Sociologists from four major research institutions have published a study in the journal Sociological Inquiry examining how we support our false beliefs. They examined the false belief of many voters during the 2004 general election, which held that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was responsible for the primarily Saudi-conducted attacks on September 11, 2001.

The researchers concluded that the false beliefs were not caused by lies told repeatedly by the Bush Administration and some cable news channels, but by the individuals’ own personal need to justify a war that was already being waged. They named their study “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification,” and claim that their findings offer serious challenge to democracy – in that the people cannot be trusted to discern truth from falsehood.

Now, while it is a trivial observation that people tend to believe what they want to believe, and that they will seek out information sources that support and/or confirm their already-held beliefs, this blogger is not convinced that these sociologists should have so pointedly ignored the fact that it was the Bush-Cheney administration that invented the lies, started the war, and was backed up in that false propaganda effort by the mainstream broadcast and cable news media establishments. Seems like giving political liars and media propagandists a free pass on misleading the public does serious damage to the conclusions of the supposedly scientific study itself.

The teabaggers who scream at congressional town hall meetings that they want the government to stay out of their Medicare did not decide on their own to believe Medicare isn’t socialized government health insurance. They have been repeatedly TOLD that by liars. They are obviously less intelligent than most people and have already demonstrated with other false political and/or religious beliefs that they are vulnerable to the propaganda aimed at them. Yet in the sociopolitical reality of the world’s oldest democracy, this unfortunate minority of intellectually challenged citizens would not be a big concern for the way government runs or what government can do.

By blaming the unfortunate individuals rather than the professional liars, propagandists and the vast corporate wealth behind them, this sort of “research” looks to be just another aspect of the Lie Machine instead of serious professional quality research from public universities. Even worse, the researchers interviewed their subjects well after those subjects had formed their opinion and invested emotion in the correctness of their opinions. They did not examine the actual sources of those opinions at all, even though they are voluminously documented historical record. Quite strange.

Perhaps a more worthwhile publicly supported sociological research project would have examined the lies, false statements, intelligence cooking, blatant propaganda, outright treason, and even the use of torture to force false confessions to support the fraudulent link in the push toward war in Iraq. THEN maybe examine the effect of all this high-level criminality on the least intelligent members of the voting body politic – to reach pertinent conclusions about the harmful effects of institutional and corporate political propaganda on the conduct of democratic government.

As the economy slips ever farther down the black hole of imaginary values and criminal greed, the looming necessity for using this crossroads of history to re-make our energy future has moved the issues up on the To-Do list. America’s automakers are lining up, hats in hand, to obtain enough funding to keep their (union) workers employed, and the funds they want may come attached to serious strings that require more gas-efficient cars, hybrids, flex-fuel and even new lines of plug-in electric cars to help get us off our addiction to other nations’ oil.

Which then begs questions about what sources of electrical energy we need to develop that do not spew greenhouse gases into the air, leave us with millions of tons of toxic or radioactive industrial waste, and cause serious detrimental health effects (and death) to the population. Following on the issue of our choices for future development is the antiquated state of our electrical grid, which is both inefficient and dangerously likely to fail altogether without much trouble.

Fact is, energy use conservation could make a more serious dent in our consumption without doing anything at all. This is what happened this past summer when gasoline prices climbed to around $5 per gallon, and diesel prices became inverted. Millions of people limited their driving, pooled for shopping excursions, and stayed home instead of driving long distances for vacation. Petroleum usage plummeted, which informs us that we don’t really have to use as much as we do. Changing light bulbs and turning off lights and appliances and turning down the thermostat can save quite a bit of our generation capacity too, but that will of course jump when we have to charge our cars at night.

But the inefficiency of the grid system itself wastes ~30% of what we already do generate. In order to diversify our sources, we are going to need to modernize the grid to lose less of the available ‘trons between the wind or wave farm and our refrigerators. The Obama transition team is already looking into a possible massive CCC-type project to modernize the grid, and with a genuine scientist at the head of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu), we might expect more forward-looking options for how to do that than the old-timers in the outgoing administration could ever have offered.

Meanwhile, many states and industrial concerns are planning for the alternative energy sources that the new grid will rely upon for generation capacity. Since there’s no such thing as “Clean Coal,” many planners would dearly love to get away from coal and nuclear plants (that take decades to bring on-line and are increasingly expensive). Wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric, there are many possibilities to be developed that not only don’t emit greenhouse gases, but also don’t emit waste heat into the environment like boiler and heat transfer systems do.

