The Republican War on Science Continues

[evince]

"WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking.

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently."
***
"Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades — to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children — might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal.

For instance, a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s air-quality laws, could become inadmissible. When gathering data for their research, known as the Six Cities study, scientists signed confidentiality agreements to track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 people in six cities. They combined that personal data with home air-quality data to study the link between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality.

But the fossil fuel industry and some Republican lawmakers have long criticized the analysis and a similar study by the American Cancer Society, saying the underlying data sets of both were never made public, preventing independent analysis of the conclusions."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/climate/epa-science-trump.html

pure evil

 

[evince]

Truth ^

The leaders of our first nation bands here are supposed to follow the "seven generations" rule. All decisions made are to be weighed with the future in mind -- "How will what we do today affect us seven generations down the road?" We would all do well to adopt that thinking ourselves. I was born in a time when no one really cared much about pollution and how it might affect health. Fortunately my elders realized that my generation (their children) and those after would suffer if we didn't clean up our nest. So they passed the legislation that created the EPA. As a result I -- and every other American -- has been able to breathe relatively clean air, and drink clean safe water. (Your results may vary in Flint.)

Unless we rid ourselves of 1) anti-education/anti-science morons, and 2) extreme partisanship, those bad old days will be coming back.

the generation that came of age in the 1950s were raised in a time in history when the Corporations and the CEOs pitched in on the war effort


they made profit sacrifices to help save the nation


NATION over corporation


they were raised thinking of these entities as patriotic and moral


they are not


and they refuse to realize what these people are now

 

[Cypress]

I suspect the vast majority of rightys believe ln science. The fact is the leaders of the right find profit in fighting environmental laws. They have decided that more profits in their lifetimes trumps keeping the future cleaner for those who follow. The Kochs and others on top are trading more profit now for a dirtier future.
The elite rightys are not stupid. They are like Trump. They look no farther than what benefits themselves now.

I maintain that the reasonably well educated Trump boot-lickers are fully aware at a visceral level that emitting billions of tons of heat trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, year after year, decade after decade, is a really bad idea and certainly not sustainable.

The problem is, they are weak people with fragile egos who spent two decades getting themselves emotionally invested in climate denial; they simply cannot admit to obscure message board posters they have never met, that they were wrong.

The Denial Cabal also has an average age of about eighty four, so being self-centered and self-absorbed conservatives, they do not really give that much of a rat's ass about what will happen to American generations 50 years from now. Why should elderly Deniers, bound soon for the grave, spend their money to help people half a century from now?

As for the profit motive, addressing climate denial in any realistic sense means asking our Corporate Overlords to leave trillions of barrels of undeveloped petroleum in the ground, and never burn it. That is asking these oligarchs to simply walk away from trillions of dollars in profit. I really can't think of any time in human history were environmental sustainability took precedence over trillions of bucks in profit. But I am ever hopeful this might be the one case it actually transpires, because climate change has the reasonable potential to be an existential threat to the earth's ecology, agriculture, and the global economy.

 

[Guno צְבִי]

A good insight

My theory is that, at a philosophical level, cons are slaves to fundementalist Protestantism thus being more concerned with personal salvation, and not the worldly concerns of reason, inductive inquiry, and scholarship

More bluntly , to most conservatives quantum mechanics might as well be black magic!

 

[ThatOwlWoman]

I've seen this chart before. It's astounding, isn't it?

 

[Althea]

I've seen this chart before. It's astounding, isn't it?

They lumped all Jewish together, which really skews the data. The ultra religious (hasidic) Jews stop studying the three Rs after grammar school, and opt for studying Torah.

As such, there are tens of thousands of illiterate Jews that are lumped in with educated Jews.

We have a large contingent here in the summer. I tried to explain what an apostrophe is to one of them this summer. I might as well speak Mandarin to them.

 

[ThatOwlWoman]

They lumped all Jewish together, which really skews the data. The ultra religious (hasidic) Jews stop studying the three Rs after grammar school, and opt for studying Torah.

As such, there are tens of thousands of illiterate Jews that are lumped in with educated Jews.

We have a large contingent here in the summer. I tried to explain what an apostrophe is to one of them this summer. I might as well speak Mandarin to them.

A good example of how fundie-anything is detrimental to the human brain. You can really see that down at the bottom of the chart.

 

[Althea]

A good example of how fundie-anything is detrimental to the human brain. You can really see that down at the bottom of the chart.

Exactly. I was going to make that connection.

 

[ThatOwlWoman]

Exactly. I was going to make that connection.

Thanks for the information on the Fundie Jewish community. How numerous are they?

 

[Cypress]

They lumped all Jewish together, which really skews the data. The ultra religious (hasidic) Jews stop studying the three Rs after grammar school, and opt for studying Torah.

As such, there are tens of thousands of illiterate Jews that are lumped in with educated Jews.

We have a large contingent here in the summer. I tried to explain what an apostrophe is to one of them this summer. I might as well speak Mandarin to them.

My informed guess is that the hasidic tradition is a exceedingly small portion of American Judaism.

Most religions have various sects and splinter groups. This poll obviously cannot account for all the splinter groups, and has to resort to some form of lumping together.

