Deception in the News

Someone said:  “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”  Some attribute it to Lenin, others to Hitler or Joseph Goebbels, and others to William James, the American philosopher and psychologist.  No matter – it seems to be true and becomes especially dangerous in light of the casual approach to the Internet information we see on social media.  People see things on Facebook or elsewhere and are thinking up a clever or cutting comment to make on the subject without considering that it may not even be true.

One that has been going around for more than 9 years now and promoted by environmentalists who have an ax to grind with Rep. Joe Barton from Texas, accuse him of saying:  “Wind is a finite resource and harnessing it would slow the winds down, which would cause the temperature to go up.”  (It is enshrined in one of those on-line, clip-art posters.  You may have seen it.)  This sounded strange to me, even though others in Washington have made equally foolish statements.  So I went to Snopes.com, easy research and a source I have found usually trustworthy.  (I also found another seemingly reliable source with similar information.)

What he said in February 2007 was:  “I am going to read a paragraph which is, if true, very ironic.”  Then he said, “And I quote” and read from a paper published by the executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.  A group from Princeton University was at the time also doing researching along the same lines.  The irony Representative Barton referred to was the emphasis on the dangers of fossil fuel while overlooking possible dangers of the alternatives.  He said it was something to think about.

Now, I’m no particular fan of Rep. Barton.  I never heard of him until this supposed quotation appeared.  Based on the rest of his statement I wouldn’t rely on him for scientific advice, but neither would I rely on most of his colleagues or the people they often call in to their hearings.  The point is that a group or groups took words he was reading from a paper and attributed them to him in an attempt to attack his credibility, and this attack has been going around for over nine years.  Likely many have come to believe it and use it as a basis to discredit any governmental opposition to wind power.

This calls to mind a similar situation many years ago when George H. W. Bush was running for re-election and the New York Times portrayed him as out of touch, based on his apparent amazement over a grocery scanner demonstration.

The incident occurred when he was visiting the National Grocers Association conference.  A New York Times reporter, who was not even present but based his story on one in the Houston Chronicle, described Bush as having a "look of wonder" on his face.  The New York Times took the opportunity to mock the President for not recognizing something ordinary citizens knew very well.

Unfortunately, a little research shows that this was a gross misrepresentation.  “[Mr. Bush] wasn't being shown then-standard scanner technology, but a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes.”  At worst, some present interpreted Bush’s reaction as being slightly bored, but polite.  (Imagine attending a NGA conference with the expectation that you must ooh and ah over all the new technology.) 

The Times and others, however, chose to interpret this reaction as being amazed by technology that common people saw frequently with the intention of portraying him as out of touch, having lived in protected isolation since 1980 as Vice President and President.  “After 12 years' vacation from the real world, there will be a lot of catching up to do.”  If this is what we get from such a reputable source as the New York Times, who can we trust?

Again, I don’t feel any particular warmth toward the elder Bush, but it’s not honest to present your twisted version of reality to drive home your political (or any other) viewpoint, knowing that even with the highly sophisticated communications and information systems of today, people will not have the initiative or exercise the critical thinking to pick through the misinformation.  This lack of critical thinking and passive acceptance of the pronouncements from authority are more dangerous to our future than fossil fuels, wind power or any other subject of debate.

A Few Ideas to Challenge Your Thinking

Last time I talked about how people today tend to live in their own “silos” or “echo chambers” with their own friends who stay friends by sharing the same thoughts and opinions.  When their beliefs are challenged, they turn inward looking for reasons to reject or ignore the new information or turn to their friends and like-minded news sources to relieve the tension.  The technical word for this psychological protection is confirmation bias.

Here are a few subjects to challenge widely held beliefs.  Test your reaction.

