And a brilliant beam of sunlight breaks through

Every once in a while Great Britain shows there really is something left of its greatness and Prime Minister David Cameron provides an impressive reminder of that.
Writing in the Times of London, Cameron took up taxing and spending policies in comments that should lift the hearts of anyone who cares about freedom and justly earned prosperity.
A champion of tax cuts which have helped invigorate the UK's economy, Cameron wrote that it's certainly all well and good to limit the government's seizure of the fruits of people's labor for economic reasons: freeing up capital, creating opportunity, being competitive in a competitive world.  But he went one step further, saying that keeping taxes low is simply... right.
He wrote

“What is morally wrong... is government spending money as if it grows on trees. Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward or the classroom.”  

Admittedly Cameron also went a little wobbly, throwing in an obligatory genuflection to the communists by saying that the wealthy should pay their "fair share" of taxes.  (Apparently the poor and middle class should not pay their fair share, or perhaps should not pay anything).  There is also the reality that the lower rate to which Cameron's policy have brought taxes still leaves the top individual tax rate at 45%, an annual heist that would do Willie Sutton proud.
But an acknowledgement that "robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul," as Rudyard Kipling put it, is inherently wrong and to be minimized when possible?   This shows a heart at least in the neighborhood of the right place.  Time was, the UK seemed hopelessly, hopelessly on its way down the socialist path.  It's still in bad shape but clearly there is reason for hope.
Cameron's philosophy is an amazing counterpoint to the kind of seizure philosophy displayed by then-candidate Barack Obama, subsequently elected President of the United States.
During his 2008 campaign, Obama acknowledged that, yes, keeping taxes down improves the economy, stimulates growth and job creation and actually brings more money into the treasury.
He then rejected the idea ANYWAY.
...Even though taking less money from the productive sectors of the country would grow the economy, give more people jobs AND bring in more tax revenue.
He said it was a matter of "fairness."
So apparently the purpose of tax policy is not to help the economy or generate funds for government services but rather simply to take money away from people he thinks shouldn't have it.
Can that really be it?

Dinero? That's a Bono No No!

Time now for a little tip of the hat and a word of defense for a bloke who has gotten terrific mileage selling himself as one of the world's biggest big spenders, singer Paul Hewson.
Turns out he's not so loose with the cash after all.
This, predictably, perhaps inevitably, has now gotten him into trouble.
Of course he was never really a big spender. Under his nom de tune Bono, Hewson has enjoyed a blockbuster career as front man for the Irish megaband U-2. Anyone watching could tell that he was not only musically gifted, but also posessed of some profound business acumen. Well, either that or he's had some superb management since very early on in the band's sojourn through the pop music ionosphere.
It’s a noteworthy accomplishment. So many musicians achieve great success, only to be undone by poor investments, corrupt or incompetent money management or simple wasteful spending. The wretched rags-to-to riches-to-(really expensive)-rags story of MC Hammer will stand as a cautionary tale for generations.
Instead, Hewson and his managers are so smart with money that, this year, when the Irish government changed its tax laws to confiscate royalties musicians make with their music, the band relocated its business to the Netherlands.
Very smart.
Especially considering that, according to U-2 lead guitarist David Evans, who goes by the the no-longer-edgey name The Edge, the band makes 90% of its money outside of Ireland anyway.
Even smarter.
Here's the trouble.
For years, Hewson/Bono has made himself an international hero with his outspoken advocacy for the most wasteful of wasteful spending.
Hewson has even been a perennial contender for the Nobel Peace Prize fer cryinoutloud for his proposals that international lenders walk away from billions of dollars in loans made in third world countries.
Never mind the consequences to the lenders, or the investors whose money the lenders loaned, or the societies from which the money would be sucked. Just dump lorry loads of cash into a black hole and forget the debt.
The merits of such a plan are the subject of endless international debate.
Can the developed world really afford to subsidize bad decision making in defective economic systems?
Is it truly helpful, or even responsible, not to demand at least a modicum of financial order and discipline in countries that desperately need some?
Will pissing away billions of dollars actually solve everything, or merely bring everyone back to this exact same situation a few years hence?
Fortunately, the Nobel committee decided this time to laud the principal of lending money in the third world rather than just handing it over for nothing. Muhammad Yunis was honored this year for the work his Grameen Bank does helping people by introducing them to entrepreneurship, not handing them welfare with no accountability or responsibility attached to it.
Nonetheless, Hewson has publicly hitched his wagon to the redistributionist model. He has even proposed that the Irish government pour good money after bad by seizing still more from the Irish taxpayers and dumping it in Africa.
And now he's been caught trying to protect his own money.
But like any actor who plays a role totally unlike his real personality, Hewson can hardly be blamed for behaving one way on stage and another in "real life."
But Hewson's fellow travelers, at least those of his public persona Bono, are doing precisely that. Bloomberg news service quotes Joan Burton, finance spokeswoman for Ireland's leftist opposition Labour Party as saying "It seems odd, in a situation where they enjoy an already favorable tax regime, they would move operations to the Netherlands to get an even more favorable rate."
So the regime the U-2s seek to escape is "already favorable?"
Starting January 1, under Ireland's new tax regime for artists' royalties, Hewson and the band would have faced a tax rate of 42 percent on qualifying income.
Avoiding such robbery is not hypocrisy. It's common sense. It's the moral equivalent of locking your house at night.
What Hewson is really doing wrong is not his protection of his own earnings.
He, and other artists in the same ideological dilemma should, by all means, keep their money in the deepest most impregnable tax shelters they can find. More power to them.
They should, however, rethink the taxation they advocate for everyone else.
October 18, 2006

Ho Hum: What Will Kill You THIS Week?

