Watch Jon Stewart shred William Kristol on health care simply by following the logic of Kristol's assertions. The military deserves the better health care that it gets, according to Kristol, more than does the general population. But, as Stewart notes, the military health care plan is run by the government, which Kristol argues can't do the job as well as our private sector system. Game set and match.
Of course, scientifically, this argument was over long ago. By any objective measure, health care in the US is inferior to so-called socialist systems: We have lower life expectancies, higher rates of infant mortality, less satisfaction, and at significantly higher costs. Just choose a WHO statistic and cringe at the nations that outperform us. The opponents of reform have nothing to offer in rebuttal except evidence-free assertions (higher costs from crack babies), misrepresentation about our present system (we don't get to choose our doctors now, the HMO does that), and anecdotes.
The one card Kristol had to play in the above exchange was that the health care the military receives is expensive, but the reason for that is obvious, and essentially the same reason Medicaid and Cobra are so expensive: they cover the worst risks we have. Applied to the entire populace, average costs would be lower. But opponents of health care reform aren't interested in a reasoned analysis of the problem, as Kristol demonstrates by pulling out two favorite canards: pre existing conditions, and rationing.
When someone talks about eliminating preexisting conditions, what they really mean is eliminating an insurance company's ability to turn down a potential new insured on the basis that the insured already has a medical condition qualifying for payment. However, this need is essential: If people were allowed to wait to buy insurance when they were already sick, that's what everyone would do, and the insurance part of the equation would collapse. Insurance, any insurance, depends on the small premiums of the many to pay for the large unexpected costs of the few. With only the few, costs are not mitigated, and needed premiums would skyrocket. It would be like allowing homeowners to buy wind insurance as the hurricane approaches.
The real issue is portability: allowing insureds on a medical plan with their employer to not be treated as a new insured if they change employers, or lose their job. Change that, and the legitimate problems with the pre-existing conditions go away. When someone like Kristol neglects to mention portability and instead makes it sound like the problem is that the big bad insurance companies won't let you wait to buy cancer insurance until after you have cancer, he is demonstrating either gross ignorance or intellectual dishonesty.
Likewise when you hear people like him prattle on about rationing. Any time there is more demand than supply for a commodity, there will be rationing. It's just brute arithmetic: if there are 6 items, and 8 people want them, 2 people are going without (the real-life complexities complicate the argument without altering it meaningfully). The question is not "will there be rationing?" The question is "by what method will we ration?" Our current system does so poorly and expensively. People like Kristol attempt to avoid the legitimate discussion of the problem by implying the problem is created by government. Rationing is part of the equation, whether government is involved or not.
We need an honest debate of the myriad problems we face with our health care system. Our population is aging, and our financial status is poor. The challenge is great, and the situation is only going to get worse. We don't have time to waste on the prattlings of obfuscating twits like Kristol, who, aside from the dubious distinction of predicting the nomination of Sarah Palin, has been pretty wrong about nearly everything lately.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
News One Liners
"You want to hear something positive about Sarah Palin? I'm positive she's an idiot" - CNN emailer
"If at first you don't succeed, redefine what you did as a success" - Stephen Colbert
"If at first you don't succeed, redefine what you did as a success" - Stephen Colbert
Thursday, August 6, 2009
The New Guitarists
There is a whole new breed of guitar players out there who are using innovative techniques to get sounds out of their instruments that would make Jimi Hendricks envious, so I thought I'd give a few of my favorites a plug:
Andy McKee
Antoine Dufour
Don Ross and Andy McKee
Antoine Dufour wth Tommy Gautier,
Dufour and Gauthier getting a wee bit silly with an old Jerry Reed tune,
and possibly the best of the bunch, Erik Mongrain, here and here.
They were all apparently influenced by a guy named Michael Hedges, who was experimenting with tapping/slapping techniques and harmonics back in the late 80's, and is absolutely mesmerizing to listen to.
"I feel I can always hear his heart when he plays. He respected my playing too, and that simply thrills me." – Pete Townshend
Andy McKee
Antoine Dufour
Don Ross and Andy McKee
Antoine Dufour wth Tommy Gautier,
Dufour and Gauthier getting a wee bit silly with an old Jerry Reed tune,
and possibly the best of the bunch, Erik Mongrain, here and here.
