Humility

I’ve never cared much for the braying exuberance with which most athletes now celebrate their goals or hits or victories.  I didn’t like Bautista’s bat flip.  I don’t like football (real football) players acting like they just raised someone from the dead every time they score a goal.  Why?  Simple: humility is a good thing.   You are not that great.  You performed an exceptional athletic feat: that’s all.  It’s just a physical ability.  It gives pleasure to your fans but not to the fans of the other 30 teams.  You achieved the ability to perform this feat by focusing all of your energy and passion into an extremely limited range of physical activity thereby depriving you of the opportunity to develop your mind, or your other physical skills.  It is not that great.

In American cities, in the South especially, football heroes– even at the high school level– are treated like gods.  They get the best seats in the local restaurants and never have to wait in line.  They get all the love.  They are treated like Disney Princesses: entitled, privileged, spoiled.  They are Disney Princesses.

I get arguments about this.  The bat flip was wonderful.  It was so much fun. Why shouldn’t he celebrate a great moment in sports?

Well, let’s turn it around.  How about if someone reads and understands a difficult book on economics?  How would you feel if he jumped up and down and screamed and shook his fist and yelled, “I know how capital accumulates!  I’m smarter than you!”?  You would despise him for his arrogance.   How about if he ridiculed one of your favorite movies, like “Shawshank Redemption”, as mediocre, unimaginative, and uninteresting, and recommended, instead “The White Ribbon”?  You asshole!  What if he looked at you with a slight sneer and said, “Really?  Neil Diamond?  You like Neil Diamond?”

Imagine.  In those Southern American cities: here’s a student with an A average: he gets the best table.  He gets the girls.  Strange people recognize him and slap him on the back.  You’ve made us all proud: you are smart.  You are a Princess.

You athletes will just have to wait your turn.

 

[whohit]Humility[/whohit]

 

 

 

The Ethics of the Unethical

When Martin Shkreli raised the price of Retrophin, a pharmaceutical used to treat AIDS, from $13.50 to $750.00 per dose, there was outrage.  Shkreli, who has since been arrested for fraud unrelated to the price increase, insisted that this was free enterprise.  There was no moral issue.  If anything, it was morally right for him to maximize the profits of his company.

I thought, what if I broke into Shkreli’s home in the middle of the night and stole his laptop computer, watches, and cameras.

Shkreli would probably think I had robbed him.  He would probably– I can’t quote him on it– call the police, if he could, and have me arrested for trespassing and burglary.  And I would look him in the eye, in court, and say, “What’s your problem?  What’s wrong with taking your stuff?  You don’t even really own it.”   Even better, if I could say that from afar, some other country, which did not have any kind of extradition treaty with the U.S.   And I would say, “what is your definition of moral”?

He might say, “it’s wrong to steal”.  And I would ask, “how do you know?”  Maybe he believes in the bible.  Maybe he believes that one should always treat others the way one would want to be treated.  Maybe he believes something like “always treat others the way you yourself would like to be treated”.

Or maybe he believes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you just take whatever you can whenever you can because that’s what everybody else would do if they could.

No, that’s not possible, is it?

He might believe that such miracles as Retrophin are only possible thanks to our wonderful capitalist system which holds that the owner of a particular item has absolute control over its use and distribution and price.  Of course, the makers and sellers of Retrophin were already doing quite well before he jacked up the price, and it had been developed under a system with the built-in expectation of a certain cost to the drug, and that had worked, and it has been shown that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising and marketing than they do on developing drugs, so they can’t be serious about argument that the high price is the cost of developing advanced drugs.

More likely a tax-payer funded university research lab developed the basics of the drug and then a drug company bought in somewhat later.

But if we were all in a wagon training headed west in 1871 and we were crossing a desert and Mr.  Shkreli happened to own the only bottle of water left and everyone else was about to die, would it be his “right” to sell it for the exclusive use of the highest bidder, and let everyone else die?

I dislike these allegories.  What Mr. Shkreli is doing is already essentially the same thing: AIDS patients need Retrophin to survive: Mr. Shkreli is extorting a wonderful price.  It is extortion.  Extortion is wrong.

[whohit]The Ethics of the Unethical: Martin Shkreli[/whohit]

 

The “Best” Pro-Life Argument Ever

I recently saw a post on Facebook said to be “the best pro-life argument I have ever seen”.  I was curious, so I checked it out.   I’m always suspicious of articles on controversial subjects that start out with something like “I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student…”   And then I saw the light!  I saw the truth.  From an article in Esquire– of all places– written in 1976(!).  So, Frederica Matthewes-Green insists, I’m not one of those dim-witted automatons merely spouting the ravings of my pro-gun, pro-war, patriotic right-wing church.