Pity the manic food police of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They’ve really hit a dead end this time.
After warning that virtually every food on the planet is destined to kill you, they’ve run out of victuals to vilify and now they’re getting hysterical all over, about fare they’ve gotten hysterical over in the past.
This time: Chinese food.
Again.
A new AP report making the rounds by writer Libby Quaid tells of the latest CSPI harangue whose snarky title “Wok Carefully” strains the group's PC credentials.
(“Wok…” Get it? Nyuk nyuk)

“The typical Chinese restaurant menu is a sea of nutritional no-nos, a consumer group has found. A plate of General Tso's chicken, for example, is loaded with about 40 percent more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day.The battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables has 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat.”

“…a consumer group has found?”
A consumer group?
It sure would be nice if the AP provided a little context instead of carrying the CSPI’s silly rant without any clarification, caveats, or consideration of the source.
Libby Quaid’s dispatch contains nary a mention of the group’s previous tirades against popcorn, ice cream, pizza, French fries, hot dogs, soft drinks, Thanksgiving turkey, cookies, crackers, cheese, bacon, candy bars, fast food, Chinese food, Mexican food, Italian food, Greek food, airline food, hospital food for crying out loud, and so on, ad infinitum.
The only “public” in whose “interest” the CSPI practices "science" must be some population of masochistic vegan monks.
This is the outfit with a decades-long history of bloviating that virtually everything you’d ever actually want to eat will kill you.
Might’ve been worth mentioning.
The study’s findings, appearing as an article by nutritionists Jayne Hurley and Bonnie Liebman in the group’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, certainly stick to the CSPI’s tradition of agita-inducing pontification. For example they say of the delicious Chinese dish lemon chicken “It’s like eating three McDonald’s McChicken sandwiches plus a 32-oz. Coke.”
Obviously the simple invocation of the “McDonald’s” name is enough to label something as eeeevillll in the CSPI’s world. The group’s accompanying press release describes such classic staples as noodles and fried rice as “a load of greasy refined carbs.”
One amusing quirk of the story is the degree to which the AP writeup gooses the hype from the CSPI'S press release, which in turn ratchets it up from the content of the report itself.
The intensity of the scare rhetoric increases, and the acknowledgement of any mitigation diminishes, the farther we get from the original source.
The AP piece does include an inverse back flip somersault clarification when it comes the CSPI’s traditional bogeymen, fat and cholesterol.
Chinese food is, in fact, very healthy on that front since, historically for the most part, it has been cooked in cholesterol free, trans-fat free, mono or poly unsaturated oils, often peanut oil.
So what do we get from the AP? A begrudging acknowledgement that says Italian and Mexican restaurants are worse.
In truth, the “Wok Carefully” report does mention that, up front. (parenthetical “hooray!” in the original)

“Chinese restaurants deserve credit for keeping a lid on saturated and trans fat, thanks to vegetable oil, no cheese, and a host of seafood, poultry, and (hooray!)vegetable dishes.”

And it tastes great too.
So then, inevitably, comes the preaching about sodium. …lest anyone get the idea that it’s possible, or permissible, to enjoy dinner without threat of death.
Of course, as most diners know, the eye popping calorie and sodium figures listed for a “single serving” of Chinese dishes are pretty meaningless anyway because few people ever really eat a whole entrée at one sitting. Chinese dinners are frequently consumed "family style" with each member of a gathering having small samples of each dish. Further, large proportions of such “servings” end up going home in those iconic Chinese takeout boxes, to be eaten another time.
Presto. Instant per-meal calorie reduction. Happens all the time.
At least, that’s the way it works in the real world, a place with which the nutrition nannies are sadly unfamiliar.
Theirs is a world where moderation is replaced by an all-or-nothing extremism. For the CSPI, either you’re choking down poached tofu and sprouts, or you’re gorging yourself with batter fried sticks of butter in cream sauce with mountains of powdered sugar and salt for every single meal and snack.
The notion that a “treat” is something to be enjoyed sporadically never enters the equation as the group serves up its draconian pronouncements.
Remember the CSPI’s news that fettuccini Alfredo is “a heart attack on a plate?” Having personally enjoyed the stuff several times without once having a heart attack, I can only deduce that this was yet another bit of silly exaggeration meant to grab headlines and squander yet another opportunity to educate the public.
Even public attempts to encourage moderation without privation are dismissed.
In 1992, when M&M/Mars introduced a reduced fat Milky Way candy bar, Bonnie Liebman exemplified the CSPI’s mentality beautifully when she scoffed “Even if they took out all the fat, this candy bar would not turn into a cantaloupe.”
Why no, it wouldn’t.
And anyone who wants to eat a cantaloupe is unlikely to mistake a candy bar for one.
The CSPI’s real complaint is that people, who know the difference, freely choose the candy bar.
…or the cheeseburger, or the burrito, or the fettuccini Alfredo.
The group’s conclusion seems to be that people cannot be trusted to make their own good choices and must instead be forced to choose a diet it deems sufficiently healthful. Such force is manifested in calls to ban, limit, or tax products of which the CSPI disapproves.
Failing that, these food police try to scare people, using pronouncement after pronouncement that just passing through the drive-through at Wendy’s will wipe out your whole family.
These diatribes only serve to drive a wedge between consumers and what might have been some sound nutritional advice they could have used.
Unfortunately, the CSPI and the media have developed a perverse co-dependent relationship in which they try to top each other with dire expostulations and have concluded there’s no other way to get their message to the public.
Ultimately, the only messages they’re actually delivering any more are...