They were all apparently influenced by a guy named Michael Hedges, who was experimenting with tapping/slapping techniques and harmonics back in the late 80's, and is absolutely mesmerizing to listen to.
"I feel I can always hear his heart when he plays. He respected my playing too, and that simply thrills me." – Pete Townshend
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Evolution Revealed in Excess Butterfly Sperm
In the best example of creationism-inconsistent evolution since the stab-raping bisexual bedbug:
The sperm of male butterflies has a strange property. About 90% of it is non-fertile -- essentially filler for the females' sperm storage organs that tricks females into thinking they have all the sperm they need to fertilize their eggs. The males' ploy reduces the likelihood that their mates will take another suitor, thereby ensuring their own paternity.
It's tough to imagine the creator god saying "gee, I think I'll design this butterfly so that the female won't be satisfied until she's full, so I'll give the male 10 times as much sperm as he needs, and 90% worthless sperm at that." Still, as good scientists we must always be ready to challenge our assumptions, and this is no exception. The science does have a bit more research left to solidify the case:
...the interpretation of Wedell's results requires some assumptions about the costs and benefits of non-fertile sperm production and storage that have not yet been confirmed, cautioned evolutionary biologist Darryl Gwynne of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work. The nutritious gifts that females receive upon mating are likely to be a high incentive for them to mate many times, but there are often costs associated with mating as well. It is therefore unclear how often females should mate to maximize their fitness.
"This paper addresses a really neat potential conflict situation in these butterflies," Gwynne said, "[but you] need to show [that] by filling her sperm storage organs with these non-fertile sperm and increasing her refractory period, you're actually impacting her fitness." In other words, demonstrating that this is a case of sexual conflict requires showing that females incur a cost by storing non-fertile sperm.
Notice however that there is no promise of salvation for the creationists in these criticisms. They only address the issue of whether the cause of the excess sperm is sexual conflict, not whether the excess sperm exists, or that it is nonfertile. It doesn't matter what the natural explanation turns out to be, or whether this one is correct, "god wanted it that way" will never fly as a viable alternative.
The sperm of male butterflies has a strange property. About 90% of it is non-fertile -- essentially filler for the females' sperm storage organs that tricks females into thinking they have all the sperm they need to fertilize their eggs. The males' ploy reduces the likelihood that their mates will take another suitor, thereby ensuring their own paternity.
It's tough to imagine the creator god saying "gee, I think I'll design this butterfly so that the female won't be satisfied until she's full, so I'll give the male 10 times as much sperm as he needs, and 90% worthless sperm at that." Still, as good scientists we must always be ready to challenge our assumptions, and this is no exception. The science does have a bit more research left to solidify the case:
...the interpretation of Wedell's results requires some assumptions about the costs and benefits of non-fertile sperm production and storage that have not yet been confirmed, cautioned evolutionary biologist Darryl Gwynne of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work. The nutritious gifts that females receive upon mating are likely to be a high incentive for them to mate many times, but there are often costs associated with mating as well. It is therefore unclear how often females should mate to maximize their fitness.
"This paper addresses a really neat potential conflict situation in these butterflies," Gwynne said, "[but you] need to show [that] by filling her sperm storage organs with these non-fertile sperm and increasing her refractory period, you're actually impacting her fitness." In other words, demonstrating that this is a case of sexual conflict requires showing that females incur a cost by storing non-fertile sperm.
Notice however that there is no promise of salvation for the creationists in these criticisms. They only address the issue of whether the cause of the excess sperm is sexual conflict, not whether the excess sperm exists, or that it is nonfertile. It doesn't matter what the natural explanation turns out to be, or whether this one is correct, "god wanted it that way" will never fly as a viable alternative.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Who's Irrational Now? The Same People That Always Were
A reader sent me this article in the Wall Street Journal (a Murdock production) about a study which gathered data confirming something I considered a given: that fundamentalist Christians believe in nonreligious paranormal events (Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts) less so than do nonreligious people.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding.