These writers always seem to feel that it’s a compelling trope.  I used to be like you.  But she doesn’t follow up with a list of other positions she has now adopted because she knows that that list would undermine her seductive introduction.  Is she still opposed to war?  Is she opposed to capital punishment?  Is she in favor of universal health care?  Does she support parental leave?  Maternity leave?  Did she ever?  Really?

After reading her list of the things she supported back in the old folkie days, it becomes clear that whatever she thought she was in favor of back then, in her “hippie days”, it wasn’t what other people of her generation thought they were in favor of.  In her coy estimation, it seems that women back then didn’t think much at all, and expected ridiculous things in the future.

That becomes evident when  she proceeds to create a straw-man, the kind of person she believes believes in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.  This prop of hers thinks embryos are just a blob, and that abortion would only ever be used in emergencies, as a last, desperate measure, and that there is nothing violent or distasteful about it all– beliefs that kind of cancel each other out, when you think about it.

And then the big slide.   Having described in detail the painful, awful experience of an abortion at 20 weeks, she then proceeds to draw conclusions that makes no sense given her claimed pedigree of enlightenment and intelligence:

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg.

Oh, everybody “knows that”?   So, the enlightened progressive who rationally concluded that abortion is horrible suddenly leaps, magically, to the belief that life begins right at the instant of conception, all without a single reference to any religious belief.

She does not provide, of course, any logic or reason or analysis that would lead anyone to conclude that because a 20-week old fetus seems very human and perhaps entitled to the protection of the law, therefore the first two cells together must also be entitled the same recognition.

So why not, at the beginning of the article, acknowledge that your beliefs are grounded in your religion, not in your reason?   Why are you pretending to reason your way to a conclusion that really doesn’t follow any of your arguments?  Well, we know why: because nobody would take her arguments seriously.  Believers will have already agreed with her, and non-believers will find her irrelevant.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is not unaware of the problem.  From her website:

I have seen so much effort to produce publications, books, music, movies, and so on that can stand in the public square as quality material, and attract unbelievers. But look back at # 3; that only works as long as the material does not point to Christian faith. Once the mask slips and they realize we have been trying all along to bring them to Christ, they get angry. They feel duped.

Yes.  Well.  Try as you might to present an anti-abortion argument that seems rational and geared towards the general, public interest, your mask slipped, when you magically arrived at the point that life begins at conception.   That is a religious belief and the argument that because an embryo has the complete DNA of an individual human being it is entitled to equal protection falls apart because brain-dead humans also have the complete DNA of an individual human being, as well as a complete body.

[whohit]The Best “Pro-Life Argument Ever[/whohit]

The Oil of Machines

We are not running out of oil.  We are inundated with the propaganda from the oil industry which simultaneously requires us to believe that there is so little oil left that we must pay dearly for it and that there is so much oil left that we don’t really need to pursue alternative energy sources seriously, but we are not running out of oil.  Yet.

We will, some day.  We are using a lot of it.  But there is a lot left, and a lot is being “discovered” at times convenient to the industry, at such a rate that even though we were literally, absolutely, indubitably, running out of oil in the 1970’s, during the first great oil crisis, we remain inundated with oil, everywhere.  The U.S., in fact, imports far less oil now than it did 20 years ago.  That would be very, very strange, if we had actually been running out of oil in the 1970’s, or 80’s, or 90’s.

Furthermore, there will not be a monumental crisis when we run out of oil.  The fact is that there are numerous potential replacements for oil, all of which already work quite well.  Why don’t we use them?  Because it is still cheaper to use oil, right now, and more convenient.  But if we ever really started running out of oil and the price per barrel began to soar, to $500, $750, $1200, $2000 a barrel, we would move rather quickly to electric or hydrogen cars, and we would begin to build more nuclear reactors, and windmills, and solar panels, which are quickly becoming cheaper and more efficient.   There is no great impediment to these technologies right now, except for the cheap cost of oil, and the massive existing infrastructure that supports it.

Oil, of course, is used for many things, besides transportation.  There will be hardships and adjustments, but nothing mankind can’t handle with some effort.

Soon or not so soon, we are not going to freeze in the dark.  We will use cleaner, more efficient forms of energy.  In the end, the world will probably be a better place.  Is that a tear I see on your cheek, for the passing of oil?