• It is imperative that you must be miserable! Or...
• Tune us out.

Unsurprisingly, most people choose the latter.
Spare us!
Treat us like adults and we’ll listen.Until that happens, the CSPI will remain a punchline in jokes about popcorn, pizza and, especially, Chinese food.
Considering that obesity truly is a growing problem in the United States, and given that the CSPI has some real nutritionists doing real research, that’s not exactly a constructive outcome.
March 21, 2007

Diagnosis: Politics Pyramids, Pedantry ...Pentagrams?

When it comes to food and fat, the government’s health gurus are suddenly coming at us from two different directions, betraying a debilitating ailment not often associated with diet.
Bipolar disorder.
Witness the schizophrenic surprises unveiled in quick order on Tuesday from, on the one hand, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, on the other, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The latest obesity numbers establish that the CDC has drastically exaggerated the U.S. death rate from obesity, while the USDA is now pushing an ostensibly new and improved version of its 1992 nutritional guidelines model known as the “food pyramid.”
First, the pyramid.
For a not-so-slim $2.5 million, the USDA signed up the marketing firm Porter Novelli to repackage the idea. Now, instead of a stodgy old pile of rocks, the guide, renamed “MyPyramid,” is a brightly colored cluster of sharp points reminiscent of a 1970s subway map, flourished with a singlet-clad cartoon figure running up a flight of stairs, meant to indicate the importance of exercise. It was accompanied by the unveiling of the USDA’ "my pyramid" website, which offers different pyramids based on age, weight, sex and physical activity levels.
The new plan actually chucks out altogether the original visual/spatial rationale for using the “pyramid” image in the first place.
Remember?
Just to restate the obvious, the idea behind the structure’s tapering shape was to convey the notion that you should consume more of some foods like grains, which therefore made up the widest level of the pyramid at the base, and less of other foods, a distinction represented by their respectively smaller positions on progressively narrower levels as you moved up the pyramid. Fats and sweets, least desirable, therefore occupied the smallest space at the point.
This time, the food group strata are assembled vertically and the width of each colored triangle is now meant to convey how much we should consume: a nice broad orange stripe for grains, a wide green one for vegetables and a slender yellow sliver for fats. Yes, in its new incarnation, the oh-so-logical pyramid has been reimagined.
…..as essentially a bright color coded bar chart!
Food consultant Clark Wolfe told the San Francisco Chronicle that the rainbow striping and the jogger in Spandex make it look as if "all you need to do to be healthy in America is be gay and exercise."
Critics asked what next, a food cube? A food dodecahedron? Blogress Michele Catalano skewered it deliciously by reintroducing a much more inviting, albeit nastier diet plan, one even I could love: her food pentagram.
I try to be visually accurate by imagining it as more a food octagonal pyramid.
Even USDA speechwriting director Matt Raymond admits to entertaining notions of a “food octahedron" or a "food Möbius strip,” before deciding that, under the circumstances, the best design might be a big red food octagon.
Former restaurant critic and New York Times food editor Raymond Sokolov dubbed the new edifice “McPyramid” and declared “McPyramid is just the kind of bureaucratic intrusion into our lives that a conservative administration should be lopping out of agency budgets with a meat axe.”
But all well deserved jibing aside, the new pyramid initiative has its exercise-enhanced, plaque-unencumbered, heart in the right place. Especially with the introduction of customization on its website, the effort signals that, after decades of ignoring it, the USDA is finally embracing one obvious reality of diet, fitness, and health. Americans are actually different from each other and some consideration must be given to individual discretion and responsibility.
It remains a very different story at the CDC which is still hemming, hawing and hedging after being caught trying to scare Americans with its apocalyptic pontification that being overweight is on par with the Black Death, and that obesity will kill 400,000 Americans a year.
The CDC unveiled the numbers in a blast of fire and brimstone in March of 2004 and proclaimed obesity will overtake tobacco as the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S.
On Tuesday, an analysis of the CDC’s research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded the CDC wasn’t even close.
The analysis found obesity causes only 112,000 deaths a year and that in elderly populations, being overweight actually saves 86,000 lives.
The kindest response to this gross error would be to conclude that CDC leaders made a perfectly understandable honest scientific mistake.
But the truth is out there already.
They knew.
From even before the original announcement of the figures more than a year ago, there was ample evidence that their numbers, so outlandish that they should have aroused doubts and questions, were replete with doubts and questions.
Only two months after last year’s dire forecast , Science magazine reported “Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper's compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements -- rather than sound analysis -- propelled it into print.”
In February, the CDC admitted after its own reexamination that the bogus numbers had been improperly released at least in part because some of its own scientists, who knew better, were intimidated into keeping their mouths shut.