Indeed, it isn't. I recall reading the same study they reference years ago:
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Of course they are, and the reason should be obvious. The more fundamentalist the Christian, the more binary their view of the world: something is either consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ as written in the Holy Gospel of the Bible, or it isn't. Those things that aren't are rejected. Naturally, this is going to lead to the rejection of practically any other viewpoint or epistemology, the good and the bad, science and nonreligious pseudoscience alike. You'd get the same exact results polling a guy with brain damage who could say nothing but "no".
Oh, except for all that baseless nonsense about talking burning bushes, a virgin giving birth, and dead people coming back to life after being dead for days. Somehow those ideas, and the intellectual mess that comes with it are given a pass from being labeled "superstitious" because, well, just because. So the study tells us that people immersed in an exclusionary belief system reject other belief systems. Color me amazed.
Instead of recognizing this, Murdock's writer Mollie Ziegler Hemingway decides it somehow validates criticizing atheism through an attack on Bill Maher. Maher supposedly said the following:
"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god"
Cute, and on point with regard to putting people following irrational belief systems in positions of power where their decisions will be influenced by said irrationality. But sadly, generally, his statement is wrong. How nice it would be if the world were that simple. However the same creationist that would be a nightmare as a biologist might do just fine as a carpenter or mathematician, where his religion and reality would rarely conflict. Compartmentalization is the norm in humanity, not the exception.
So it is with Bill Maher, who holds his share of goofy beliefs, mainly having to do with medicine (he's a Big Pharma conspiracy guy as well as a supporter of PETA). He does OK with science until it gets near that subject, and then he gets goofy, just like anyone with a hole of irrationality in their cognitive processes. It doesn't make him any less astute an observer of religious irrationality. In similar vein, a believer in a risen Jesus may have no trouble seeing Maher's medical irrationalities for what they are.
Ms. Hemingway hopes her readers won't notice this inherent contradiction in her argument, which is why, as so many do on the right these days (a la Coulter), she doesn't make it explicit. She's trying to give religion points in the "who is more rational" wars by implicating Maher as an irrational person. But the only way to do that is to claim that his one set of irrational views brands him entirely irrational on all others, which is exactly what Maher is wrong about. If Maher's PETA support merits the irrational badge, then so does your support of Jesus, Ms. Hemingway. If you can compartmentalize (which is obvious), then so can Maher. You can't have it both ways.
Oh, and Maher doesn't claim to base his entire life and view of reality on his pharmacrap the way you claim to with the Bible. So that sort of gives him a leg up on you, as it does for everyone who believes in bigfoot (fight over Michael Medved if you must), and similar cognitively isolated views. As long as the people who believe in Atlantis and martian abductions don't start thinking their beliefs can save them from death, while all others will burn in torment for all eternity, they're still more rational than you are. One doesn't have to be perfect to be superior.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding.
Indeed, it isn't. I recall reading the same study they reference years ago:
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Of course they are, and the reason should be obvious. The more fundamentalist the Christian, the more binary their view of the world: something is either consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ as written in the Holy Gospel of the Bible, or it isn't. Those things that aren't are rejected. Naturally, this is going to lead to the rejection of practically any other viewpoint or epistemology, the good and the bad, science and nonreligious pseudoscience alike. You'd get the same exact results polling a guy with brain damage who could say nothing but "no".
Oh, except for all that baseless nonsense about talking burning bushes, a virgin giving birth, and dead people coming back to life after being dead for days. Somehow those ideas, and the intellectual mess that comes with it are given a pass from being labeled "superstitious" because, well, just because. So the study tells us that people immersed in an exclusionary belief system reject other belief systems. Color me amazed.
Instead of recognizing this, Murdock's writer Mollie Ziegler Hemingway decides it somehow validates criticizing atheism through an attack on Bill Maher. Maher supposedly said the following:
"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god"
Cute, and on point with regard to putting people following irrational belief systems in positions of power where their decisions will be influenced by said irrationality. But sadly, generally, his statement is wrong. How nice it would be if the world were that simple. However the same creationist that would be a nightmare as a biologist might do just fine as a carpenter or mathematician, where his religion and reality would rarely conflict. Compartmentalization is the norm in humanity, not the exception.
