Keep the Change

For the record, I spent Election Day 2008 driving people to the polls. I didn’t ask any of them what their political preferences were, although many volunteered that information, and I wouldn’t have denied a ride to anyone based upon such a consideration, but since most of the people were elderly, female and of African descent, I can pretty much surmise what they did in the voting booth, and, more importantly, why they did it. I also contributed money I couldn’t afford to the Obama campaign for President and spend a chilly few months in the old household while my wife supported Hillary in the primaries. Now, just slightly less than one year into the Obama presidency, I’m starting to get that sinking feeling that you get when you begin to suspect the Van Gogh etching you greedily bought without proper caution is a fake. Of course, like any case of desperation related denial, I will keep the etching proudly displayed upon the wall and pray that I am wrong.

I do realize that President Obama took office under a set of circumstances which were as unfavorable as any since at least Franklin Roosevelt and I know it is hard to remodel the kitchen when the house is on fire, but the continued failure of the America economy is not what troubles me. I am of the opinion that our current economic struggles are the result of decades of short-sighted consumer behavior, regulatory failures and the policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations which favored the accumulation of shareholder value over fundamental economic development. These things will not be corrected by President Obama nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men any time soon. The things that bother me are far simpler, and as a result, far more disturbing.

I’m going to give the President a pass on Iraq, although I’m not fully convinced that he deserves it, but it is clearly a complex situation and it appears that things are slowly sorting themselves out, although we are still pouring an incredible amount of money and intermittently the lives of our soldiers into fixing a mess that should be the responsibility of the Iraqi people themselves. The trouble with Iraq is that it is the poster child for the Bush Doctrine, which basically says we can, and perhaps should, impose our “superior” values on the rest of the world by force, although one of our values is that values should never be imposed on others by force. President Obama probably rightly fears the instability that would result from a too hasty U.S. exit, but there comes a time when the chicks must leave the nest on principle alone. We don’t want Iraq living in our basement and bringing its unemployed friends over for the next hundred years.

So forget Iraq, but the last time I checked, President Obama was still the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. So why do we still have this stupid “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy? I know there are a lot of people in this country who feel homosexuality is a sin or a perversion or something equally unpleasant, but unless I completely misunderstood, their candidates lost the election. We bed-wetting Liberals put Obama in office and we want gays to be able to openly bleed and die for their country just like every other poor son-of-a-bitch of whatever persuasion in the military. To deny someone the right to serve their country because Sarah Palin doesn’t like their sex habits is the height of foolishness, not to mention being down right unpatriotic. And why is Guantanamo Bay still an operating prison? Why has the policy of rendition not been clearly and specifically denounced and terminated? What stuns me is that President Obama won’t do these simple things to demonstrate that he understands why he is the President, which he apparently doesn’t. I could go on and on about the triumph of form over substance in health-care legislation, the escalating American presence in Afghanistan and the consistent kissing of Wall Street’s ass, but those are also complex issues which merit substantially more effort than I am willing to make between Christmas and New Years; nonetheless, I am sadly coming to the conclusion that President Obama is similar to virtually all of his predecessors in the fact that executive policy is driven by perceived political necessity rather than commitment to principle. What is even sadder is that as he compromises on everything important to me, the Right in America intensifies its hysterical efforts to discredit him. Perhaps the sharks of pessimism already smell the blood of a seriously wounded dream.

The Sixth-Century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as observing that one “cannot step twice into the same river”, illustrating his defining principle of the inevitability and inexorability of change. He felt that there was an underlying universal force governing change, but he never fully defined the supposed nature of that force. Heraclitus was something of a buzz kill, eventually parting ways with his fellow Ephesians over their alleged self-indulgence and he spent the last years of his life wandering the mountains, eating grass and talking trash about Homer and Pythagoras. He was later much admired by the Stoics, whose motto was basically “get used to it”, but I have to wonder if Heraclitus, like an increasing number of us, became disillusioned by the contradiction of the clear and absolute certainty of change and the preponderant likelihood that said change would not be the same change we had chosen to believe in.

Roid Rage

99942 Apophis is a an irregularly shaped, 1000 foot wide chunk of rock (or perhaps metal) that is meandering around the solar system periodically coming uncomfortably close to the earth’s orbital path. This particular piece of rock was discovered by three dudes in June of 2004 and immediately became a matter of some concern to people that concern themselves with being concerned about such things. Apophis, by the way, is the Greek name for the Egyptian demon Apep, the ‘enemy of Ra” and the personification of all that is evil. That’s a pretty harsh moniker for a chunk of rock, but as we shall see, it is not completely without merit.

