So naturally, he's done everything possible to ease passage of the Colombia Free Trade Pact, which the Bush Administration negotiated and the then-Democrat controlled Congress battled up. Right? Wrong.

As I write-in Investor's Business Daily, the pact is lopsided towards the U.S. in that Colombia's exports to us are already tariff-free, while our products sent there carry duties of up to 25% - an estimated $3.2 billion total since the agreement was reached.

Those tariffs would disappear and, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, expand opportunities for a broad array of U.S. sectors, increase our gross domestic product by about $2.5 billion, lower our massive trade deficit and create J-O-B-S.

That's also where export markets are opening up. Economic performance confidence levels are higher in Latin America than in any other part of the world. That's why other nations are busily entering trade agreements with Colombia, including the entire European Union.

Yet in December Obama refused to even send the Pact to Congress. I absolutely will not speculate as to why.

Not at all.

Nothing.

Not a hint.

Well, except that Big Labor doesn't like the Pact because it means competition for them. And Big Labor donates Big Money to political campaigns, with 90% going to the Dems.

But, of course, the Dems can't say that. So they say they're worried about protecting the rights - indeed the lives - of Colombian labor union members. Except that the percentage of such members reported killed last year was vastly below Colombia's overall homicide rate - not to mention a fraction of that of New Orleans.

But, under tremendous GOP pressure, it looks like Obama is finally sending the Pact to Congress - who, we should hope, has the wisdom to force the President to accept his own rhetoric.

More recently, I documented that the whole Toyota flap was mass sociogenic hysteria in the same category of the missing children and Satanic abuse in the day care centers hysteria. This notwithstanding that I've been unable to find a single publication willing to print what I show is clearly obvious. Editors don't think anybody is interested that this is America's greatest mass hysteria in many years, and that such mass hysterias usually cause tremendous and lasting damage. And maybe they're right.

Mind, "irrational" and "aberrational" are by no means synonymous. Often enough, irrationality rules the day and it's rationality that is aberrational.

The irrationality that interests me the most is my own. That's allowed because relative to other Americans, I don't have a very large ego. I readily admit when I do dumb things and I ponder why. Such is the case as I've been packing boxes for my forthcoming move to South America.

I found that with flattened boxes I was consistently flipping them so that I first taped the bottoms, filled the boxes, and then taped the tops. But what's a "bottom" and "top?" Silly! It's determined by the writing on the boxes! But who cares what the writing says? Top and bottom are whatever you make of them. So I was being irrational and wasting a bit of time in making sure the lettering was upright.

Or was I?

Fact is, while I SHOULD be packing as if the box is going to be tossed and tossed and tossed, probably part of my brain is assuming this box will be kept upright. Certainly when it's in my possession it will be. That's an important part of the time. And my guess is that while many movers will simply toss boxes about (more roughly, of course, if they're marked "fragile"), that a certain percentage will also be affected by the lettering on the side. Even if that percentage is quite small, spread across a large number of boxes (Too large, "Groan!") it could result in reduced breakage.

So the "irrational" turns out to be not so irrational after all!

Now, with a rub of my lucky rabbit's foot and a four-leaf clover in my pocket, I'm back to packing.

]]>http://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/2011/03/rationality_and.htmlhttp://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/2011/03/rationality_and.htmlPonderingsWed, 09 Mar 2011 13:05:44 -0500 Two items on the front page of yesterday's Washington Post: "Record U.S. Deficit Projected this Year" and "Two lawmakers from Michigan propose billions in incentives for buyers of electric cars." What's wrong with this picture? That's the problem. We don't see anything wrong with this picture. We want it all. But we can't have it all.

Some people think electric cars are nice, because the pollution they generate is off-site. But as Charles Lane, a liberal, writes: "If the cars were cheaper than gas-power cars of equal performance," that would be one thing. "But electrics are substantially more expensive than cars of greater quality." So we have to heavily subsidize them to get them out the door.

On the other hand, gasoline-powered car owners are forced to use ethanol. That's a subsidy to the everyone involved in the ethanol industry, and again it has to be subsidized because it's inferior to gasoline. It cuts your mileage and does essentially nothing to reduce pollution. You just can't go around subsidizing everything.

Behold a pale rider.

True enough, the main problem is entitlements. Which, not incidentally, are subsidies. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid already absorb 40% of the budget and grow inexorably without anybody casting a single vote to increase them. Left untouched, they will destroy the country. But earmarks are readily controllable and yet still uncontrolled.