Ideally, this saga would now end, as a nice story of lessons learned.
But a bureaucracy with an agenda will not be turned so easily.
Far from acknowledging it had run off the rails to make a point, the CDC suddenly tap danced around the question of whether its own numbers were to be embraced. The Associated Press reports "CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said because of the uncertainty in calculating the health effects of being overweight, the CDC is not going to use the brand-new figure.”
Well, gee, the folks at the CDC certainly seemed willing to make a big deal about the numbers when they favored doomsaying hysteria. Why change now?
Politics.
For years, bio statisticians have been alarmed at the runaway collusion between researchers trying to score political points or dig up funding via dramatic numbers and reporters trying to dig up a more gripping story. Inevitably, they seize upon the “worst case” in any scenario to generate the juiciest headline.
Medical experts say hysterical overstatement, especially of big statistics, can become an occupational hazard when health issues get batted around in the public square. Yale biostatistics professor Daniel Zelterman says organizations’ agendas can routinely skew the numbers. “Do you want to say we’re winning the war on cancer, or that we need more research?”
Former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Harold Varmus calls it “body based budgeting.”
But even if the CDC still isn’t doing an immediate 180 from its chicken little rampage of a year ago, there may yet be a glimmer of sanity in this misadventure.
In the aftermath of the latest revelations, spokesman Tom Skinner said the agency will probably start using a range of estimates for obesity-linked deaths.
“A range.”
Well, that’s better than “wolf! wolf!”
...which brings us right back to the Agriculture Department and its new food pyramid.
The CDC’s “clarification” on the obesity stats and the release of the new and improved pyramid coincide nicely to highlight the same issue: oversimplification, dumbing down, doctrinaire heavy handedness
The CDC chose one course, using scare tactics and a least-common-denominator blanket approach, while the USDA has gone in another direction, advocating greater personal discretion and a startlingly grown up acknowledgement that not all people are the same and that a pedantic, simplistic “one size fits all” approach to something as complex as nutrition helps no one.
Perhaps someday, someone will analyze just how much damage is actually done to the public welfare by overwrought Cassandra clarion calls about what’s going to kill us next. Time and again, Americans hear one ex cathedra health pronouncement after another that strain credulity to begin with, then see them contradicted a few months later.
Will they eventually listen to anyone?
It’s time to stop the scare tactics and reason with us.
The cutesy new food pyramid may be a step in the right direction. In the hours after its release, the "my pyramid" website was reduced to a crawl because so many people logged on.
Behold. Those who are genuinely interested in intelligent, more individualized advice will seek it out (and will apparently put up with some inconvenience to do so).
I think NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle actually intended to criticize the new pyramid when she griped “It’s all about moderation and personal responsibility.”
But what she was really doing was articulating its best feature.
That’s precisely what it’s all about.
Always has been.
April 23, 2005

Heretics!

Somewhere, there's a big bonfire laid with Michael Palmer's name on it. Any day now, he's going to be burned at the stake for heresy.
As General Manager of two TV stations, he’s certainly an established member of the media family.
Now however, he is a rogue.
An apostate.
A blasphemer in the church of the politically correct media who has disputed the holy word and unquestionable newsworthiness of former Vice President Al Gore.
No lesser arbiters of proper media orthodoxy than the grand inquisitors of the New York Times itself decree it so.
In an exquisitely condescending article, Times reporter Joseph Treaster spells out the sacrilege. Palmer has had the audacity to declare "enough already" with the global warming stories at the two news operations he oversees in Bangor, Maine.
Further, Palmer spelled out his objections in an email to his staff.
This email mysteriously found its way to the Times which offers this patronizing interpretation.

"How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television."

Wink wink.
Oh these bumpkins.
Don’t think global warming is "important." How silly.
In the interest of journalistic accuracy, it behooves one to point out that Palmer never said any such thing. He took up a position it’s easy to imagine coming from any conscientious news decision maker, Republican or Democrat, global warming believer or unbeliever.
Here’s what really did happen: During the summer, Palmer’s Bangor TV stations broadcast… here’s the important part… live reports from the opening of Al Gore’s hysterical global warming doomsday propaganda movie "An Inconvenient Truth."
Why is this significant? For most local TV news operations, especially those in smaller cities, live reports are usually the marquee stories of a newscast, the top stories, the biggest news events in the metro area that day.
And on this occasion, these top billing positions went to…
The opening of a movie?
And not just the opening of a movie, but the opening of a political message movie with an overwhelming partisan twist?
Is this appropriate?
That was the question Palmer dared to ask. He emailed to several staffers, according to the enforcers of The Times, the following:

"I was wondering where we should send the bill for the live shot Friday at the theater for the Al Gore commercial we aired."