An Epidemic of Diagnoses

You have to distinguish between an epidemic of diagnoses and an epidemic of allergies. Dr. Nicholas Christakis

A recent story out of Sacramento describes the tragedy of the death of Natalie Giorgi, a 13-year-old girl who was allergic to peanuts and inadvertently swallowed a bite of a Rice Krispies square that had “peanut products” in it. Her parents had two EPI-Pens, used them both, then used a third from the camp where their daughter had been staying. Natalie’s father, a physician, couldn’t save her, and neither could the EMS team that arrived by helicopter.

Now the Giorgi’s have gone public because they want to convince a skeptical public that food allergies are real and pose a real threat to public health and safety. They believe most people aren’t already hysterical enough about food allergies. We need to ramp it up.

Now, I don’t know where the Giorgis stand on gun control, or drunk driving, or lightening, but, if we, as a society, were to respond intelligently to genuine threats to health and safety, we might be better off channeling our energies into more productive causes.

Even worse, the remedies proposed most often– declaring schools “peanut free”, for example– may actually be having the opposite effect. In Israel, where peanuts are a popular snack, the rate of peanut allergies among children is about 0.17%. In Britain, where peanuts are less popular, the allergy rate is 2%.

About 150 people die every year in the U.S. due to an allergic reaction. About half are due to peanuts. That’s slightly more than the number of people who die from lightening strikes.

Be it noted: there is a lot of misplaced faith placed in Epi-Pens.

Junk Science in Court: Bite Me

If you were charged with a crime in the U.S. and put on trial, would you assume that the forensic evidence introduced in court against you would at least be based on some kind of sound, factual, scientific research? Think again.

Frontline recently ran a documentary on the “science” of fingerprinting, bite mark analysis, and other forensic “sciences” and demonstrated rather convincingly that many courts will allow testimony by self-styled experts that has no basis in any substantive research whatsoever.

The most dramatic examples were related to two men who had been in prison for ten years or more for assaulting and murdering three-year-old girls. In both cases, the men were the former boyfriends of the girls’ mother. In both cases, an orthodontist who claimed to be versed in the science of bite mark analysis testified that scratches on the little girls’ bodies were actually bite marks that could only have come from the suspects, to the exclusion of everyone else. In each case, this testimony was the bulwark of the prosecution’s argument. In each case, the judge allowed the testimony. In each case, the man was convicted. In each case, DNA analysis– which is founded in real science– eventually exonerated the men, and the real killer confessed to the crimes.

Do I have to be polite when expressing myself about how I feel about these judges for allowing this testimony into their courts? This is not a matter upon which reasonable, educated people might respectfully beg to differ. These are witch trials that have no place in a civil society.

How far does it go? At the Casey Anthony trial a self-styled expert in smells testified that a container of smell– I’m not making this up– from the trunk of Casey Anthony’s car contained the smell of a dead body. Casey Anthony was found not guilty largely because she was able to raise $200,000 for decent lawyers by selling pictures of her with Caylee to People Magazine. Those lawyers successfully challenged a host of junk science evidence.

Now, there are rules about “expert” testimony. Prosecutors interviewed by Frontline didn’t seem aware of them. One of them declared that it was up to the jury to determine whether the smell evidence was truthful, relevant, or accurate. It is not. The Supreme Court has ruled that the judge is the “gatekeeper” for expert testimony and determines whether any specific evidence should be presented or not.

Furthermore, evidence will be deemed qualified if it has been gathered according to a scientific methodology which makes use of valid scientific procedures. One key element is falsifiability.

That said, some judges will permit both sides to present evidence on the scientific validity of certain procedures and expect the jury to sort it out. This gives an enormous advantage to the heavily resourced prosecution in most cases.


My own take on the Caylee Anthony case? I doubt we’ll ever know the truth. Casey Anthony is clearly a disturbed, unstable, delusional young woman, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is also a murderess. She could be. But we’ve seen enough wrongful convictions to know that people tend to fit the facts to the preferred narrative, not the other way around, and whacky, unstable people are particularly vulnerable.

Here’s the most compelling point in her favor: if the police and prosecutors really believed she was guilty, why on earth did they introduce so much whacky junk forensic science into the proceedings? If you were a prosecutor, wouldn’t you have dumped the “smell” science immediately as something that looked specious and stupid, and would ultimately weaken your case? If you really believed in your own case, with any kind of integrity or intelligence, why would you introduce so many dubious elements into your presentation?