According to prevailing opinion, acupuncture is ancient and alternative, and therefore good.  News from Great Britain reminds us that acupuncture, like any treatment, should be able to prove its worth in well-designed clinical trials and everyday experience.  Medicine should never be judged on reputation alone or by individual testimonials.   The Guardian news tells us:  Acupuncture is no longer recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as a treatment for low back pain.  “The u-turn comes after a review of scientific evidence found that the practice was no better than a placebo in treating those living with low back pain and sciatica.”  After reviewing a large number of scientific trials for effectiveness, “there was still not compelling and consistent evidence of a treatment-specific effect for acupuncture.”  The National Health Service, the single payer healthcare in Britain, doesn’t want to pay for something that doesn’t work.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (DARE) is used in nearly 80% of the school districts in the United States and in many other countries to discourage the use of alcohol and other drugs.  It’s important to know how effective it is.  The program is very popular and appealing.  It’s common to see it advertised on bumper stickers and promoted by schools and the media, but does it really work or is it a waste of time and money?  The news from alcoholfacts.org contradicts the conventional wisdom.  “Scientific evaluation studies have consistently shown that DARE is ineffective in reducing the use of alcohol and drugs and is sometimes even counterproductive -- worse than doing nothing. That's the conclusion of the U.S. General Accounting Office, 1 the U.S. Surgeon General, 2 the National Academy of Sciences, 3 and the U.S. Department of Education, 4 among many others. 5”  [Note:  I left their links in the quote for anyone who wants to delve deeper into specific sources.]

Locally grown is the new by-word for produce, despite problems Chipotle had last summer in a number of their locations.  We now have fresh vegetables in the grocery store year round, but that doesn’t seem to be good enough.  Some people are pushing for more locally grown produce claiming it’s fresher and better for you.  Fresher food generally tastes better and delivers more nutrients – that’s why I have a vegetable garden in the backyard every summer – but there is one fly in the ointment.  The assumption that the local food system is as efficient and better controlled than modern farming is wrong, as freakonmics.com reports.  “Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.”  Local food is harvested with less efficient methods and delivered in smaller volume leading to higher price – good for the middle class foodie who endorses the practice but another hurdle for the poor.  Those who believe commercial farming is wasteful and polluting, have never seen farm equipment guided by computer and GPS to deliver a shot of fertilizer in the precise quantity to the exact spot at the time required.  It’s fine to support the farmer’s market, but those who endorse moving as much of the system as possible to a local paradigm are trying to turn a personal preference into a requirement that would be a burden on others who are either not so interested or not so well off.

As mentioned last time, sometimes doing the right thing flies in the face of doing what feels like the right thing.  It takes courage to change your own mind and additional courage to challenge the fanatics who refuse to consider new arguments or facts.

Perspective from the Past

Last Friday as one of my students was leaving yoga practice, she commented on how much better her back felt and that it had been only about a week since she could barely move due to an minor injury from overexertion in the garden.  She mentioned how we often don’t appreciate being able to move around without feeling pain.  The same could be said for days when we don't feel sick and a host of other situations that we constantly take for granted.  This is one aspect of perspective, feeling gratitude for what you have instead of unsatisfied or grasping for more and then feeling anxious about not being able to afford it or disappointed about not getting it immediately.

All the advertising and other hype we are exposed to daily preys not only on our insecurities but also on this yearning for more fueled by a shortage of perspective as neighbors and friends try to outdo each other with personal possessions and special experiences.

A book I just finished again brought this home to me.  It was a study of the changes in the standard of living in the US over the past 150 years.  The book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, showed graphically that the advances in technology that led to an improved standard of living for everyone came at a rate unheard of prior to 1870, but still not at a steady pace.  Most of the life changing inventions came about in the first half of the 20^th century, despite the Great Depression and two world wars.  Advances leading to real improvement in how we live have been scarce since 1970 with the exception of a one-time surge in information technology in the 1990s.

The details are not important.  What this 660 pages of fairly dry reading brought home to me was an appreciation for what we have today, conveniences that were unavailable to those living just a few generations ago. 

Begin with not waking up with dead horses in the street.  Before automobiles, the stench of horse manure, urine and carcasses in the streets of most major cities was constant.  They had no sewer system to deal with that and all the other waste.  There was no electricity and conveniences like indoor plumbing and central heating were rare.  Work was hard and dangerous.  Life expectancy was low and those who lived beyond a “retirement age” continued to work, often losing their regular job because they were no longer physically able.