The Industrial Wind Action Group understands the grid issue better than many, as the siting of industrial-strength wind farms in regions of the country that enjoy steady winds enough to achieve peak performance is going to need transmission accessibility from parts of the country that managed to get electrified mostly as an afterthought. There are even some fairly radical ideas out there about concentrating wind farms in the midwest by swapping-out government-owned land in the far west for a huge reserve in the heartland. Even the investor class is getting in on the action, as Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin from the Common Sense Investor demonstrates.

We’ll keep up with developments in all areas of alternative power research and development as well as initiatives to modernize the grid. Stay tuned!

Links:

US Electric grid needs modernization
A Vision for a Modernized Electric Grid: Clean Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy
Industrial Wind Action Group
Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin
What is an Intelligent Grid?

The International Space Station marks its 10th Anniversary this week, in commemoration of the launch of the first bus-sized component – Zarya – on November 20, 1998 from Kazakhstan. Happy Birthday to this great achievement in international cooperation for the exploration of space and the progression of space-based science!

A joint venture of the US’s NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Jaqpan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and 11 members of the European Space Agency – Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Do things come any more international than that?

The world’s space-based science conglomerate brags a total of more than 25,000 cubit feet of room after a decade of flights bringing more experiments and more modules, and the participation of 167 astronauts from 14 countries. Recently American astronauts were able to cast their ballots in the General Election from the station, making them the most “absent” of all absentee voters ever!

Estimated to cost around $100 billion over the life of its mission, consensus opinion is that the space station will go down in history as precursor to permanent moon bases, a first step in future journeys to the planet Mars. The station could be abandoned as early as 2011, but may, like several of the recent Mars rovers, end up living well past its life expectancy. Its future is tied to what happens with the US shuttle fleet, and whether or not other nations involved will develop their own fleets to service the station and transport supplies and experiments.

So raise a toast of your favorite to the night sky and consider for a few moments just how far we’ve come since Sputnik. Happy Birthday, ISS!

Links:

Nations Mark 10th Anniversary of ISS
NASA – International Space Station
Wikipedia: International Space Station

It seems like the entire month of October has been one big Halloween Trick (not Treat) as the grotesque and blatantly illegal ‘melamine in food’ imported from China horror just keeps getting worse and worse. Some might wonder why all food products from China weren’t immediately banned back when tainted pet food cause the painful deaths of thousands of dogs and cats last year, once it was confirmed that Chinese state-owned food processors were adding the industrial plastic to wheat gluten to fool tests for protein content in this ubiquitous protein additive. Alas, imports were not banned, and now this dangerous adulterant is in hundreds of common food items.

Thousands of Chinese infants were poisoned when melamine was added to infant formulas and milk products. It’s in medicines exported and has caused sickness and death in Central and South America. Now it’s in candy and eggs and almost every wheat product from China. The US does not require country of origin labeling of foods, thus American consumers have no real way of knowing they’re buying poison.

Tainted Chinese Products Criminal Timeline traces the tainted Chinese food scandal back through 2004, and includes many other adulterants Americans have been ingesting. Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. It is not a pretty picture, and our FDA has been criminally lax in their duty of protecting the safety of our food supply.

As for melamine, here’s an Update: now coffee, Snickers, KitKat, M&Ms and Heinz products such as baby cereals and crackers. The latest contamination is being found in eggs, which got there via tainted animal feed. This has caused United Nations officials to worry that it is also in chicken, pork, farmed fish and other meats.

Melamine causes kidney stones and kidney failure. The Chinese babies who died all died of kidney and organ failure. So it comes as no surprise that doctors are now seeing a rise in kidney stones in US children as young as 5. The situation is very, very serious.

Educate yourself! Fused Report has a cache of reports on melamine contamination from news organizations all over the world, and Food Standards offers a detailed risk assessment of the adulterant. There is a constantly updated list of tainted products available at the Natural Remedies Blog too, and with Halloween coming this Friday pay special attention to the candy list. Also see FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy.

Protect yourself and your family, because our government’s FDA will not.

