were map references. Why did Plain take them off-line?
http://j.mp/ebWb5m

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/statuses/24249371012890624

Q for Sharron Angle

@techweenietechweenie

Q for Sharron Angle: is this a "Second Amendment remedy?"

RWNJ or LWNJ?

misselisebrown:
"I can't tell from what I've heard about Jared Loughner whether or not
he's a RWNJ [Right Wing Nut Job] or a LWNJ [Left Wing Nut Job]. He just
seems like a NJ." http://huff.to/ep8yvd

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/misselisebrown/statuses/23867444573507584

Flashback: Giffords on being on Palin's crosshairs target list

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/8/934345/-Flashback:-Giffords-on-being-on-Palins-crosshairs-target-list

"Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action."
-- Gabrielle Giffords, March 2010

Krugman

Paul Krugman:

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

Huff Post: 2nd person arrested in AZ shooting....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/08/gabrielle-giffords-shot-c_n_806211.html#46_2nd-person-arrested

Picture of Jared Loughner?

http://azstarnet.com/events/collection_aebeb63c-2f9e-11df-9021-001cc4c002e0.html?mode=image&photo=8

Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube Channel(?)

Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube Channel(?):

http://www.youtube.com/user/Classitup10#p/a/u/1/nHoaZaLbqB4

(this is a good time to be skeptical about such things)....

More on Laughner

PhotobyWendyLLC: Jared Laughner, the man who shot Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), was described by eyewitnesses as a young
…http://lnkd.in/xBCcgS

Original Tweet:
http://twitter.com/PhotobyWendyLLC/statuses/23850410015985664

Jared Laughner's Youtube Channel.

peculiarways: Looking at Jared Laughner's Youtube Channel... some of his
favorite books are 'The Communist Manifesto' and 'Mein Kampf' #ok

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/peculiarways/statuses/23849271254056960

Gunman reported as Jared Laughner of Arizona

BreakingNews: RT @RussertXM_NBC: Federal authorities identify the gunman
as Jared Laughner of Arizona, born September 1988

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/BreakingNews/statuses/23845493289263105

Federal Judge John M. Roll killed in Arizona attack

Federal Judge John M. Roll killed in Arizona attack, NBC News reports
http://on.msnbc.com/caJ3T3

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/msnbc/statuses/23841462936412160

Federal Judge among those shot

ACTORSandCREW: TPM's confirming that a Federal Judge was among those
shot at the shooting this morning in Tucson. WTF.

Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/ACTORSandCREW/statuses/23837721747263488

Tweet forwarded by @qsoup

eugeniedfranval: RT @benpolitico: NY Post: Her father wept when asked if
his daughter had any enemies. "Yeah," "The whole tea party."
http://is.gd/knVv7

Original Tweet:
http://twitter.com/eugeniedfranval/statuses/23834793485537280

Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)

On Palin's Hit List

Gabrielle Giffords was on Sarah Palins "hit list": 

Sarah Palin's PAC Puts Gun Sights On Democrats She's Targeting In 2010‎

Gabrielle Giffords

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was the wife of astronaut Mark Kelly of STS-134....

Steve Goddard's Big Error

Ladies and gentleman, rarely are you privileged to see such levels of stupidity.

Steve Goddard, trying (I guess) to claim some kind of Al Gore effect because it's going to be cold in Denver in mid-January (who would have imagined?) during some climate conference, writes:

Umm, Steve.... Actually that forecast is for 16 F (-8 C), not -8 F (-22 C). 

Of course, not one of his commenters sees the error....

Deaths Due to Secondhand Smoke

Amazing: Secondhand tobacco smoke caused 603,000 deaths worldwide in 2004, according to a recent report in The Lancet -- about 1.0% of worldwide mortality.

28% of these deaths occur in children.

Not only that, it causes 10.9 million years lost due to disability (0.7% of the worldwide disease burden).

And we drive ourselves crazy worrying about an airplane crash here and there and low-level toxins in our drinking water.

If tobacco were created today it would never be allowed on the market. Not even close.

Congressional Priorities

Approximate increase in the U.S. federal debt during the hour and a half the new House majority party choose to read aloud the U.S. Constitution: $237 million.

Two Recent Pieces

"Health," n+1: Year in Review, Part 2, January 2011.
http://nplusonemag.com/year-in-review-part-2

"Are Recent Snows From Global Warming?" Oregonian, January 3, 2011.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/01/are_recent_snows_from_global_w.html

About Concensus

Any scientist would, of course, love to disprove any "consensus" view in his/her field, if he could -- he would be immortalized in the field's history.

My experience with climate scientists suggests that they would be the first to revise or discard a hypothesis if data did not support it. 

-- Jeffrey A. Myers, Oregonian, Jan 5 2011

Legacy of the Bush Administration

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post:

"The decade just concluded is the first in which Americans, on average, have seen their incomes decline. Median household income increased by about $4,000 per decade in the 1980s and '90s: from $42,429 in 1980 to $46,049 in 1990 to $50,557 in 2000 (in 2007 dollars). In 2009, the most recent year for which we have figures, it had declined to $49,777 - but 2009, of course, was a year of deep recession. If we go back to the peak year of the last decade, 2007, we find that median household income was just $50,233- roughly $300 less than it had been in 2000."

UAH Data for 2010

UAH data places 2010 as statistically tied for the warmest year, with 1998.



I have to admit, I haven't calculated the statistics for the RSS data I mentioned the other day.

While 1998 and 2010 were both El Nino years, 1998 was clearly a much stronger El Nino than 2010. So to me it seems surprising a good question is: why are weaker El Ninos now just as warm?