This is an extremely common complaint for news managers, as Times reporter Joseph Treaster must surely be aware. Unthinking, unquestioning news stories, especially pull-out-the-stops live reports covering promotional events, shopping center ribbon cuttings, tea parties et cetera frequently amount to little more than free publicity, unless there is some compelling news reason for covering them. Palmer did not see any journalistic reason to cover the opening of a partisan political propaganda movie. Instead he enumerated what he saw as journalistic reasons not to cover it.

"a) we do local news,
b) the issue evolved from hard science into hard politics and
c) despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, this science is far from conclusive."

"Local" news?
This is the heart of Palmer’s argument and the degree to which it’s ignored demonstrates the gross disingenuousness of The Times’ entire pompous tirade.
Anyone remotely familiar with the workings of local TV news knows that such news organizations face a difficult task, covering, with limited resources, news of importance, sometimes unique importance to their metropolitan audiences, news that may well appear nowhere else. For instance, while the balance of power in the U.S. Congress can affect the lives of virtually everyone in the country, it likely merits only cursory attention from local TV or newspapers. The issue already receives plentiful coverage from national news outlets, coverage which in turn is carried on local TV stations. On the other hand, the fortunes of individual, locally based congressional candidates would be inconsequential to the networks but of keen interest to local viewers and therefore of interest to local news departments. Whether Mister Smith, Democrat of Finortner County goes to Washington is a major story in Finortner County and for its press corps.
"An Inconvenient Truth" was one of hundreds of major Hollywood movies coming out in national release this year. What possible reason could there be for granting it such exalted play in a local newscast?
Except…?
perhaps…?
Palmer’s second point: Politics.
If David Duke produced and starred in a remake of "Birth of a Nation," would that warrant extensive coverage?
Well, maybe it would, but that coverage would be a deafening chorus of condemnation. Has "An Inconvenient Truth" received even a skeptical reception from the media? Not.
The concerns raised in the current global warming debate could indeed be grave and legitimate, but the entire discourse on the subject has been almost hopelessly commandeered by the most extreme, anti-American, anti-industrial, anti-free enterprise nutjobs from the lunatic fringe, and by their fellow travelers in an anti-American, anti-industrial, anti-free enterprise press corps.
Scientific comparison has taken the back seat to a political shouting match and the only politically correct conclusion allowed is the credo that… global warming is happening; global warming is caused by man’s emissions of greenhouse gases; and therefore all growth and progress throughout the civilized world must be stopped and dismantled and we should all go back to living on communes eating roots and berries. (…except for those third world countries who are the fastest growing emitters of greenhouse gases. They should get a pass.)
All this comes despite the fact that there are plenty of respected scientists for whom the conclusions of that credo are hardly final or irrefutable.
That’s Palmer’s third point and the one that probably earned him his storm of slings, arrows and boiling oil from the ivory tower of the New York Times.
He dares to question.
He dares to question!
With the fervor of their political passions stirred, many of today’s media demigods have decreed any evaluation of the threat of global warming is over, over, over, period! No further discussion or debate will be permitted, period! There can be no further questioning, period!
The Times has proclaimed that there exists an irrefutable global scientific "consensus" on the matter, in which everyone who’s anyone now agrees the global warming credo is the only acceptable philosophy.
…as if scientific discovery were some democratic process dependent on agreement or "consensus." Einstein would laugh his mustache off.
At a conference in August, ABC News Reporter Bill Blakemore dismissed the very notion of including dissenting voices in any discussion of the subject. Should reports on the issue of global warming be balanced? Why no, he proclaimed, going so far as to say that, in addressing the issue, "I don’t like the word ‘balance’ much at all."
So the evidence supporting the credo is so strong and its assertions so irrefutable it can’t even withstand inquiry, dissent, further examination? How interesting.
Blakemore proclaimed that those who question the global warming theories to which he subscribes are "the proverbial flat earth society."
Perfect. An ad hominem dismissal, and a brilliant characterization of the level to which this discourse has sunk in what may become its most important venue, the public square. The scientific world must continue its analyses and review of course, but ultimately policy questions will have to be aired through the media, a forum becoming progressively less helpful for so important a task.
The evidence of global warming is compelling enough to warrant a serious, broadly engaged, public discussion, not a dogmatic new political campaign to destroy America’s economy and industrial infrastructure. The gatekeepers of Big Media do a grave disservice by relentlessly warping this issue into a political one.
The dustup over the Bangor TV stations and Palmer’s blasphemous foray off the reservation, to the extent that he’s excoriated even for questioning what the proper venue for such a discussion might be, is a stark example of the compromised competence or willful unsuitability of some contemporary "journalistic" organizations to cover the global warming issue.
That does not bode well for our society’s ability to confront the matter.
October 30, 2006

Sex please. We're a tabloid.