Our nation has a spending addiction. And our politicians don't have the guts to tell the public that no, we can't have it all. And so we will continue to borrow and the Fed will continue to print money. In other words, subsidize the government so it can subsidize special interests.

But as Peter Orzag, Obama's former budget director, writes in the Financial Times, "International investors would be wise to pay close attention to fiscal trends within the U.S." Don't worry, they already are. And at some point, although it will be very costly to them, they will get nervous enough to stop subsiding our subsiding.

Orzag adds, "I hope it does not ultimately require a crisis to restore fiscal sustainability at the federal level, but I fear it will." Indeed, it will. At some point, some point soon, it will all come crashing down.

Watch.

"The worst e-mails I received about the civility project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists, and some words I wouldn't use in this phone call," Civility Project head Mark Demoss said.

"This political divide has become so sharp that everything is black and white, and too many conservatives can see no redeeming value in any liberal or Democrat. That would probably be true about some liberals going the other direction, but I didn't hear from them."

Mr. DeMoss said he was not convinced that there is a link between vicious political attacks and violent acts, but he added, "Whether or not there's violence, whether or not incivility today is worse than it's been in history, it's all immaterial. It's worse than it ought to be."

Comment:

We are experiencing a mass hysteria of political hatred and anger. Both are common to mass hysterias in that they stimulate the lower brain. Ultimately, you no longer see humans as humans.

Thus you can slaughter whole groups of people, even fact to face, just because they are DIFFERENT. Different nationality, different religion, different ethnic background, different wealth status. It doesn't really matter. You find something YOU believe is different enough to dehumanize them.

And there are always the rabble rousers. You know their names. I used to be friends with some of them. Whether they actually believe the awful things they say is irrelevant. It's good for their egos and pocketbooks and the damage is the same.

Slaughter is the worst, but there are lesser grades of harm that usually come first. And, in this case, hopefully not at all. But this isn't just a short-lived fad anymore than is the hatred and fear of intellectuals and the triumph of mediocrity.

It's yet another sign of a once-great nation in decline. The America we grew up in is no more. If it still looks like it is, you're prey to wishful thinking.

This is the face of pertussis.

Many people, including me, have spent years puncturing his claims and those of his acolytes in the anti-vaccine movement. But a media that thrives on sensationalism instead played up the phony link.

Yet while this "deliberate fraud" has been exposed, others continue to go unchallenged, or worse, get trumpeted by reporters who should know better.

Last year the World Health Organization, having exaggerated the world AIDS problem by 12-fold, then hyped SARS and then spent four years terrifying us over avian flu (remember avian flu?), converted the mildest flu strain in decades (swine flu H1N1) into the first flu pandemic in 41 years simply by rewriting the flu pandemic definition. Aiding it was a study in Science magazine that completely misrepresented the citations it used as authority.

Likewise, San Francisco last year became the first jurisdiction in the country to put warning labels on cell phones, influenced in great part by a series of studies published in peer-reviewed journals alleging they cause brain tumors. Yet as I wrote in a CEI paper, "Celling Fear," they're all by a single environmental activist and totally fly in the face of the main body of research. Plus the city relied on an Environmental Working Group paper that used citations saying exactly the opposite of what the report claimed.

Why does fraudulent science thrive? Better to ask, "Why not?" It pays.

Even when the fraudsters get caught, they often laugh all the way to the bank. Wakefield gets more than $300,000 a year in salary alone from an anti-vaccine group.

Why! That's even more than I got for writing that article for AOL News!

AIDS forgotten? Sure, like Sarah Palin is forgotten.

As I observe in my Forbes.com piece today, "On World AIDS Day, Let's Remember the True Forgotten Victims," The term "HIV" brings up over 100 million Google hits in just the past year. Nor is it even an epidemic. U.S. AIDS cases peaked 17 years ago, then plummeted to a steady "endemic" level within three years. Worldwide, a UNAIDS report released last week states the epidemic peaked 11 years ago in terms of cases, with infections peaking much earlier.

Yet HIV/AIDS will receive over $3 billion in the 2011 federal research budget. That doesn't include an entirely separately-funded "infectious disease" category. Granted, it's shy of the 100 billion gagillion that Dr. Evil wanted in order to ransom the earth, but:

• HIV/AIDS gets about $200,000 per patient death in the NIH research budget, according to calculations from the FAIR Foundation (Fair Allocations in Research). We spend 21 times more per AIDS death than cancer death. Pancreatic cancer will strike about 43,000 Americans this year and is essentially a quick death sentence. It gets one percent of the funding per death as AIDS.


• Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, are the nation's sixth and 14^th-leading causes of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.


• The disparity is all the worse when trends are considered. While AIDS cases and deaths remain level, those of Parkinson's are inexorably climbing while those of Alzheimer's are flying off the chart.


• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis are the ninth leading cause of death in this country, causing three times as many deaths as AIDS. Compared to those 100 million Google hits for AIDS over the past year, "nephritis" got just 1.3 million. Far more importantly, the Medline database lists fewer than 2,000 total published medical papers on nephritis, compared to 21,000 on HIV/AIDS in just the past year.

Federal non-research AIDS spending far exceeds the combined research grant budget for all diseases combined - including AIDS! This even as NIH has to turn away over three-fourth of grant applicants.

It's Koop who's worried about being forgotten. So let's indulge him. Let's recall that he was among the worst perpetrators of AIDS mass hysteria, which I first debunked in a 1987 article and then my 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, including popularizing the term "heterosexual AIDS explosion." The lesson here, Koop said in his talk with no hint of irony, is "If you tell people the truth, in a very factual way, they will act."

No, the lesson is you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time. And then become a hero for it - even as the entire nation pays a horrible price for it for perhaps generations to come.

A surveillance video posted by Fox Chicago News Online shows a 2006 Toyota Corolla backing out of a parking space and striking a car. The Corolla then shoots forward and slams into another vehicle, knocking it aside. Next the car swerves, presumably in an effort to avoid a strip mall, and crashes into a brick wall. The driver, Leon Przybylowski, died of his injuries later that day.

Artist's conception of media view of all Toyotas

As I write in my new Forbes.com piece, "In Black and White, the Toyota Hysteria Exemplified," the family is now suing Toyota. They insist the video supports their claim that Przybylowski, as the newscaster put it, was "yet another victim of sudden unintended acceleration." Their lawyer says it was another victim of "across the board" and "systematic failure" on the part of Toyota. Both, huh?

Actually, the incident is almost a perfect example of why Toyota SUA accidents really happen, comprising as it does:
• Elderly drivers
  
• Parking lots
  
• A sensationalist media
  
• Trial lawyers
  
• Misconceptions about how cars work generally and throttles and brakes specifically
  
• Ignorance, willful or otherwise, of solid data and substitution with presumptions, unwarranted allegations, and emotion
  

There’s no systematic failure with Toyotas. Prior to the hysteria outbreak, only three sudden acceleration complaints were filed with NHTSA regarding 380,000 Toyota Corollas model year 2006. Rather that failure has been that of the media in utterly failing to convey the importance of the above factors.

Texting behind the wheel accounted for 16,141 deaths between 2002 and 2007, according to Researchers from the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Ft. Worth. One way of putting that in context is that in the last 10 years NHTSA has attributed five (5) deaths to sudden unintended acceleration in Toyotas, four in one car. So where are all the newspaper articles and congressional hearings on text messaging?

Hope that last text was important!

To arrive at their number, Fernando A. Wilson and Jim P. Stimpson, writing in the Nov. issue of the American Journal of Public Health, analyzed nationwide data from the Fatality Accident Reporting System and texting records from the Federal Communications Commission and CTIA, a wireless telecom industry group.

They compared the number of deaths there have been versus those that would have occurred if there were no text messaging.

And it's only going to get worse. The average monthly number of text messages was 1 million in 2002, but by 2008 it was 110 million.

Panic over five deaths and complacency over 16,000? Not untypical. Since my first AIDS article in 1987 it's been a common theme of mine that the media, the government, and people in general aren't just irrational about reducing risks but actually tend to view them butt-backwards. The more rare something is, the more attention it gets along with more regulations. The more common something is, the more used to it we are and are willing to accept it.

Cassandra is not just the stuff of Greek legends.

That's because vaccine companies were going the way of the woolly mammoth, in part because it's just not a very profitable business and in great part because they were awash in over $3.5 billion of lawsuits claiming little more than the post hoc fallacy of "Before the person was vaccinated her or she was fine and since the vaccination he or she became sick." Seriously.

If certain people in black robes make the wrong decision, this guy in a black robe will need to be paid overtime.

Even as it dramatically cut spurious claims, it helped persons who really had suffered from adverse reactions both by cutting litigation costs and by taking them outside of "roulette wheel" justice wherein a case might net a reward of millions while a virtually identical one would be rejected entirely.