The poll rings true to me, at least based on life experience -- American Jews, to me, seem to generally hold books, literature, higher education in the utmost esteem.

 

[Althea]

My informed guess is that the hasidic tradition is a exceedingly small portion of American Judaism.

Most religions have various sects and splinter groups. This poll obviously cannot account for all the splinter groups, and has to resort to some form of lumping together.

The poll rings true to me, at least based on life experience -- American Jews, to me, seem to generally hold books, literature, higher education in the utmost esteem.

I didn't Google the poll, to check sampling. But...this particular sect typically encourages husbands/wives (marrying at around 18-20 years old) to have numerous children. 8-10 per family being the norm. In one community, the population doubled in ten years. That sect currently has about 1.5 million members. Less than 10% of all Jews worldwide.

There are other ultra orthodox sects too, but I take your point.

I'd have to evaluate the sampling.

 

[Althea]

Interesting sampling. Use your cursor in each column to see sample size. Of course, given the aforementioned family traditions, this was from 5 years ago

https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/educational-distribution/

 

[PoliTalker]

Hello ThatOwlWoman,

"WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking.

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently."
***
"Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades — to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children — might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal.

For instance, a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s air-quality laws, could become inadmissible. When gathering data for their research, known as the Six Cities study, scientists signed confidentiality agreements to track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 people in six cities. They combined that personal data with home air-quality data to study the link between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality.

But the fossil fuel industry and some Republican lawmakers have long criticized the analysis and a similar study by the American Cancer Society, saying the underlying data sets of both were never made public, preventing independent analysis of the conclusions."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/climate/epa-science-trump.html

We can't get rid of Trump soon enough. We have got to make progress on clean energy.

Hopefully, he gets impeached. If not we vote him out.

He's history. DARK history.

 

[ThatOwlWoman]

Interesting sampling. Use your cursor in each column to see sample size. Of course, given the aforementioned family traditions, this was from 5 years ago

https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/educational-distribution/

Very small sampling of Hindus that probably skewed that result. Thanks for finding this.

 

[ThatOwlWoman]

Hello ThatOwlWoman,



We can't get rid of Trump soon enough. We have got to make progress on clean energy.

Hopefully, he gets impeached. If not we vote him out.

He's history. DARK history.

I hope whoever we get on our ticket, they hammer the (R)s about the environmental insanity 45 has promoted.

 

[Cypress]

I didn't Google the poll, to check sampling. But...this particular sect typically encourages husbands/wives (marrying at around 18-20 years old) to have numerous children. 8-10 per family being the norm. In one community, the population doubled in ten years. That sect currently has about 1.5 million members. Less than 10% of all Jews worldwide.

There are other ultra orthodox sects too, but I take your point.

I'd have to evaluate the sampling.

The other thing to consider is that, as I understand it, this is a poll of religious Americans - not a poll of religious people world wide. I would need to understand if the hasdiac tradition is proportionally the same in the United States, as it is in worldwide Judaism.

The bottom line to me is that conservative and orthodox religious traditions have lower rates of educational attainment.

And I do not think anyone is shocked by this. We could have easily predicted that Baptists and Pentacostals would have less formal education than Quakers or Jews.

 

[Guno צְבִי]

My informed guess is that the hasidic tradition is a exceedingly small portion of American Judaism.

Most religions have various sects and splinter groups. This poll obviously cannot account for all the splinter groups, and has to resort to some form of lumping together.

The poll rings true to me, at least based on life experience -- American Jews, to me, seem to generally hold books, literature, higher education in the utmost esteem.

you are correct

 

[Guno צְבִי]

They lumped all Jewish together, which really skews the data. The ultra religious (hasidic) Jews stop studying the three Rs after grammar school, and opt for studying Torah.

As such, there are tens of thousands of illiterate Jews that are lumped in with educated Jews.

We have a large contingent here in the summer. I tried to explain what an apostrophe is to one of them this summer. I might as well speak Mandarin to them.

a very tiny portion of the jewish population

 

[Guno צְבִי]

The other thing to consider is that, as I understand it, this is a poll of religious Americans - not a poll of religious people world wide. I would need to understand if the hasdiac tradition is proportionally the same in the United States, as it is in worldwide Judaism.

The bottom line to me is that conservative and orthodox religious traditions have lower rates of educational attainment.

And I do not think anyone is shocked by this. We could have easily predicted that Baptists and Pentacostals would have less formal education than Quakers or Jews.

No, modern orthodox and conservative judaism are the majority of Jews in the united states and we stress education and knowledge , thus high high viability in medicine sciences and the law , in addition It was also due to Jews being kept out of other pursuits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Orthodox_Judaism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Judaism

 

[Cypress]

No, modern orthodox and conservative judaism are the majority of Jews in the united states and we stress education and knowledge , thus high high viability in medicine sciences and the law , in addition It was also due to Jews being out of other pursuits

I stand corrected, and I probably could have used a better choice of words, because the term Orthodox does not neccessarily mean backwards or uneducated. The Eastern Orthodox Church I am familiar with is a testament to this.