Anyone paying close enough attention to Georgia's tragicomic "runaway bride" fiasco should have seen this coming. The New York Post is now reporting that the missing-now-found, kidnapped-not-kidnapped, cold-feet-suffering, heroine/villainess of Duluth Georgia Jennifer Wilbanks vanished four days prior to her scheduled wedding because...
because...
She and her fiance John Mason hadn't been having sex!
There! I said it.
Last Thursday, when Jennifer's family pastor Tom Smiley read an apology from her to everyone involved in her story, the statement alluded to "issues" that pushed her out of control.
The Post quotes persons it describes as "friends" of John and Jennifer who say the fact that they hadn't consummated their relationship in bed was something of a problem for Jennifer.
Having developed this gripping testimony, the Post delivered it front and center , of course.
Of course indeed.

A little context, however, might be in order.
In case anyone wasn't paying attention, the Post is the paper in which only two days earlier, columnist Andrea Peyser informed us that John Mason "may not be the most brilliant buttercup in the bouquet" and found it noteworthy that John appears to still possess the majority of his teeth. Before you go scouring her treatise, no, she does not bring up dueling banjoes, at least not yet.

A little east of the Hudson Yankee bigotry perhaps?
If one really wants to bounce off the high board into the deepest end of the gutter and discuss what precious little anyone knows about John and Jennifer's sex life, there are A FEW POINTS TO KEEP AN EYE ON:

1) Yes, they have apparently been chaste. John Mason has said in his rare public comments that, while they were literally living together, they weren't "living together" and were keeping their relationship "pure."
2) While tales full of sound and fury told by ostensible "friends" indicate both John and Jennifer had been more "active" in their respective pasts and may have sown a few wild oats, John enthusiastically reembraced his Baptist faith some five years ago and has since eschewed premarital sex, waiting instead to give himself entirely to that one, right, woman.
3) John and Jennifer had been involved for 18 months, a period well inside the five year window during which John presumably has been keeping his fly zipped, so Jennifer would've known pretty darn well what he was like from the first time they met.

AND...
4) After 18 months together, the entire "no sex" issue was four days from becoming moot on the evening Jennifer flew the coop.

So this entire escapade has been all about a couple's hangup over sex?

Really?
Or is it, just maybe, someone else who has the hangup?
Perhaps instead we're seeing a peculiar variety of blue-state befuddlement that these people who preach and advocate sexual restraint and self discipline might actually be exercising a little of it in their lives.

Sweetness and Enlightment from the Food Police

I knew there was a reason I was starting to like, and I mean REALLY like, Splenda.
Splenda is the brand name for the artificial sweetener sucralose. It hasn't been around long but I’ve been feeling this peculiarly strong devotion to it.
Oh sure, there are a few practical considerations. It has effectively zero calories and doesn’t promote tooth decay like sugar does. It doesn’t break down and lose its sweetness if you cook with it, like aspartame (NutraSweet) does. And, also unlike aspartame, it’s an artificial sweetener I can actually get my wife to use. She hates the taste of aspartame so much she’ll drink a regular leaded soda full of sugar rather than touch a Diet Coke. So, yes, practically speaking, there’s a lot to like.
But it’s one thing to appreciate the attributes of a product, and something else altogether to feel a real personal affinity for it, and lately I’ve come to be especially fond of Splenda.
It’s really very simple. Splenda has just received one of the best endorsements any food can get.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has put Splenda on its S#@%&* list.

