I received an email about "Obama phones". They were complaining about a government program that gave phones to welfare people who needed to find jobs, places to live etc. I "snoped" it, and, yes, the program exists, but it was implemented under the Bush administration. I sent the link to everyone on the mail list, and suggested people check these emails on snopes, com before forwarding them. Anyway, I turned out to be the bad guy for pointing out the real facts. And I'm real sure many people continued forwarding this misleading, stupid email. I mean, how is someone suppose to find a job and get off welfare, if they don't have a phone?

Let's see - supposedly one third of our healthcare spending goes to insurance companies - did anyone ever read the infamous (and ridiculous) study published in the NEJM that number was based on? It did *not* say the 30% went to insurance companies, and the methodology was extremely suspect in the first place.

And then there's the one-half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses. Oddly enough *that* study was by the same authors as the earlier mentioned one - the founders of Physicians for a National Health Plan, self-described as an organization working solely to bring about a taxpayer-funded single-payer system (and oft-quoted by merrill).

How about all those ungodly profits made by health insurers? They make, on average, 3.4%, barely more than the average hospital does ('not-for-profit' LMH makes about twice that) - but it's okay for a hospital to make a profit, when they're the ones actually responsible for providing care.

How about the constant class-jealousy-fueled harping about the rich not paying taxes, or the Bush tax cuts only benefiting the rich? Anyone actually look at the numbers?

I'm all for open and honest discourse.

When does it start around here?

kmat,

Where was your outrage when Howard Stern did the same thing in Harlem with Obama? He even said that Palin was Obama's running mate and all the people there loved her and the idea of a qualified woman running with him.

It happens on both sides. If you're going to cry foul make sure it's done both ways.

...because they're easily dispensed in round, pear shaped tones.

Why do people believe things that aren't true? Because their government and their teachers and their university professors and their so-called scientists use these tactics on them:

"Excerpt:
a new way of thinking

Once we’ve eliminated the myths, there is room for some new ideas. These principles relate to some of the key ideas emerging from behaviour change modelling for sustainable development:

5. Climate change must be ‘front of mind’ before persuasion works
Currently, telling the public to take notice of climate change is as successful as selling tampons to men. People don’t realise (or remember) that climate change relates to them.

6. Use both peripheral and central processing Attracting direct attention to an issue can change attitudes, but peripheral messages can be just as effective: a tabloid snapshot of Gwyneth Paltrow at a bus stop can help change attitudes to public transport.

7. Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations Traditional marketing associates products with the aspirations of their target audience. Linking climate change mitigation to home improvement, self-improvement, green spaces or national pride are all worth investigating."
.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/au...

and

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcap...

"Everyone has their own agenda, and for that reason I'm beginning to think they're all lying. "

Ding, ding, ding! Winner!

The best you can probably hope for is to filter out the more obvious nonsense.

1. Is what is said even rational, and likely to have been determinable? "Jobs saved" - clearly a lie, as there's no way to measure that.

2. Does the person telling you have a likely financial interest in a favorable outcome? Nearly every scientific "announcement" packs a ton of this, as it's standard 'grant-farming' tactic.

People are lazy. If something sounds potent enough as a soundbite to captivate the typical 10 second attention span, they run with it.

The End.

Ask the people who run recovery.gov.

Oh, and this one is nice:

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?
James Delingpole
November 20th, 2009
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesd....

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more....

I sort of agree with acg here... many groups are only pushing their own agendas, so they manipulate stats or studies to support their point of view. It is almost unreasonable to think people have the time to research it all on their own and try to find the truth (this is sort of sad but true). Even the news networks often do less reporting than discussion panels that bring together people fighting for their side. So again, no real truth is constructively worked on, merely a sharing of sides each with their own "stats"

One of the biggest problems with the way our current democracy works is that hardly anybody outside of the government has time to read even a small portion of the laws that are passed. Reading the actual text of a bill is the only way that you can know what a law really says and means, without the spin and BS that the media put on it.

Of course we're all busy people and don't have time to actually do that, so we resort to getting our information about law and policy from the inevitably biased media, and we get nowhere.

Godot,

Did all those "alleged emails" melt centuries old glaciers?

(laughter)

Godot, I wouldn't believe you if you told me the sun was going to come up tomorrow.

Paul, as soon as I started reading your blog, I was struck by:

"My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown."

Frankly, I haven't read the rest, or the comments yet. I will, but I have a thing tonight and don't have time right now.

