What's Science Got to Do With It Anyway

For those who have read my previous postings, up until now I haven't written anything critical of the Democratic party.  There may be some of you who wonder if I will live up to my promise in my profile to take swipes at politicians on both sides of the aisle.  Well I don't plan to let you down.

Last week, legislation enacting one of Obama's top priorities - universial health insurance - came into law.  Now, he is ramping on his other big campaign promise, global warming legislation.

As anybody that has not been living in a cave already knows, the global warming theory goes like this:  The earth's climate has warmed up at an unprecedented rate over the last 200 years or so, and that man made carbon dioxide gas from burning fossil fuels is the culprit.

Supporters of the legislation insist that if something isn't done immediately to sharply cut carbon dioxide emissions in the developed world, then the planet will continue to warm up rapidly resulting in dire consequences in our lifetimes.  And the supporters of restrictions on oil and coal use in Europe and the United States insist that it is simply a matter of settled science.  They state that all reputable scientists believe this to be true and only crackpots - global warming deniers - contest the issue.

I'm not going to weigh in on the global warming issue here, at least not in this post.  I'll leave that to another day.  Instead, I am going to talk about the "it's science" part of the argument, and why we should be skeptical of it.

I'm 52 years old, so I was born in 1957 and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.  A lot has changed since that time, even so-called science.

My mother bought me a set of encyclopedias when I was in 5th grade.  I read them seemingly from cover to cover and believed everything in them as gospel truth, especially things relating to science.  Like the article that said that modern man is directly descended from Cro-Magnon Man.  Well, today the scientists say this is not true and the Cro-Mags had nothing to do with us.  Rather, they were an unrelated line of humanity which died out without contributing anything to our gene pool.  However, if you are white or Asian, today's experts say you might have some Neanderthal relatives in your family tree.  Again this is something that the scientists said was not so in the 1960s.

We see this kind of stuff all the time.

In the 1950s we were told to put babies on their bellies to keep them from getting the back of their head flattened.  By the 1990s we were told to put them on their backs to prevent complications from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

I recall TV commercials in the 1960s and 1970s telling people to use margarine instead of butter because it was "made from polyunsaturated fats" derived from corn oil.  The margarine was supposed to healthier than butter which is high in saturated fats.

As a result of these ads, my mother and countless housewives across the country switched to margarine to protect their families' hearts from cholesterol damage.

Little did we know at the time that the margarine of 30, 40 or 50 years ago was made hard enough to form into sticks by taking unsaturated vegetable oil and turning it into saturated fat through a chemical refining process.  Today, these artificially saturated vegetable fats are called "trans fats".   As everybody knows, according to modern science, there is nothing worse for your heart than trans fat.

So moms across America were misled to switch their families from natural butter to margarine that was made of trans fat.

Our shared cultural belief that scientists always know best played into the Madison Avenue's hands when getting the public to switch for health reasons to something that was actually bad for your heart.

While switching from butter to trans fats may seem like a boneheaded move, at the time I believe the experts that touted it were being sincere.  They just didn't understand the science well enough.

Politics sometimes plays a more prominent role in decisions made in the name of science, such as in the case of the development of modern drunk driving law.

The legal threshold from driving while intoxicated was at first visible intoxication at the the time the concept originated in the first decades of the 20th century.  Then, in the 1950s the Breathalyzer was invented and we now needed a scientific standard for drunkenness.  After all the company that made the machines had to find a reason to get law enforcement to buy them.  The limit was first set at .15 as anybody who watches Mad Men regularly knows.  By the mid 1960s the threshold was lowered to .10.  Then, in the 1990s it was lowered to .08.  Experts in the field made the case to lower the threshold by arguing that people become impaired sooner than previously thought.

An equally plausible explanation why the legal threshold for drunk driving was initially set at a high level was that the public was more tolerant of heavy drinking than it is now.  People in the past were more reluctant to lock up someone for driving drunk because a higher value was placed personal freedom than on public safety. .

As time went on, the public became less tolerant of people who go to the local bar after work to toss down a few hours worth of shots and beers.  We stopped seeing this behavior as being normal and rather something that is dangerous for a driver to do.  We lowered the standard for drunkenness, at first in the 1950s as a means for requiring use of Breathalyzers, then later on as people's attitudes toward drinking changed.  In other words, it was not science that produced the lower DWI standards, but changes in public opinion.  The science was used as a means of advancing a political objective.

As a result we went from accepting vehicle operation by heavy drinkers to now, when driving after having two drinks in a restaurant can put you at risk for a DWI.

The truth is, scientists actually "know" nothing to be true.  What they do is come a reason for why something is as it is (a hypothesis) then set about trying to disprove this theory by subjecting it to experimental testing.  It fhe hypothesis stands up to rigorous testing by many scientists over a long period of time, it becomes a "theory", or a hypothesis that is accepted as accurate.  However, very few theories advance to achieve the certainty of "laws" or concepts accepted as true on their fact.  Yes, there are scientific laws like the "law of gravity", but these are few and far between.