Apophis has a mass of approximately 2.7 × 1010 kilograms, or 29,762,405 tons. Unbelievably, that’s more massive than Mariah Carey’s ass. It orbits the sun once every 323 days and scoots along at about 30 kilometers per second, or right at 67,000 miles per hour. It has an elliptical orbit (of course) which takes it as far as about 103 million miles from the sun and as close as 69 million miles; and this just happens to be in the ball park of the 93 million mile average distance of the Earth from the sun. While Apophis is by no means the largest lump of debris pursuing its own independent course through the solar system, it is so far projected to be one of those that comes the closest to our little green planet, potentially intersecting Earth’s orbit several times during the current century. Present analysis indicates that Apophis will make a very near miss in 2029 with the potential for a further close encounter in 2036 and again in 2037. Because interaction with the gravitational fields of countless other bodies occurs continually during orbit, it is difficult to predict the exact location and velocity of any celestial object too far in the future, or the probability of collision, hence the uncertainty, and anxiety, about Apophis.

Most everyone with reasonably decent eye-sight has seen a “shooting-star” at some point in their lives. These meteors are typically no larger than your fist and are totally consumed by the heat and pressure of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Larger meteoroids will sometimes survive all the way to impact, becoming meteorites, often after doing great violence to the Earth’s surface. The Earth has been bombarded by these cosmic leftovers every hour of every day since God said let there be light. Unknown to most, shortly after the light thing, God also said let there be crap slamming into other crap on a random basis forever and ever, amen; so, our beautiful little Eden here has been on constant alert for divine kinetic intervention for about four and one-half billion years. In that time we have apparently been walloped by some real doozies, and all we need do is take a gander at our sterile neighbor, the Moon, to see what can happen, given enough time.

Apophis is potentially a treacherous little demon, but nothing like the devil himself that slammed into the Earth around 65 million years ago. That asteroid, or comet, may have been as large as 6 kilometers in diameter and could have released an explosive force equal to as much as 100 million megatons of TNT, ruining an otherwise pleasant day for much of the world’s existing life. There is still some debate as to whether this event caused, contributed to, or had nothing to do with, the extinction of the dinosaurs, but if it happened the way most geologists think it did, it would, without doubt, have been a catastrophe of enormous proportions. Apophis’ relatively paltry 350 meter diameter and estimated 880 megaton explosive force may pale in comparison, but it is still estimated that if it hit one of the more populous areas along its potential path, it could result in tens of millions of deaths and have significant long-term effects on the global climate. The unfortunate part is that Apophis, and countless other bodies like it, will inevitably smack into the Earth at some point in the future if the Earth is around long enough.

Based upon current observations and calculations, NASA believes there is a one in 250,000 chance that Apophis will collide with Earth in April of 2036. That sounds like a real long-shot, but consider this; the odds of winning the Powerball multi-state lottery are one in approximately 159 million and there is a winner or two every two to three weeks. While this is not a valid statistical comparison, it is meant to point out that even very unlikely events do occur, and if such an occurrence would result in very unsatisfactory results, it might be a good idea to contemplate the situation. A Near Earth Object (NEO) is defined as any object whose orbit brings it into close proximity with the Earth, close being defined as orbiting within approximately 121 million miles of the sun. There are a few thousand NEOs already identified and each of these has some calculable probability of striking the Earth at some point. Many NEOs are quite large and there are potentially many, many times more NEOs still unidentified; then there are all the random, rouge asteroids, comets, planetoids, Plymouth satellites and broken down alien spaceships which may fly out of nowhere and smash into us with little warning.

So here’s the deal. I am an unrepentant space exploration enthusiast and feel we would be way better off if we took all our military budgets and used them to research warp drive or turn Mars into a habitable planet. I believe in a human future that is unconstrained by gravity, but for those of you who don’t feel the same way, I would break it down like this; to the large number of gentle fellow humans who believe God will protect you and your progeny until the end times, go back to sleep; I’m not talking to you. To those of you who think the moon landings were faked by the government in order to steal your hard-earned cash through outrageous taxes; go Google “booger” or “sex with chickens”; you’re wasting your time here. However, for those of you who value human civilization and understand the power of the human mind, give Apophis some thought; and especially for those of you who believe in the value of the human spirit and the natural world we inhabit, but who are suspicious of the military/industrial complex and want our resources to be committed to relieving human suffering and promoting a sustainable civilization, think about the “enemy of Ra” and what will be necessary to combat him if he turns his eye to us.