Links:

A Rise in Kidney Stones Seen in U.S. Children
Cache of News Reports on Melamine Contamination
Food Standards: detailed risk assessment
List of Contaminated Products
FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy

It would be great to see some of these questions come up in the debates, so that follow-ups to the positions could be explored.

Please go to the ScienceDebate 2008 website, take a hard look at Obama’s answers for our future, and don’t forget to drop the crew a dime (or ten) on your way out. These folks have been hard at it since November of last year, and have gathered some very impressive institutional support. The future is important to all of us – and our children – and the future needs the very best science we can possibly field to meet it head-on.

The 2007 Farm Bill – now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.

But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.

Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.

In 2005 the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Clinical Services published a new food pyramid based on “healing” foods. Which emphasized fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables over grains, legumes (beans) and the more fatty foods at the top. The Agricultural Research Service published this past weekend a study that showed alkaline-producing fresh fruits and vegetables help preserve muscle mass in older men and women.

And researchers from USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory have released findings that demonstrate organic farming methods including crop rotation complexity can offer a 30% greater yield than simple corn-soybean rotations.

As demand for organic meat, milk and basic commodities rises about 20% per year in this country, improvements in the technology of organic production will serve to increase availability. It has long been known that reduced use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers (most with highly questionable ‘inert ingredients’ such as toxic waste from industry) will also improve water quality and the general fertility of our ‘breadbasket’ agricultural base land. It is hoped that the new farm bill, by emphasizing changes that need to be made in these directions, will speed America’s switch to sustainable practices and improve citizen’s health significantly.

The team at ScienceDebate2008 reports that this cycle’s Presidential candidates have declined to engage in a debate on science policy issues on April 18th in Philadelphia. While not surprising – these are professional politicians trying to sell themselves to a largely science-illiterate public – the importance of staging such a debate with national media coverage has not diminished in the least.

The next target will focus on the Oregon primary venue in May. For the effort ScienceDebate2008 has forged a working relationship with PBS’s NOVA science series and NOW on PBS weekly news program for cosponsorship. NOW host David Brancaccio will moderate, supported by a panel of internationally recognized scientists everyone can agree upon. Three possible dates have been proposed to the campaigns.

Because science is so important to our society and to the livability of our abused planet, it is hoped that the candidates will agree to debate the science issues on one of the possible dates. Again, due to personal ignorance of many of the issues, each candidate should be allowed to bring their primary on-staff science advisor and be able to consult that advisor about details. Simply reading position statements drafted by their campaigns should not be considered sufficient grasp of the issues for the next leader of the free world.

If you would support the effort you can contact the candidates’ campaigns in favor of the initiative. Letters to the editor of local and regional newspapers can also help drum up public interest. And you can contact the debate team from the initiative’s website at ScienceDebate2008.

Government leaders, university presidents, leading scientists, engineering leaders, business executives, American innovators have been making the call loudly and with some help from NPR, MSNBC, the New York Times and Time Magazine as well as increasing numbers of other media outlets. Now that both the Democratic and Republican fields of potential Presidential candidates are down to two apiece, it’s time for Science Debate 2008 to happen.

The invitations to the candidates have been sent, the debate will be held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Thus far none of the candidates have responded that they will commit. While we all know that issues of science and technology are usually handled by advisors who have knowledge of the subjects, it would be nice to get a feel for whether the candidates for our country’s highest office have a basic grasp of those issues and a defensible position on policy. Or find out if all they’re good for is to mouth sound bites their handlers feed them.

If you’re interested in what you may be able to do to help convince them, visit the Science Debate 2008 website and sign on. And it wouldn’t hurt to write to the campaigns and request the candidates’ participation while you’re at it.

Science Debate 2008

They’re calling it Science Debate 2008. It’s a grassroots initiative to petition for a Presidential candidates forum specifically about issues of science and technology. The list of science bloggers in the Blogger Coalition is impressive, and represents almost all of Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs stable. The list of initial signers includes Nobel Prize laureates, academics, corporate CEOs, congresscritters, political science policy advisors, journal editors and regulatory agency veterans.

I heard about the initiative from Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew’s front page post announcing it over on Daily Kos on December 10th. He called for bipartisan and independent science bloggers to sign up, so I emailed the group through their form and offered my support. I didn’t get a reply and I’m not listed as a supporter, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.