The answer is that prosecutors and police believe that the court system is a bit of a game, and you do what it takes to win, and getting at the truth is merely a secondary objective. I think they see a kind of organic logic to the system, justice theatre, in which their goal is to lock up bad people when something bad happens. If a few innocent people get snagged along the way, so be it.

And if a particular suspect didn’t commit a particular crime but was busted for it anyway– it’s a small price to pay for a system which, they believe, ultimately “works”.



When I was very young, my brother came into our house one day and told me he needed help. He led me to the back of the garage where he had started a fire which was now beginning to lick up the exterior wall. He wanted me to help him put it out. We began filling small plastic buckets with sand from the sand box and throwing it on the wall. In spite of our efforts, the flames grew bigger and bigger, and I believe I was about to tell him we should get real help when I noticed he had disappeared. He had gone back into the house to tell our mom that I had started a fire behind the garage.

I denied it, of course. My mom stared at me and ask me if I was telling the truth. Everybody knows that if you are telling the truth, you won’t get nervous and giggle. I giggled. Busted.

Or maybe I wasn’t. I had a feeling that Mom wasn’t totally convinced. I don’t remember any big punishment other than having to stay in my room for a while.

We now know, I hope, that people giggle when they are nervous, whether they are lying or not. It was the bite mark of my childhood, a wrongful conviction based on spurious evidence. You might think it trivial, but I have never forgotten. I few years ago, I brought it up at a family party and my brother acknowledged that he, in fact, had started the fire. Within a year, the entire family seemed to forget that revelation and went right back to blaming me for it.

, and even to this day my siblings tend to remember that I started that fire rather than the fact that Ed finally admitted the truth years ago.

Locard’s Exchange Principle and Dr. Sam Sheppard

Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value. Paul Leland Kirk, describing Locard’s Exchange Principle, 1953.

Dr. Edmond Locard, one of the pioneer’s of “forensic science”.  He allegedly solved several high-profile cases through the rigorous application of his Exchange Principle, particularly applied to clothing fibres.

That does not sound unfamiliar. It sounds like something you might hear a Crown Attorney tell a jury after having provided for them an entertaining “analysis” by an expert “microscopist” proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a fibre from a sweater owned by the accused was found near the body of the victim. Or that a tiny, invisible pin-head-sized dot on a car door is actually, possibly, almost certainly, human blood, maybe. Or that the baby could only have died as a result of incredibly forceful shaking by the only person with the baby at the time of death, with a 99% degree of certainty.

I have a feeling this is prevailing mythology around police investigators and prosecutors in North America. As such, it is extravagantly misleading. It answers a question that does not need to be asked– the real question is, does a “matching” fibre really provide an exclusive match to the material in question? Does it prove that the suspect and only the suspect could have committed the crime?

What exactly is a “match” anyway? You might be surprised to know that the answer is somewhat religious: I know because I know. There is no objective criteria for what constitutes a match because there is no “science” of microscopy– check it out: there isn’t. There is no research or systematic investigation that shows how and where and why fibres travel or are found. There is no statistical proof that any particular fibre is unlikely to match any other fibre from any other article of clothing of similar characteristics…

Locard is right in one sense: at any given crime scene there will be multitudes of “evidence”, of fibres, of blood, hairs, saliva, skin flakes, whatever. The question is, what does any particular sample prove?

About the silliest comment in the entire quote is “physical evidence cannot be wrong”. No one said it could. Indeed, no one ever accused a fibre of lying. But when a “microscopist” tells a jury that he has some kind of rational calculation to tell them about the odds of that particular fibre coming from someone else’s sweater– he is lying.

If you are intrigued by this, you might want to read the blood spatter testimony of Dr. Paul Leland Kirk, who claims to be an expert in “criminalistics”.   Yes, that’s a made-up word, for a made-up science.

Yeah, I used to eat this stuff up too, but when I read it now it almost sounds farcical. Well, all right– it’s not entirely farcical. At least he did some experiments and testing which, even if it was ridiculously specious and capricious, at least gave some empirical heft to his testimony. I’m not hard to please: I would have loved to see a well-funded defense team record on film some of their own experiments and then try to persuade Dr. Kirk to analyze the results and compare his conclusions to the actual record.