You and I, sir, agree on a lot of things. Falsehoods, sense of security, unknown, wool over heads?

You mean you are questioning authority?

You mean that we don't know as much as we say that we do?

You mean that we are bullying and cajoling, and manipulating in order to win?

I gotta go......I'll let you do the talking.

I was told by a 7th grade class today that I should be on TEDS, and now this.

I'm floating. One of the best days of my life.

"you can keep your doctor" ... "you can keep your health insurance" --- if you like them. when provisions in several democrat bills and the work of the Health Choices Commissioner would make these false.

overthemoon (Anonymous) says…

"From the American Journal of Medicine. Note that Elizabeth Warren is one of the researchers on this. I am not an expert on reviewing studies like this. Perhaps you would care to dissect it and point out the errors?"

Um - did you notice who the other authors were? David U. Himmelstein, MD and Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, are the same authors you'll find listed on that NEJM study on administrative costs, and none others than the founders of PNHP. Check out Woolhandler's bio on the NIH's website sometime (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefac...). Steffie only became a doctor in the first place to promote her social change agenda. She thought it might be nice to work somewhere with poor people, then realized that being a part-time clinician and full-time professor (at Cambridge) would give her the opportunity to publish in such journals as NEJM and AJM, thereby reaching a bigger audience to push her agenda. That should have set off some bells even if you aren't an expert on analyzing research.

Incidentally, this is a repeat study. They've done it a number of years, and use slightly different thresholds.

Okay, now for the study itself (and a whole lot of dissection isn't needed):

>>> "For this analysis, we replicated the most conservative definition employed in the 2001 study, which designated as “medically bankrupt” debtors citing illness or medical bills as a specific reason for bankruptcy; OR reporting uncovered medical bills >$1000 in the past 2 years; OR who lost at least 2 weeks of work-related income due to illness/injury; OR who mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Debtors who gave no answers regarding reasons for their bankruptcy were excluded from analyses.

>>> "For all other analyses (ie, those not reporting time trends) we adopted a definition of medical bankruptcy that utilizes the more detailed 2007 data. We altered the 2001 criteria to include debtors who had been forced to quit work due to illness or injury. We also reconsidered the question of how large out-of-pocket medical expenses should be before those debts should be considered contributors to the family’s bankruptcy. Although we needed to use the threshold of $1000 in out-of-pocket medical bills for consistency in the time trend analyses, we adopted a more conservative threshold—$5000 or 10% of household income—for all other analyses. Adopting these more conservative criteria reduced the estimate of the proportion of bankruptcies due to illness or medical bills by 7 percentage points."

You appear open-minded and intelligent enough to spot what's wrong with this picture. Give it a thought, and I'll tell you my own a little later.

Lets be clear here. This forum is not the place to debate specific issues, and I apologize for getting into sidebar discussions with a few posters. Paul has put forth a very interesting question about the spreading of falsehoods in the public and political debate.

There is a very dangerous trend in America today. It is not new...there have been lies and rumors since the first days of our country. However, with the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, the lies, fear mongering and misinformation have escalated exponentially to the point that it is nearly impossible to conduct the business of our country, let alone have a decent conversation or debate. Lies are accepted as truth and never recounted. This was the basis for the political machine designed and launched by Karl Rove and company. They did not care if what they said was true, as long as it stuck in the minds of potential voters. So we have become, to a greater degree than ever before, assaulted with a myriad of lies that know no end.

I suggest that it is prudent to be very cautious when you hear a buzz word--'bad science', 'socialism', 'extremist', 'government control'---etc etc etc ad nauseum, unless you truly understand the issue and context which is being discussed. This takes some work and some intellectual effort, but, honestly, I think the future of our country depends on the efforts of individuals to rise above the sloganeering to which we have descended.

I hope additional comments will address the questions Mr. Decelles has so aptly presented.

--"Check your falsehoods at the door."--

I'm perplexed, because the post here is about falsehoods, and yet I see one in the very first paragraph. It's in the assertion that people have been repeating the alleged falsehood about Stephen Hawking "all over the web." Well, it is true that the alleged falsehood has been repeated all over the web, but it is my practiced observation that almost all the repetitions have been critical of it. In other words, it would be difficult for the casual searcher to find a repetition of the alleged falsehood that lauds the thing. And yet it is plain that Paul Decelles wishes to imply that the falsehood is being repeated by people who believe it. I say that he's wrong.

However, the alleged falsehood is not so very false, either. Though it's very difficult to find anyone saying so.