I suppose this kind of thing was inevitable. Splenda is exploding in popularity. Since it was introduced in 1999, it has managed to capture 51 percent of the American market for sugar substitutes. Over the past year, consumers have bought $177 million worth of the stuff. By some estimates, it’s made its way into 20 percent of U.S. homes and it’s currently used in 4,000 products.
Now comes before us the Sugar Association, which represents beet and cane sugar growers. For obvious reasons, these folks are concerned about Splenda’s blockbuster appropriation of a huge chunk of their market and they’ve been throwing out everything including the kitchen sink in an attempt to derail Splenda. All perfectly understandable of course. Business is business.
But sometimes business and especially advocacy campaigns can make for some pretty strange bedfellows and this donnybrook has made for some of the most inexplicable bedfellows imaginable.
In its latest maneuver against Splenda, the Sugar Association has teamed up with the folks at Merisant, the makers of the aspartame sweetener Equal. These are the natural enemies of the sugar people. But they’ve hooked up in a lawsuit against Splenda's marketer, McNeil Nutritionals.
Now for the "Crying Game" plot twist:
They’ve also joined forces with, yes, the food cops of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the natural enemy of both NutraSweet AND sugar producers!
Unless you’ve been living in cheeseburger paradise (and if so, I envy you) you’ve heard of the hypochondriac food fanatics of the CSPI.
The “public” part of CSPI is really something of a misnomer. Those people aren’t “interested” in any part of the public with which I’m familiar. It’s really more like the Center for Science in the Interest of Miserable Masochistic Vegan Monks.
These are the people who have condemned as deathly unhealthy: Chinese food, Italian food, Mexican food, hamburgers, pizza and movie theatre popcorn. They’re constantly claiming Americans eat too much sugar and they give aspartame/NutraSweet a yellow warning designation.
Nonetheless, this curious coalition has cobbled itself together accusing McNeil Nutritionals of…
Ready?
…false advertising!
The Splenda ad campaign proudly proclaims that Splenda is “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar.”
Pretty clever, no?
This sinister slogan has the added devious advantage of being, well, the truth!
Splenda’s crucial ingredient sucralose is created by processing sugar in a technique that swaps three chorine atoms onto the sugar molecule to create a compound so stable it survives cooking and even metabolization after it’s eaten. That means the sugar no longer delivers any of its calories into the body.
So, okay, Splenda does indeed start out as sugar.
Problem?
The Sugar Association claims the ads IMPLY that Splenda is “natural,” but nowhere does McNeil actually make that claim. In fact, while company representatives have been quoted as saying correctly that “Splenda is made from cane sugar,” they’ve also clearly said that in its final form “It is not sugar and it is not natural, although the chemical structure is similar to sugar’s.”
Penn State food scientist Manfred Kroger has said highlighting the sugar component makes sense. “It has to come from something and if it comes from sugar, I would want people to know that.” The sugar connection looks especially advantageous for Splenda, and more of a problem for Equal maker Merisant, when you consider that NutraSweet is made from the much less appetizing sounding chemicals aspartic acid and phenylalanine. These are two amino acids which are perfectly safe but just don’t have the friendly sound of good ol’ sugar.
True to form, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, for its part, takes the cake (probably a tofu cake) in its analysis. A CSPI spokesman spells it out with the truly profound gripe that Splenda “happens to be a synthetic chemical cooked up in a flask somewhere.”
Well, duh. Let’s hear it for modern science.
Actually the essence of the CSPI’s problem seems to be the group’s familiar, incessant, refrain that Americans are too dumb to take care of themselves. To back it up, the Center cites a survey it performed last year which found that 90 percent of consumers don’t know sucralose contains chlorine. You have to wonder what would have happened if the survey asked the same question about municipal tap water. Of course, all surveys conducted by crackpot activist groups are to be viewed with skepticism since we have no idea precisely how the survey’s inquiries were conducted or how the questions were phrased.
There is, for example, the same study’s finding that only 57 percent of the people who’ve tried Splenda know it’s an artificial sweetener.
And the other 43 percent thought what? That it was sugar?
Seeing as Splenda is dramatically more expensive, many times the price of sugar, precisely what were these people willing to pay so much more FOR? Unless perhaps the question is what precisely constituted an “artificial sweetener” according to the surveyors of the study. Did they ask the same question about NutraSweet and Sweet'n Low, or aspartame and saccharine? Was there any explanation given? Or does the CSPI simply assume its standard thesis that any confusion is a function of consumers being stupid and in need of the protection of wiser guardians like the CSPI?
For a saner perspective, one can turn to John Childs, not an unbiased player in this comedy. His investment company owns NutraSweet Co. “I think Splenda has done an excellent job of marketing” he says. “I tip my hat.”
Fortunately, the CSPI’s patronizing hysteria is, again, doing nothing but underscoring the group’s neurotic disconnect from the real lives of real American consumers. Splenda remains so popular; there have been periodic threats of a shortage. I’ve certainly had the occasional problem grabbing it at the supermarket before it’s sold out. And by this summer, both Coke and Pepsi plan to reformulate some of their diet drinks to include Splenda, meaning, I hope, that I can finally get my wife to enjoy one of them.

Thank you Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Thank you for showing the way.

April 4, 2005

Technical Foul, Hand Overplayed

Whoops! Al Gore may have overdone it just a teensy bit this time.
Now even the New York Times, yes that New York Times, notes that perhaps Gore’s apocalyptic science fiction movie "An Incovenient Truth" may have gone too far.
As readers have seen before, the Times regularly rails against anyone who so much as questions the legitimacy of the fast growing new cult of global warming.




Today, however, the Times acknowledges hearing "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype".
Discreetly tucked into the “Science” section, a piece by William Broad observes…

“Hollywood has a thing for Al gore and his three-alarm film on global warming “An Inconvenient Truth”… But part of his scientific audience is uneasy… these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.”