Some things like whether products containing trans fats "made from polyunsaturated fats" are good for you or from whom modern man is descended  have changed over time as our knowledge of science has advanced. The experts weren't lying when they told us something different 40 years ago than they do now, they just didn't have the whole picture.

Other things like whether we put babies on their backs or their bellies are simply educated guesses based on how we perceive the relative risks and benefits.  In other words, do we want well formed heads on our kids or do we want to minimize the chance of spontaneous death in infants.  Another case of this type of decision is how and where to set the threshold for DWI.  Here the question is how much do we value the personal freedom to drink alcohol versus highway safety.

With global warming and what to do about, it is a little bit of both.  Both the environmentalists who are pushing for restrictions on fossil fuels and business interests who want the status quo to continue have political axes to grind.  Scientists have examined climate change, and scientific research is being used by both sides as a way of advancing their respective viewpoints.  But for the antaganists, the science is more a tool for pushing their political agendas rather than a basis for their viewpoints.

In the end, it all depends on what we want and what we value.

Health Care Bill Passes In Washington, a Momentous Occasion

Finally after almost a century of effort, a national health care bill was signed into law which will guarantee nearly universal access to healthcare.  (I say nearly universal, because the bill exempts the Amish and similar religious groups which provide from their members from having to purchase health insurance.  By the way, they have long been exempted from having to participate in Social Security either).

The Republicans fought the bill tooth and nail saying that it will increase the national debt to unmanagable levels. This begs the question, is the problem that the bill will increase the national debt or is it really that it will increase healthcare costs for employers by encouraging them to do what they should have been doing along - providing adequate health insurance for their workers as part of their job benefits.

What the bill does is requires that all people under 65 have a health insurance policy, either purchased individually, or through their employer.  Various incentives and sanctions are provided to see that this actually happens.  Individuals without health coverage will eventually be fined $695 per year,  Larger employers that fail to provide health coverage will be fined $2,000 per worker.  Insurance companies will no longer to refuse coverage or base rates on preexisting conditions.  Rates may only vary based on age, tobacco use, or geographic location.  Also, insurance policies can no longer contain rate caps which cause the insurance to run out when a person has an expensive catistropic condition.   The federal government will regulate policy rates, to insure that insurance companies to not use the mandatory purchase requirement to gouge customers.  Government subsidies will be offered to small businesses and low income individuals, so they can afford to by coverage.

Simple enough.  You think you are healthy and don't need insurance, pay the $650 fine with your tax return.  Nobody will bother you any more.  (This is being done to give an incentive to people to buy now rather than waiting until they come down with a serious health condition.)

Looks like Obama is a good egg and everybody should be dancing in the streets.  No, the Tea Party is threating to throw out of office anybody who voted for this "terrible" bill.  I think the real problem is that the Republican party is run be business interests who are more concerned about operating costs than they are about the man on the street.

Will the bill cost the federal government billions?  Sure.  But to say that it will cost New Jersey taxpayers extra is a matter of debate.  Because today, if an uninsured person gets sick, all they have to do is go to the emergency room and they will be treated.  The doctor and hospital get paid through Charity Care, a state program funded by state taxes.  Basically what this does is have individual taxpayers subsidize businesses that don't provide health insurance.  With national health care, some of this burden would come off state taxpayers and get passed on to employers and the federal government.

The new system will be a cheaper way to provide care to the currently uninsured.  With health insurance, they will now be able to go to private physicians that can keep records on their health histories and coordinate care, something that makes healthcare less necessary and cheaper in the long-run.  Also, private physicians charge less for office visits than the emergency room charges.

So do yourself a favor.  In the congressional elections this fall, vote out every Republican in the House and Senate.  Not one of them voted for the president's bill or the fixes that were passed a few pays latter.  It is the Republicans, not the Democrats that deserve to go.

Support Your Local Newspaper

The Internet is a wonderful invention. It allows us to be able to access all sorts of information from our computers often for free. Indeed, this blog would not be possible if it wasn't for the web.

As cool as online media access is, it is important to remember that the stories cited in this blog were for the most part originally published in newspapers. Without newspapers and their reporters, it would not be possible to obtain reliable information about most events.

Newspapers today are in financial trouble partly because too many people get all their news online and do not bother to pick up a real newspaper. I make it a point to buy several hardcopy newspapers each day.

Please keep the tradition alive. Purchace a subscription to your home town paper or buy a copy at a newstand or honor box every day. The cost is small, and you will be supporting a home-town institution.

Celling Kids For Profit

Our neighbors in Pennsylvania lead the nation in the number of private detention facilities in the nation. Leave it to two Keystone State judges to come up with a new scheme to turn state-sponsored child abuse into their own personal money-making machine.

This story appeared on www.cnn.com on 2/24/09. Here is the link: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/.