I’m not ridiculing science here. In fact, it is precisely because I value real science highly that I think our criminal justice system has to start filtering out the junk science that tries to pass for the real thing. Kirk’s testimony at the Sam Sheppard trial is a classic case: he mixes in real scientific facts and research with rather startling conclusions that don’t really have a tight connection to the evidence. His statements about the arc of the swing of the attacker’s arms, the angle from which she was struck, and the source of various blood spatters strike me as dubious at best. It provides a patina of “science” to a lot of conjecture, the signal conjecture being that Marilyn Sheppard was murdered by someone who was left-handed (Dr. Sheppard was right-handed).

The truth is there may have been an element to the crime that no one has thought of yet. If you think Dr. Sheppard’s explanation of what happened is a little difficult to believe, that is precisely because we are not likely to imagine, before hand, the sequence of events he describes. And we all know how often the police create suspects out of people who do not behave the way they expect after a traumatic event, including Lindy Chamberlain.

Sheppard’s account:

According to Sheppard, he was sleeping soundly on a daybed when he heard the cries from his wife. He ran upstairs where he saw a “white biped form” in the bedroom and then he was knocked unconscious. When he awoke, he saw the person downstairs, chased the intruder out of the house down to the beach where they tussled and Sheppard was knocked unconscious again.  From Wiki.

There are good sciences, like DNA analysis, that do inspire confidence. So far, it is most famous for exonerating people who were convicted based on evidence like that given by Paul Kirk.


Weird Detail: Sam Sheppard later married a German woman named “Ariane Tebbenjohanns” who was half-sister to Magda Goebbels, who helped murder her five children in Hitler’s bunker in the waning days of the 3rd Reich, rather than leave them alive in world without her beloved Fuehrer.

Even Weirder Detail: Sam Sheppard later established himself as a professional wrestler (I am not making this up).  Later yet, he returned to surgery where his incompetence caused the deaths of two patients.  He died of alcoholism April 6, 1970.

 

Deregulation: Bisphenol

In 2007 it was reported that among government-funded BPA experiments on lab animals and tissues, 153 found adverse effects and 14 did not, whereas all 13 studies funded by chemical corporations reported no harm. Assessment of potential impact on human health involves measurement of residual BPA in the products and quantitative study of its ease of separation from the product, passage into the human body and residence time and location there.

The studies indicating harm reported a variety of deleterious effects in rodent offspring exposed in the womb: abnormal weight gain, insulin resistance, prostate cancer, and excessive mammary gland development.[41] [wikipedia]

Wow. That might explain a lot.

It is amazing to me how many people will declare that the government should keeps it’s stupid fingers off the regulation of industry and private enterprise and just let competition do it’s work and we would all be happier, healthier, and better off.

So the industry can do it’s own studies of BPA (Bisphenol A) and we, the public, and potential customers of products containing BPA can trust that when they do twelve studies and all of them show that BPA is completely safe, it is damn well completely safe.

So why did the government do 167 studies? Who told them to? Why are they interfering with the marketplace? If customers get cancer from a product, you can rest assured, sales are bound to decline.

This government study in which 153 of 167 studies found adverse effects… who do you want to believe? The “adverse effects industry” or the company that stands to make a profit by selling you the stuff?

The Republican primaries almost lead one to believe that there are legitimate reasons to consider a world in which corporations simply behave as they wish to and consumers have the might and wherewithal to prevent them from wrecking havoc on our lives with impunity. I say “impunity” because the idea that de-regulation will stop at the free market is absurd: the Republicans are fighting this battle on many fronts and one of their pet projects is to emasculate class action lawsuits and restrict the rights of consumers to seek redress when defective products cause harm or economic or environmental hardships.

The Universe is Expanding

The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

Yes, we’re all concerned about Greece defaulting on it’s debt, but the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.

My question is, is the earth at the center of the universe? If it was, it might seem reasonable to conclude that God created the earth and the universe and started it on it’s way. And we are indeed the center of the universe and Lady Gaga is the center of the world.

But it doesn’t solve the mystery of the fact that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.


I stole the picture at right from the New York Times article as well. If they want it back, all they have to do is ask.

The picture above, by the way, is of my feet, taken in 1976 in Calgary, Alberta, on a beautiful day in June. I was reading Fydor Dostoevsky’s first novel, Netochka Nezvanova.

Chinese Science

I came upon this marvelous item in the New York Times today that made me want to move to China:

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

They don’t “waste time” questioning scientific data? Wow. Imagine that. Leaders who make decisions based on science.

So what do our leaders here in Canada and the U.S. base their decisions on?

But let’s not get glib about it. “Men of science” can have creepy overtones.