What do you think of resarchers who lie? What do you think of mainstream media outlets who report an obvious lie as if it were perfectly reasonable? What do you think this kind of thing says about both our society and our "news" media?
Yes, I am talking about yesterday's report that "researchers" (at Johns Hopkins, I believe, but the sad thing is that it could have been almost any publicity seeking "researchers" in the U.S.) had concluded that EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN WILL BE OVERWEGHT OR OBESE by the year 2048, if present trends continued.
Note that I deliberately put the emphasis in the above sentence exactly where the "researchers", and the mainstream media, put it. It is that emphasis that made the report an obvious lie. IF anyone confronted the "researchers", as they should have, with the (correct) assertion that such statement is absolutely, totally ridiculous, they would have said (maybe they did to somebody, but the media would still have kept the same ridiculous headline and lead) that the important part is NOT the words that I put in all caps aobve, but the "IF PRESENT TRENDS CONTINUE."
Way back in the 19th Century, a man named Malthus predicted that there would soon not be enough room on the Earth to hold all of the people, because the TREND line showed that we would fairly soon have people standing on every square foot of the Earth's surface. Why did that not happen? Why was Malthus' prediction FALSE? Easy, you can NEVER (well, almost never) project a trend line in this simplistic way. It is a PERVERSTION of "science" to pretend that you can. It is how to LIE with "science" and statistics.
Often, it is done with geometric progression. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... That sequence QUICKLY leads to a VERY LARGE NUMBER. That is what is called a "geometric progression". In the real world, as distinguished from the world of mathematics, such a progression ALWAYS levels off. Real world things, like population growth, cannot maintain that kind of growth rate (also true in the stock market, by the way). The curve ALWAYS levels off. But it is not like this is a secret. When a "secientist" or "researcher" says, or implies, otherwise, we should simply shoot the "scientist and put him out of his misery. He, or she, is clearly a publicity seeking fool.
Even LINEAR trend lines almost always level off. A linear trend line is one that goes up, say, a constant 10% per year. Something like this explains the scientifically MEANSINGLESS assertion that every single American will be overweight, if the trend line continues--meaningless because any real scientist knows that you can't unreasonably project a trend line that way. Say the number of overweight people has been increasing 20% every year (a geometric progression, because it is in percentage terms). Projecting that curve will soon put the NUMBER of overweight people at more than the population of the United States. Doesn't matter. Because the trend will NOT coninue. It will LEVEL OFF, and these "researchers" know it (or are so terminally dumb that we need to go to the "shoot them" option).
"But...." you sputter. "You are missing the point." The idea is to SCARE people into reversing the "trend", and into letting the government take away their FREEDOM (like by limiting fat in food--will the next Al Capone be in ICE CREAM?).
I am NOT missing the point. I know EXACTLY why this LIE is receiving publicity. That is both what makes me angry and scares me. It does not scare me because I worry about every American becoming overweithg. It scares me because it has become ACCEPT to USE "science" and "research" in this POLITICAL way.
Do you recognize the similarities here to the SCARE campaign on "global warming"? of course you do. It is the SAME political use of "science" to say more than it can legitimately say. "Global warming" is another case where the WORLDY "trend line" 'has already leveled off. You had to START the trend line in a specific place to create the scare in the first place. Plus, there never was a "trend line" of warming IN THE UNITED STATES (see Michael Crichton's chart in "State of Fear").
Isn't it all right to lie and scare in a good cause (like getting rid of Saddam Hussein, in which good cause President Bush "lied" and "scared" much less blatantly)? Only if you work for the Associated Press, where facts are irrelevant to, and always subservient to, agenda.
Otherwise, "science" loses all credibility, and each scientist becomes merely a tool for his or her particular interest group (or the interest group that the scientist believes will advance the interest of the scientist the most).
Once you believe that the truth does not matter--the complete and whole truth, as best we can know it--then you have become a LEFTIST. To leftists, the only thing that matters is whether your "heart" is in the right place, and not whether what you say makes any real sense. The idea is to DECEIVE, because you think ordinary people are stupid. I think leftists have been proven partially right. Ordinary "journaliests" are stupid--except that ordinary "journalists" are leftists--meaning they are really part of the campaign to deceive.
Don't I think that people, and the government, need to be SCARED into taking "action" to stop this "pandemic" of obesity? Nope. I don't. I believe in freedom, in the first place.. I actually believe there is MORE reason to deprive people of marijuana and alcohol than there is to deprive them of tatty foods, even as I may not favor depriving them of alcohol (and vacillate some on marijuana). Second, once you accept the idea of lying to people "for their own good", you are well on the road to "1984" and the totalitarian idea of Cummunism. It is no accident that leftists have long been unwilling to be strongly against this concept.
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