Among the science bloggers who have already posted about the subject is a favorite of mine, “GrrlScientist” over at Living the Scientific Life. While I certainly agree with the description of why a science debate would be good – “intellectual stagnation in public policies” – I was not so impressed with Grrl’s complete rejection of sociopolitical realities in favor of current theoretical consensus in her particular field of science. She concludes:

“It is hoped that, by placing each candidate’s science and technology policies squarely into the public consciousness, the average American will realize that not “believing in” evolution unacceptable, that it constitutes intellectual dishonesty that is tantamount to not “believing in” gravity…”

Um… that sort of attitude isn’t going to fly in the national political arena, with candidates or with voters. Not that I don’t agree that public rejection of current theoretical consensus can interfere with necessary social and political policies that indeed are the responsibility of politicians to develop and implement. But politicians are not scientists and are not required or expected to be scientists. That’s what “science advisors” are for, along with the junior staffers who type up the position statements for candidates’ campaign websites.

That’s how it works for the politicians who get elected too. In the US, government is not a dictatorship of current scientific consensus. I do not believe it’s going to turn into one if scientists insist on displaying their arrogance on television while insulting the politicians, the voting public, and democratic political philosophy.

So I went over to Bora Zivkovic’s blog A Blog Around the Clock, because Zivkovic has so far posted 4 different questions he would ask candidates if this debate takes place. This can help us get a better feel for the issues that concern scientists as well as an idea of how such a debate would be conducted. Zivkovic’s first question is excellent:

“If elected President, what do you intend to do to make sure that you receive trustworthy scientific information and that your policies are based on the best available empirical knowledge about the world? What do you see as the primary role of the Presidential Science Advisor? In what way, if any, would you change the current federal framework of implementing science-related policy?”

It’s a good question because science is quite notorious for harboring opposing and highly contentious views in many disciplines and sub-disciplines. Simply following the science news for a few weeks will give you a general idea of how much incoming research “contradicts” other scientists’ older research, and answers to questions of detail change depending on who you’re asking today. If you care to follow the in-house debates, they’re as rancorous as anything politics can dish out (short of the notorious Hamilton-Burr duel or notable assassinations and impeachments).

Zivkovic’s second question concerns science funding:

“How would you address the current problems of scientific research in the USA – stopping the brain-drain, attracting foreign students, energizing young Americans to consider careers in science, and encouraging development of science in other countries (with free flow of information between nations as well as between scientists and the public in the USA) while still retaining the US dominance?”

Another good question. Not an easy one to answer, either. Looks to me like some work on science education needs to factor in here, particularly at the university level where a scientist gets out of grad school so far in student debt they’ll never dig out. Same problem is happening with doctors (and all other professions), so doing something about that would help everybody. As far as “US dominance” is concerned, that may not be something politicians can do much about. Seems that distinction is up to scientists and their institutions to preserve – if they can. Scientific knowledge is not something that can be held exclusive while at the same time encouraging a ‘free flow of information’.

Zivkovic asks about the complex issue of climate change in question 3, a subject bound to take up a lot of space at a science debate. Question 4 mentions science education and asks for a candidate’s position on who s/he will trust to be “the voice of true authority on a scientific question.”

I’d imagine the answer to that will be no different than it’s been for decades. The NAS panel overviews parsed by ‘expert’ hired science staff and filtered through the advisor to the politician. Perhaps this debate should be held with the candidates’ respective science advisors, who should at least know more about science than any of the politicians running for President.

I understand that most in the scientific community are upset at the Bush administration’s reliance on marginally capable, ideologically biased advisors who’s advice and operational tactics have led to some really awful science policies. But they couldn’t have accomplished that if science were absolute (as opposed to provisional) and there were no disagreements about evidence, interpretations or theoretics. What can politicians be expected to do about disagreements among scientists about science?

I’ll keep my eyes open for more science bloggers and other supporters weighing in with their own issues and concerns and questions. Maybe they can just choose the best questions and send the list to all the candidates well before the debate so their science advisors can come up with answers and the writers can draft responses. And so the candidates can practice their delivery in front of mirrors and focus groups so they won’t look like complete idiots.

If scientists want to play in the political arena – The Show – they should give a thought to its customs, formalities and rules before taking the stage. Otherwise I fear the program will turn out to be more sit-com than useful educational resource.

Links:

Science Debate 2008

ScienceBlogs