I did a little research back in August, when the Investor's Business Daily article that mentioned Stephen Hawking caused such an uproar, and I found that the U.K.'s National Health Service did indeed shortchange the man. Back before he became famous. It could have ended very badly if large private donations had not been made on Hawking's behalf. His wife was very upset with the NHS. It's all in a biography that's available online. And Hawking has worked tirelessly in the years since becoming famous to push the NHS to do more for people in situations similar to his, because they very obviously don't as a general rule.

For what it's worth, my original blog entry on the matter is here:

http://www.kayak2u.com/blog/?p=924

Follow ups can be found by using the search box with "Hawking".

The Hawking thing was interesting to me in the way it interests Decelles, but I saw it spread as a reflexive, uninformed criticism of Investor's Business Daily that everyone took for granted after it was put forth by a couple different liberal bloggers (one of them, the person I criticize on my blog.) It appeared that the original author of the IBD piece didn't know that Hawking lived in the U.K., and since he was still very observably alive, that's all the information that was necessary from then on to criticize the piece. But the story did go deeper, if one wanted to research it. The IBD eventually did a follow up.

I see Decelles, here, as just one more uncritical disseminator of falsehoods, even in a post where he decries the same.

[continued]

But the important part is the passages I quoted. Did you even read them? Do you understand the criteria used to label a bankruptcy 'medical' in cause?

By the criteria used in the study, a person filing for bankruptcy could have an $800,000 mortgage, $150,000 in student loan debt, $50,000 in outstanding car loans, $30,000 in credit card balances, and if they spent $1,000 ($5,000 in the follow-up study, hardly better) in the past two years for medical expenses the bankruptcy was defined as medically caused. This 'straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back' approach is ludicrous. For one thing, it assumes that if that $1,000 (or $5,000) wasn't spent, the other $1,030,000 in debt the filer was carrying would somehow have been manageable. By the criteria used, *any* expense incurred, regardless of how insignificant a percentage of the total indebtedness, could be labeled 'the cause' of the bankruptcy - for example, I bet I could use the same methodology to prove that grocery bills 'cause' 100% of bankruptcy filings!

"Lies are accepted as truth and never recounted. This was the basis for the political machine designed and launched by Karl Rove and company. They did not care if what they said was true, as long as it stuck in the minds of potential voters. So we have become, to a greater degree than ever before, assaulted with a myriad of lies that know no end."

"I suggest that it is prudent to be very cautious when you hear a buzz word—'bad science', 'socialism', 'extremist', 'government control'–etc etc etc ad nauseum, unless you truly understand the issue and context which is being discussed."

I sincerely hope that one day you take your own advice, and analyze the data rather than blindly swallowing the sound-bites. And I also sincerely apologize for mistaking you as someone open-minded and intelligent enough to spot the BS in the falsehoods being perpetuated by the current administration and congressional majority.

I suggest that it is prudent to be very cautious when you hear a buzz word—"Beck, Limbaugh, and the entire Fox news network".

Of course, Paul, physics isn't everything.
It isn't the only thing, nor is that which goes as physics today always science.

However, "to the degree that a hypothesis is testable, the hypothesis is science" remains my definition of science.

Early epidemiology, like the incident of the Broad Street Pump in London, show that gathering evidence, forming a hypothesis, then testing by padlocking the pump are science without physics. But look at what science has become in your broader view:

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/177346/cl...

Now don't just say that this is just a statement by a bureaucrat, and not intended to be science. The man represents the UNFPA. Very much like IPCC. The report that UNFPA recently put out is just the kind of big government proscription crap that is running rampant in our world.

The broadening of the definition of science also means a loss of rigor. Everybody knows this and protects themselves with the "peer reviewed" security blanket. Oh yeah? And who checks the peers? Nobody. As a result, global warming is the cause of everything nowadays.
Unless its cigarette smoke.
Or obesity.
Or sugar,
Or conservatives.
Or mercury.
Or the nebulous "pollution".
Or "chemicals".
Or non-ionizing radiation.
Or alcohol.
Or genetically modified grain.
Or over-grilled Tuna.
Or salt.
Or PCBs.
Or sunshine.
Or .........

Why do we even get out of bed in the morning?
Because dust mites are.....

Look, Paul, my desire to have all the scare tactics toned down and a more rigorous boundary put on science (especially epidemiology) is because of the lies that are told today.