In February 2009, a federal court sentenced former Luzerne County President Judge mark Ciavarella and Luzerne County Senior Judge Michael Conahan for federal charges of tax fraud for accepting kickbacks from a private juvenille detention facilitity for sentencing kids to prison terms in their facility.

The corruption began in 2002 when Conahan shut down the county juvenille detention center and used money from the county budget to lease the private facility. Despite some criticism, the county commissioners approved the deal.

In exchange for sending inmates to the facility, Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp. paid money to the judges for sentencing youths to prison terms. Many of they youths sent to the jail committed minor infractions that would almost never result in a custodial sentence if the case went before an impartial judge. Often, youths that were given disproportionatly heavy sentences were not represented by an attorney.

The CNN article cited an example of one 14 year old youth who stole pocket change from an unlocked vehicle to buy chips and a soft drink. This first offense resulted in a 9 month jail term.

CNN quoted a report from the Philadelphia-based Juvenille Law Center which stated that about 50 percent of children who waived counsel before Judge Ciavarella were sentenced to jail terms while the Pennsylvania Juvenille Court Judges' Commission found that on the average 8.4 percent of juveniles statewide receive custodial sentences.

Imagine the opportunities New Jersey politicians and judges will get to obtain graft at our children's expense if more juvenille facilities in this state are privatized.

Privatization Kills

Before we let Governor Chirstie privatize anything, we should think long and hard about what can go wrong.

Most of the time, the worst things that can result are overpaying the private company and fraud from paying for services not provided.  Or perhaps getting lousy service from poorly trained, screened and compensated private employees.

However, sometimes the consequences are worse.....much worse.

Like the case of disabled teenager Danieal Kelly, 14 who was starved to death by her caregivers who were supposed to be supervised by social workers from now-defunct MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, Inc. , a company that was contracted by the Philadelphia Human Services Commission to provide caseworkers that monitor at-risk children.

A federal jury in Philadelphia recently convicted company co-founders Mickal Kamauvaka and Solomon Manamela and former caseworkers Julius Juma Murray and Miriam Coulebaly of conspiracy, lying to federal agents and multiple counts of healthcare fraud.

prosecutors say the company defrauded the city of millions of dollars by not visiting needy families and falsifying records to show home visits were made that never occurred.

For a link to this article which appears on www.cbsnews.com: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-6267226-504083.html 

Charging to park in the employee parking lot is just plain mean

An article appeared in the Trenton Times on Friday which indicated that Governor Chris Christie created a task force to explore privatization of various state government functions.  The governor stated that while he is not sure of  everything he intends to privatize, one thing he is sure he wants to do is to make state workers pay to use the parking lots surrounding government office buildings in Trenton.   To read this article, click on the following link:  http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/nj_employees_will_have_to_pay.html

 

He wants to hire a private company to operate the parking lots and collect the fees.

May I ask, what purpose will this serve?

First, the private company will not take the deal for free.  It will want to take a  cut of what is collected as a profit.  Currently there has been much controversy about how state government workers are overpaid and receive excessive benefits.  It is implied in many articles that have appeared in newspapers across the state that excessive compensation is one of the main causes of the state budget deficit and is an important factor in driving up taxes.

Even it this is true, how does it help matters to enter into a costly contract with a private company so it can siphon off tax dollars that could be used to provide useful services to the public.  Instead, the money would be used to enrich a private company, which may be from out of state.  Great!  Let's send our tax dollars off to some company in California or Alaska or somewhere.  That's really going to benefit us.

Additionally, since parking in the state's lots has always been free, charging for it now would amount to a pay cut for government workers.  All right, you might be some right wing type that thinks government workers need a pay cut, but what that means is that your neighbors will now have less money to spend at the supermarket, the local restaurant, bowling alley, car dealer or other local businesses.  Worker paychecks don't just disappear into some black hole, but rather are spent at private businesses across the region which helps generate jobs and economic activity that benefits everyone.

One other thing.  Charging for parking will effectively force state workers to pay the state so they can get to work.  Since most state workers don't live within walking distance, they would have no alternative but to either pay to park the car in the privatized lot or take public transportation to work.  And who operates the public transportation here?  None other than NJ Transit, a state agency.  

So what you would be doing is creating a situation akin to a company town, where workers give their pay checks back to the factory owner who owns all the stores and houses in the town.   The factory barons of old got their workers for the cost of food and housing.  The governor wants to get a cut out of his workers either for bus or train fare or for parking fees.

Company towns for the most part don't exist anymore because we consider them unfair, just like we consider sharecropping, and peonage unfair.

Although making government workers shell out $50 or so per week to park at work may not rise to the same level of exploitation  as that of sharecroppers by a southern planter, it is certainly the same type of thing.

After all, who out there has to pay to park in the factory or office park parking lot?  My guess is practically no one.

Go ahead Gov!  Make my day and shoot your foot off with this one.