People in rural areas had other problems.  Farm work, which employed over 45% of the working population, was very dangerous, with working conditions as unpleasant as nature could make them.  In addition, they were isolated for long periods with no phone and no radio.  If they needed a doctor or supplies, they rode to town, and arriving there, were at the mercy of the single retail outlet with no way to tell how fair a deal they were getting.  (Competition was limited or non-existent until Sears and Montgomery Ward began to send catalogs.)

Since then our houses have been networked with electricity and water supply (including sewage) along with all the appliances that they enabled:  telephones, radios and televisions, washers and dryers, stoves, refrigerators, microwaves, dishwashers, central heating and air conditioning.  No more walking to the pump to fill a bucket and haul it in to scrub the laundry or wash the dishes or take an infrequent bath.  No more eating only what is in season and worrying about spoilage.  No more freezing in the morning waiting for the stove to heat up, where the first one up had to haul in the wood or coal to start the fire.

Cars and trucks, along with the roads themselves slowly improved to the point where a daylong trip in the past became an easy drive today.  And travel by car has also become progressively safer – and would be safer still, if drivers could put the phone down. 

There are so many other advances and inventions that we take for granted.  Progress in fighting communicable diseases like polio and diphtheria has been enormous.  Medicine offers treatment and cures unheard of even a couple of decades ago.

In the first ten minutes of the day we enjoy so many of these conveniences from the time we curse the alarm, turn on the light switch and stumble into the shower.  Then we get to the drive thru in our heated or air-conditioned cars to pick up a coffee on the way to work in a temperature controlled office, where we can stand around and complain about the most trivial discomforts or inconveniences.

Things can always be better and there is no need to become static with appreciation, but it doesn’t hurt to reflect on what we have, even if only as a barometer to gauge how inconsequential some of our daily problems really are.  That’s how perspective helps keep our lives in balance.

Believing in Onions!

Here’s one that’s been going around the Internet for a number of years and has recently been resurrected on Facebook, the one place you can rely on for completely accurate scientific and medical advice.  (Not!)

The medical guidance is that putting an onion in the room of a sick person will absorb the illness leading to a complete cure in an unbelievably short time.  The truth in this statement is totally contained in the one word “unbelievably.”  Onions are said to so easily absorb bacteria that it’s not safe to store a partially cut up onion in your refrigerator for fear it will later infect you and your family with the gobs of germs it has collected from the air.

If you or someone in the family has the flu, place an onion sliced in half in a bowl in their room and not only will it cure the patient, it will also prevent the flu from spreading to others in the family.  Supposedly cutting it in half exposes more onion to the air.  But if that’s the case, why not dice it to expose so much more surface area?  Apparently no one asked that question, so the explanation stops at halves of an onion.

But it gets even better.  Sleeping with onions in your socks, or from another source, rubbing them on your feet and then wrapping plastic around them and your feet, and tying the whole package in place with white socks, helps alleviate the flu.  (I wonder why the socks have to be white – apparently another question no one has asked.)  There is probably some scientific reason for the color of the socks.  (I imagine a comedy routine about two people trying get intimate in bed feeling inhibited by the bags of onions each has tied to the feet.)

But people who get their medical advice from a site called healthybliss.net probably don’t get too worked up about real science.  They are satisfied with the fact that this cure has been used for thousands of years and that the ancient practice of Ayurveda has some good things to say about onions.

Speaking for real science, this article from McGill University Office of Science & Society, and subtitled Separating Sense from Nonsense, makes it clear that onions are not especially prone to bacterial contamination.  “Onions feature a variety of sulphur compounds that have antibacterial activity.  (Of course that doesn’t mean they can in any way protect against the flu which is a viral disease.)”  They don’t attract or absorb bacteria from the air, although they may absorb bacteria from a contaminated cutting board in the kitchen that was improperly cleaned.