Its lies, Paul, just as you say. They are allowed because everybody does it. The demise of science is just one of several examples of hippy-style thinking (non-judgementalism, diversity, etc) that has made us intellectually sloppy. Sloppy science, sloppy workmanship, sloppy everything, except marketing. They seem to be doing a better job than ever.

Remember....Science has a well-known liberal bias.

Olympics, science by definition must have a liberal bias. The purpose of science is to find new things. This is by definition, not conservative, ill-liberal, or dogmatic.

What has recently happened is that the checks that usually bound science are missing.

The most important check on science is that if you state a hypothesis, you must be prepared to properly test it. You must be able to take an action which actually does the statement, or something similar. The quality and quantity of the test is the measure of good science, regardless of how liberal or nonconformist the statement is.

But in today's world, science gets away with all kinds of statements that are quasi-scientific or downright untestable. Meaning that they aren't science.

I think you attribute "liberal" bias to the stealing of the science term by people who have political agendas.

How do we separate the science from the false marketing?

Whatever story is told about (whatever the notion), one must insist on testing. My earlier post links to a story of a statement that prostitution will increase in countries like the Philippines as a result of global warming. It is made by a person in the U.N. ostensibly on the basis of science.

Untestable conjecture. Not science. But the general public in inundated by a barrage of such articles daily. Science suffers. Science becomes less trusted.

Now, go have a glass of red wine (anti-oxidants) or maybe not, shoot I dunno anymore. All I know is that I've had $300 dollar a bottle red wine, and I'd rather have a Samuel Smith Tadcaster porter. Since I don't blog with alcohol in me, and its Saturday night I'm outta here.

You got to love the people that go after Foxnews. They don't watch it and have no idea what they are talking about. They are fans of CBS. You know Dan Rather's former hangout. What? Dan Rather the one that filed fake reports about Viet Nam....produced a fake document about Bush. That guy. They follow Al Gore's false global warming, and after that is proven false they now call it climate change. They read the New York Times. The paper whose subscriptions are at record low and fired reporter for making news up. They love the LA Times, same thing. They watch CNN whose viewership is the second lowest only to MSNBC. And when you think of all the democrats that worked for CNN that are now broadcasting with Fox, well we can see just how dumb they really are. So go ahead, put your head back in the sand. Hold on to your liberal values, as almost 17% of the nation remains unemployed with no hope in site, just hoping for change.

Why do people repeat falsehoods?

From my observations it is because they actually believe them. A lot of people will believe what they want to believe, no matter how thoroughly a thing is debunked or how obviously ridiculous it is. I think a cursory reading of the comments sections of this newspaper makes that quite obvious.

As for knowing what is true---we don't know what will happen in the future, although some comment writers certainly seem to believe they do. I'm pretty sure that some sort of health care bill will pass---I could be wrong. It might be successful and it might be a real bust. Nobody knows at this point. And there are usually, if not always, unintended consequences. Some might be good, although the unintended usually seem to turn out to be bad. Or maybe that is because it's the bad ones we take notice of.

One needs to educate oneself so that you can pick out what seems to be true and what sounds suspicious. And since one person can't know everything, figure out which "experts" seem to have it right most of the time and seem to be driven by a search for truth and not ideology.

Things are rarely black and white. Listen to all sides of the issue. It's not just "conservative" and "liberal"---there may be many sides---and sometimes there is only one side. Having a conservative and liberal debate about something does not make fair and balanced. All opinions are not of equal value. And looking at all sides can perhaps cut down on the unintended consequences.

And probably most important---look at your own beliefs and prejudices---are they clouding your perception of what is true? We must never be afraid of changing our minds. This is not flip-flopping, this is learning and growing.

There is much more, but this is enough for one comment.

Verity (truth!)
Spot on. The insanity that's dividing our country is scary because people hold on so stubbornly to the lies they believe that any reasonable discussion is impossible. It has gone way beyond holding personal beliefs or philosophies, it is antagonistic and accusatory and a violence of thoughts if not actions lies barely below the surface. It is crippling our democratic process and the very fabric of our nation.

I will take no end of attacks for the following, but so be it.
There is nothing coming from our government today that rivals the lies and misinformation of the previous administration. And while every person and group has a naturally biased point of view, there is no matching the insane and disturbing rhetoric and lies coming from the newly incited far right.

Staffo4. Yep. I chose to not even grace it with a response. Jr Highish sort of insult, which speaks volumes more about the speaker than the one they're aiming at.

Why do people repeat falsehoods?

Ask Leedavid, he apparently knows.