(Incidentally, any appearance of the phrase “some say” is to be noted with skepticism but, in this instance, Broad does go on to back up the assertion quite thoroughly.)
Gore’s movie brooks no discussion of or dissent from its central credo that...
1) The earth is heating up catastrophically;
2) This phenomenon is entirely manmade, the result of the sun’s heat being trapped in the atmosphere by carbon dioxide and other gases discharged by power generation, motor vehicles, campfires, …breathing; and
3) The only way to save the world is for people to dismantle CO2 producing industries. (In this mantra, “people” means almost exclusively “the people of the United States.”)
Critics in industrial, political and scientific arenas have taken issue with the fact that most discussion of the need to curtail CO2 emissions does not include the fastest growing emitters of such gases, the rapidly expanding industrial powerhouses China and India, who are also exempted in the Kyoto treaty.
A few have also pointed out that only today’s modern industrial infrastructure, largely internal combustion dependent as it is, makes it possible to feed, clothe and house 300 million people in the United States, and 6 billion on the earth.
Some have even brought up the contradiction that the most avid global warming crusaders also oppose nuclear power.
But the ire of the zealots is most vigorously heaped on those who question… who so much as question… the central tenet that global warming is absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly manmade, not natural, and is destined to bring precisely quantifiable disaster down upon all in the next 20 minutes, or at least in our lifetimes.
It is from that dogmatic certainly, a certainty that ventures well beyond any known facts into the realm of blind religious extremism, that respected scientists including global warming believers, are now trying to distance themselves, as the Times notes.

“Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were ‘overselling our certainty about knowing the future.’”

Exaggeration?
Well, Gore explains, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.” Ah, so Gore is of the opinion that the only language the layman understands is “everybody panic! You’re doomed!”
A tempting parallel to "Inconvenient's" diverting detour from reality is a newer cinematic guilty pleasure, the big screen adaptation of the comic book "300" which, in its testosterone fueled retelling of the story of the battle of Thermopylae, manages to make utter hash of the historic facts. Yes, there really was such a battle, and the heroism of Spartan king Leonidas is remembered in Greece to this day. Numerous historic scholars, however, have already weighed in on the extreme degree of artistic license exercised in Frank Miller's comic book version of the tale as well as in the movie.
But hey it's only a movie, right?
A better comparison may be a little-remembered film that, like "An Inconvenient Truth," also won an Oscar for best documentary, 35 years earlier.
It was in 1971 that another blend of science fact and over-the-top speculative science fiction called "The Hellstrom Chronicle" won the Academy Award for best documentary.
“Chronicle" offers a fascinating and, yes, educational look at the world of insects. But it too juices up the drama with a little science fiction hysteria. Its cool bug pictures are wrapped in a doomsaying warning from stern scientist Nils Hellstrom, who cautions that with their superior strength, order, discipline and lack of wasteful emotion or individualism, insects are destined to take over the world.
Much like “Inconvenient Truth,” “Chronicle” does offer a little to recommend it, marvelous photography and a real introduction to a world of science with which much of the audience may be unfamiliar. The silly campfire-worthy scare stories of the grim Dr. Hellstrom merely serve to hold the attention of viewers, many of them young, long enough to make some real science genuinely interesting.
But Hellstrom is a fictional character, played by actor Lawrence Pressman. In the real world, nobody was expected to take seriously his dark pontificating misinterpretation of the real science presented elsewhere in the movie. Nobody was calling for trillions of dollars to be wasted exterminating the world’s bugs.
When Pressman left the set to play in “Shaft” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he didn’t continue his game of “let’s pretend we’re about to be wiped out.”
The Al Gore character, however, really exists. He was, you may recall, a heartbeat and a few hanging chads away from the presidency of the United States. And when the cameras stopped rolling, his role as haranguing firebrand prophet of calamity had only begun. And Gore is indeed calling for trillions of dollars to be wasted addressing a threat which may or may not exist, but which the evidence indicates is nowhere near as dire as he preaches it is.
“Unless we act boldly,” he writes, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.” Gore has historically been vague about what, precisely, he means by “acting boldly,” but it is unlikely that switching to overpriced hybrid cars (which, incidentally, still emit suspected greenhouse gases) or microwaving our eyeballs with those hideous pigtail compact fluorescent light bulbs will come remotely close to the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions deemed necessary by the hard core of global warming Luddites.
The unsurprising news that their champion has been fudging the numbers is not helpful.
Even the skeptics proclaim their willingness to listen to reason. In fact, according to the Times, they’re begging for some.

“Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the (UN’s climate change) panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. ‘Climate change is a real and serious problem’ that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. ‘The cacophony of screaming,’ he added, ‘does not help.’

Unfortunately, it is the career screamers who currently monopolize the stage, or in this case the movie screen, when it comes to climate change.
The threat of manmade global warming may be real. It may even be urgent. Brutal industrial austerity measures may indeed be warranted. Maybe.
But that case has yet to be made and this “cacophony of screaming” only serves to prevent it from being made.
Assuming the danger really exists, and quick action really is necessary, the rabid shouting is actually making things worse. That may be the greatest lesson the serious scientists offer in their sudden expression of misgiving. Al Gore is, first and foremost, a politician, and a politician well known for tweaking the facts to achieve some dramatic, political, effect. That's not what the world needs now.
If those currently in the forefront of the debate are sincere in their desire to protect humanity from a legitimate danger they really believe exists, they should shut up, step aside, and let the grownups analyze the facts.

March 13, 2007