Photographing Fairies

I recently had a run-in of sorts with the fine people over at Huffington Post over some comments I tried to post relating to an article they published by one Mr. Dana Ullman concerning what he termed "nanopharmacology". Nanopharmacology is apparently a term which relates to regular pharmacology at the level of nanometers (which is scientifically problematic in and of itself) which purports to be the explanation of why the scientific method generally cannot find any indication of validity to homeopathic medicine. I could write 726 pages of my opinions on why homeopathy is a fraud and at least 16 pages would have some element of fact to them, but it is not my intention to again debate homeopathy per se. Rather, I wish to address the issues of why democracy is a failure, human civilization is doomed and Fox News stays on the air.

First, let me say I am a regular reader of the Huffington Post and I generally appreciate its Liberal bias because it serves to re-enforce conclusions I have already reached even before reading anything. I have known for many years now that Arianna Huffington is something of a flake, like many unrepentant hippies, but I credit her instinct towards humane ideas as well as finding her dreamily hot in a "crap, I am already almost 50 myself" sort of way. So I am not completely surprised that elements of the website tend towards New Age themes and alternative medicine. After all, nobody is perfect. Anyway, I thought this article by Mr. Ullman was particularly egregious in its effort to unscientifically co-op certain concepts that are insurmountably obtuse to most people, such as quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, and use them to vaguely explain away the statistical failure of homeopathy to ever produce anything but anecdotal results. In this context, I wrote a comment on the article which the web administration type dudes declined to publish.

The reason they gave when they kindly responded to the email I wrote protesting this Stalinesque censorship was that my comments violated their rules of polite discourse. They citied my use of terms such as "irrational pseudo-scientific crap" and "malicious fraud" as being inconsistent with the carefully reasoned, fact based commentary that they desired to promote. Fair enough, but I would point out, as I reminded them, that free speech and the democratic process are often less than polite and the social obligation to respect extends only to respect of the right of the individual to hold and express an opinion, not to respect of that opinion itself. The Huffington folks are certainly under no obligation to provide a forum for my views and I concede their right to censor their own content, if not the wisdom of it, but that isn't even what I am really ranting about.

What got me thinking about the decline of the West is this tendency towards binary reasoning that afflicts much of what we think and believe. We often see truth as a straight line that runs from right to wrong, and we set up these bogus dichotomies in our minds such that if "A" is true "B" must be false, when "A" and "B" often have nothing to do with one another. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? My point is that just because the Pharmaceutical Industry may be a soulless enterprise that experiments on man and beast alike and actively seeks to obscenely maximize profit, even at the expense of limiting access to useful new medicines, that doesn't mean homeopathy is anything but a ridiculous load of manure. In my fevered imagination I have ferreted out this logical fallacy that I believe is challenging our ability to progress intellectually and the folks at Huffington post are a prime example.

Needless to say, any thoughtful and caring person will look at our civilization and find much to be desired. I have already postulated frequently that it is human flaws and not autonomously misanthropic institutions which create this reality, but whatever brought us here, a lot of people seek alternative paradigms for managing all aspects of human affairs. Alternate methods of governance have been experimented with throughout the centuries and we have settled on the models that seem to work least poorly, but political truth is not the same as medicine, engineering or other scientifically based endeavors. Whether wealth should be redistributed or health care should be universal are not really issues which can be resolved through observation and experimentation. Science cannot tell us which wars are moral, but it can tell us whether a homeopathically diluted solution of ground nightshade has any effect on nausea, which, by the way, repeated controlled experimentation suggests is not the case. I am concerned that the emerging lack of trust in common sense resulting from rejection of what some see as the sterile, industrial, capitalistic misappropriation of scientific process will just result in further enslavement of the poor and ignorant as they sink into the delusional morass of qi.