So it is with Bill Maher, who holds his share of goofy beliefs, mainly having to do with medicine (he's a Big Pharma conspiracy guy as well as a supporter of PETA). He does OK with science until it gets near that subject, and then he gets goofy, just like anyone with a hole of irrationality in their cognitive processes. It doesn't make him any less astute an observer of religious irrationality. In similar vein, a believer in a risen Jesus may have no trouble seeing Maher's medical irrationalities for what they are.
Ms. Hemingway hopes her readers won't notice this inherent contradiction in her argument, which is why, as so many do on the right these days (a la Coulter), she doesn't make it explicit. She's trying to give religion points in the "who is more rational" wars by implicating Maher as an irrational person. But the only way to do that is to claim that his one set of irrational views brands him entirely irrational on all others, which is exactly what Maher is wrong about. If Maher's PETA support merits the irrational badge, then so does your support of Jesus, Ms. Hemingway. If you can compartmentalize (which is obvious), then so can Maher. You can't have it both ways.
Oh, and Maher doesn't claim to base his entire life and view of reality on his pharmacrap the way you claim to with the Bible. So that sort of gives him a leg up on you, as it does for everyone who believes in bigfoot (fight over Michael Medved if you must), and similar cognitively isolated views. As long as the people who believe in Atlantis and martian abductions don't start thinking their beliefs can save them from death, while all others will burn in torment for all eternity, they're still more rational than you are. One doesn't have to be perfect to be superior.
Monday, August 3, 2009
In Case You Still Don't Believe O'Reilly is an Idiot: Life Expectancy with Billo
In case there was any doubt left in your mind that Bill O'Reilly is an idiot, watch this video of him explaining away Canada's greater life expectancy than ours by noting that:
"we have ten times as many people as you do, that translates into ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line."
Yes you blithering idiot, and it also translates into ten times as many people in the denominator of the calculation of life expectancy. You don't increase an average just by changing the number of people in your sample. Add "life expectancy" to the terms O'Reilly, and apparently his viewers, don't understand. Is it any wonder that we can't have a reasoned debate on these subjects when so many people are grossly ignorant of the most basic aspects of the issues?
Let's also note that this is another classic example of substituting conjecture (if our population was the same size as Canada's, so would our life expectancy) for actual data. So much for "the party of facts".
"we have ten times as many people as you do, that translates into ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line."
Yes you blithering idiot, and it also translates into ten times as many people in the denominator of the calculation of life expectancy. You don't increase an average just by changing the number of people in your sample. Add "life expectancy" to the terms O'Reilly, and apparently his viewers, don't understand. Is it any wonder that we can't have a reasoned debate on these subjects when so many people are grossly ignorant of the most basic aspects of the issues?
Let's also note that this is another classic example of substituting conjecture (if our population was the same size as Canada's, so would our life expectancy) for actual data. So much for "the party of facts".
Saturday, August 1, 2009
The Science is in: Organic Food Not More Healthy
In what had to be a a major blow to the natural-is-good crowd, "a systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years...found there was no significant difference" between organically grown food and food created by other means. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said:
"A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance. Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."
I had always wondered about organic foods, and what exactly the supposed benefits were. The most common response is that they are "natural", but so are cyanide and botulism, so I found that argument entirely unconvincing. Now we find the science is lacking for alternative nutrition (at least this piece of it) just like it is lacking for alternative medicine.
This once again shows that conservatives don't have a monopoly on pushing pseudoscience. Leftwingers like The Huffington Post do their share of misinforming, and politicians like Tom Harkin waste millions in taxpayer money on pseudoscientific nonsense. Conservative nuts are just more numerous, and more mainstream.
"A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance. Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."
I had always wondered about organic foods, and what exactly the supposed benefits were. The most common response is that they are "natural", but so are cyanide and botulism, so I found that argument entirely unconvincing. Now we find the science is lacking for alternative nutrition (at least this piece of it) just like it is lacking for alternative medicine.
This once again shows that conservatives don't have a monopoly on pushing pseudoscience. Leftwingers like The Huffington Post do their share of misinforming, and politicians like Tom Harkin waste millions in taxpayer money on pseudoscientific nonsense. Conservative nuts are just more numerous, and more mainstream.
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