There is some good news and some bad news here.  First, your leftover half onions should be perfectly safe in the refrigerator and better kept there than in the bedroom.

Second, there is hope for the problem of over-prescription of antibiotics that leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that leads to the emergence of super bugs and 23,000 deaths per year, which I referred to in the Epidemics posting of May 27, 2016.  Patients who insist on antibiotics to fight viral diseases like flu and the common cold can be prescribed an onion instead.  Their misunderstanding of medicine is obvious from the fact that they don’t distinguish between a bacterial and a viral infection and think antibiotics are the cure.  This sets them up perfectly to accept an onion as a valid cure for their cold and flu symptoms.  Problem solved!

The bad news, of course, is that these same people who apparently slept through science class and are so weak in critical thinking that they readily accept this kind of advice at face value from dubious Internet sources without doing any research on their own, also vote.  And their vote counts exactly the same as yours.

What Happens When We Don't Take Care of Ourselves

We all know what happens when we don’t take care of ourselves, when we act irresponsibly.  Someone else steps in and tries to force us to change behavior.  There are a number of ways to do this.  We would like to tell these busybodies to mind their own business; but as I pointed out earlier, when we are all forced into the same big insurance pool, how well you take care of yourself becomes everyone else’s business.

The least intrusive method that they try to modify our behavior is through labeling.  The FDA has recently passed a requirement that labels on grocery items stress the amount of added sugar in the product.  “Labels will have grams of added sugar and percent of daily value.”  They will also include calories and serving size, all in larger, easier-to-read print.  Total sugar has always been listed, but they assume the larger, bolder font and more specific description will make the problem more noticeable, causing people to maybe think twice before buying something less healthy.  The standard example always seems to be Coca Cola.

And speaking of Coke – the new mayor of Philadelphia wants to impose a special tax on non-diet soda and other sugary drinks.  The new tax is expected to “generate more than $400 million over the next five years” to help fund a plan for universal pre-K and community schools among other benefits.  Using a good cause will bring good will toward paying the tax, right?  This is a little more intrusive than labeling, but the new beverage tax will not only double the cost of soft drinks and juices, it will have some interesting, unintended  side effects.  Those who are better off financially can afford to drive outside the city limits to buy their cola.  The ones who will be hurt most are the city grocery stores, who lose business as the special tax drives grocery shopping out of the city for some, and the poorer folks whose options are more limited, ironically the same people who are the target of the universal pre-K programs.  When you consider human behavior, the $400 million looks like a pipe dream.

Another way to influence our behavior is to punish the makers of products that are not healthy.  They already tax and restrict the use of tobacco, but why not also encourage citizens to act like victims and sue companies on the basis that we didn’t know better or were tricked into it.  Take the recent case of Hall of Fame baseball player Tony Gwynn.  He died at the age of 54 from salivary-gland cancer linked to many years of using smokeless tobacco. “Now, his family is suing the tobacco company they say manipulated him into addiction.”  They accuse the company of negligence, fraud and product liability, saying that Gwynn was the victim of a scheme to get him hooked into a lifelong habit, while the company all along understood the danger.  Yes, they surely did know the danger.  But Gwynn was in college in the 1980s, and who would believe that a college student at that time did not understand that tobacco was both habit-forming and a cause of cancer?  Are they arguing that he was stupid or living under a rock?  No, they only insist that the company was selling something they knew was dangerous - the same argument some want to now use against gun makers.  What’s next, mountain climbing equipment and parachutes?

When we act irresponsibly and the government wants to change our behavior (for our own good), there are more subtle ways to do it than just passing laws to ban the activity or product.  They can print bigger labels - in the UK they've even proposed printing on the labels the amount of exercise required to burn off the calories and to ban ads for junk food on both television programs and websites with content directed at children.  They also may impose higher taxes or encourage lawsuits (by the way the process is structured).  There is no end to the ways our freedom to choose or to act as we wish is restricted when someone else thinks we are acting irresponsibly.