But as I write at Forbes.com, this system itself is now endangered by a Supreme Court case in which the plaintiffs are claiming that having lost their case in Vaccine Court that rather than appeal within that system they should be able to try the case in state or federal court. And Congress did allow for some such exceptions.

But no, not this one. It's very clear from the history of what led up to the statute that Congress did not want cases such as these to bypass the system. Why? In part as one court found, it could to a great extent destroy that very system. I provide other arguments. If we lose this system many, many children will not get their vaccines until something else is instituted. And many will die.

O'REILLY: Everybody knows that scientists have enough knowledge to clone a human being if they wanted to.

O'DONNELL: Right.

O'REILLY: But they're not, at least not that we know of. And now they're in the monkey realm. And I don't understand, if that's the possibility that people might be cured, why the objection. Because I never buy the slippery slope....

O'DONNELL: By their own admission these groups admitted that the report that said, "Hey, yay, we cloned a monkey. Now we're using this to start cloning humans." We have to...

O'REILLY: Let them admit anything they want. But they won't do that here in the United States unless all craziness is going on.

O'DONNELL: They are - they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment.

Fact check:

Presumably O'Donnell was misremembering a 2005 report about growing human brain cells within mice. Not the same as an actual functioning human brain. Yes, it has been demonstrated that some mice are more intelligent than members of Congress but no genetic manipulation was required.

Regarding O'Reilly, as per usual when you see the term "everyone knows" it's a hint of something untrue. It is possible that scientists now have the capability of cloning a human being.

But cloning mice proved fairly easy, sheep much harder, and monkeys much harder yet. Until somebody actually does clone a human being, we won't know whether scientists have enough knowledge. But of course at some point they will have the knowledge and the will clone humans. And it won't be the end of the world. We already have human clones. They're called identical twins.

One thing I say for both Colbert and John Stewart is that agree or disagree with them, they are truly funny. I can't say that for some of the TV and radio show hosts on the right, nor former radio show host Al Franken.

In fact, Franken wasn't even funny on SNL. I was on his show once and he was far from funny there, hardly justifying his $3 million a year contract that helped bring his entire network down. In fact, he said something about my colleague Capt. Joe ("Crazy Joe") in quoting from my article "The New Band of Brothers," that horrified me at the time.

I was writing about my first fight, video of which you can see here though I intentionally blurred it for the sake of protecting the identity of the SEALs, in which Claburn was the only soldier. The others were SEALs. As you can see and hear, it was intense.

I wrote, "As we take fire, Claburn yells: 'Hear them cracking over your head? That’ll get your peter hard, huh?'" To be clear on this, if you hear rounds whistling by it means they're fairly close. But a crackling sound means they're REALLY close. It's only luck that a chunk of lead isn't slamming you in the face. A few weeks later, one of those SEALs was shot right through the mouth and became the first to die in Iraq.

Franken read those words and sneared. But those are the things soldiers say to keep themselves and their buddies sane in what's actually an insane position to voluntarily be in.

Well, now the disparaged Crazy Joe is paralyzed from the waist down. And Al Franken is a senator. And that's how it works.

With a grand total so far of one patient.

"I don't understand [having] human trials because the animal studies aren't very convincing," David Bennett, a University of Alberta neuroscientist renowned for his experimentation with spinal-cord injuries, told me for my AOL News piece today. "My gut feeling is that it's a scam," he said.

Cats can regrown severed spinal cords to the extent they can walk again without help, though mine prefers to literally lie down and monitor me.

My article explains why the company behind it, Geron, felt compelled to proceed. It comes down to one word: money. In part, they've been spending on this work for 15 years with no human experimentation. Stockholders don't like that.

But there's much more to the Geron "scam."

For example, Geron says it will only treat patients injured in the preceding two weeks. Yet that's when injured spinal cords are spontaneously generating new cells in an effort to heal.

Studies in cats with completely severed spines show that with mere treadmill exercise, as one found, all of them could walk again without assistance, though sadly their mouse-chasing days were behind them.

Even if none of Geron's patients shows any improvement in sensation or mobility, sensitive tests like electromyography or one mercifully abbreviated to SEP can detect increases in cell growth or something called plasticity.

That would give Geron a chance to claim success when there was none.

Meanwhile, there has already been success using adult stem cells to treat human paralysis. But money for these trials has steadily been diverted to, yes, ESC work.

Incidentally, Bennett has 106 citations in MedLine, but nobody else in the media quotes the real experts. Instead, they go to the "old reliables" who just happen to have millions of dollars invested in embryonic stem cell research. Which is why, unfortunately, you read stuff like this here first.