Ancient cultures were excellent scientists. They observed and repeated and verified. If by chance they happened to grab a certain leaf in a pinch to apply to a wound as a bandage, and that wound seemed to heal more quickly and completely, they would use that leaf again the next time someone was injured. If the results were repeatable, the medicinal properties of the leaf became an established fact of that culture. This was not some mystical revelation, but good old fashioned scientific method. It did not matter to what the culture ascribed the results; the plant's life force, wood sprites or some god's intervention; they harnessed reason and logic to anticipate the effects of the plant's usage. These were not kinder and gentler cultures; they were just people like us using every physical and intellectual resource at their disposal to survive in an indifferent world. And there is nothing kind and gentle about cancer or diabetes or the Ebola virus; they are vicious, implacable enemies, who must be bludgeoned into submission through force of knowledge, whether that knowledge involves lifestyle, medication or medical procedure. The supposedly primitive cultures that have preceded us would laugh at our growing reliance upon unproven and unverifiable cures in the same way we arrogantly smirk at their myriad ignorant beliefs.

So the Huffington Post can exclude me from the conversation because my tone is not civil if they like; it is, after all, a free country, but I am not going to pretend the Emperor has new clothes just because it brings psychological comfort to some of the desperate and disappointed people who reject the callous inequity, exploitation, destruction and inhumanity of a technological civilization that can and should do better. Retreating from the scientific foundation of human welfare because of the use of good ideas to do bad things is like rejecting your wife because she got raped; you only succeed in blaming the victim and destroying the very thing you sought to preserve. While it certainly could turn out that I, and the world's scientific establishment, are completely wrong and homeopathy is the greatest medical leap forward of modern human civilization, the probability of that is minute; however, the probability that the blind will lead the blind is great, and the probability that exploitive self-interest will masquerade as enlightenment to deprive the foolish and desperate of their lucre is enormous. In that respect, some things never change.

It Takes Big Balls

And behold! The lowly dung beetle. These some 5,000 species are members of the ironically classified superfamily Scarabaeoidea, and are united in their singular love of poo. While insects are noted particularly for their indefatigable pragmatism in feasting upon every putrid, corrupt, desiccated and decaying scrap of the misfortune of life on Earth, the dung beetle makes a virtue of the ultimate necessity. Using feces as a source of nutrition, a nursery or even as an entire residence, this is one insect that clearly knows its shit. Dung beetles are found all over the world in a variety of habitats and are native to every continent with the exception of Antarctica, where one might speculate there is some pretty c-cold caca. The beetle’s signature move is forming a portion of a dung pile into a nice round ball and rolling it in a seemingly straight line until it arrives at wherever it is that a beetle would take such a thing.

Dung beetles are notorious thieves and lazy interlopers will often lurk around the perimeter of the dung source and attempt to liberate the work products of their more industrious neighbors. Mating pairs will often collaborate on removing the dung ball, although entomologists observe that the female more often simply follows behind the male rather than actually assisting in moving the dung, perhaps taking the opportunity to convey to the male advice on how to perfect the effort. Generally no more than one to two inches in length, dung beetles are prodigiously strong, moving up to 50 times their own weight. The ball itself is ultimately buried to serve as a refuge and food source for the developing larvae or as a food cache for the adult beetles. There is a single species of dung beetle residing in South America that is not a fan of dung, preying principally on millipedes. One cannot help but wonder if they simply tired of having to eat shit all the time.

Al Gore would be proud of the environmental consciousness of the hardy dung beetle. With their specially designed digging legs, the beetles remove, distribute and bury enormous volumes of dung, playing a key roll in renourishing the soil, and their efforts prevent the accumulation of large amounts of dung which might serve as a breeding ground for pests like biting flies. Because modern ranching methods concentrate animals in restricted ranges, the beetles aid ranchers in the Herculean task of removing manure, so much so that it is estimated they save livestock producers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and all they ask in return is a tasty little turd of their own. Actually, it is somewhat inaccurate to say that the dung beetles eat dung; they really just suck on it. Because the moisture in the dung is rich in nutrients and tasty micro-organisms, the beetles suck the juice out, leaving behind fiber and other vegetative matter. The dung is such a complete snack that the adult beetles eat and drink nothing else. The growing larvae consume the solid elements of the dung ball, which are usually more than adequate for their needs, leaving behind precious dung to enrich the soil and provide a medium for the growth of numerous micro-organisms.

The love life of the dung beetle is about as shitty as that of most humans. The male grows a large horn which he uses to threaten and combat other males for the right to mate with a female whom he has attracted with his large ball of dung. They run off together and mate in, and around, the dung ball, which then becomes home to their hungry offspring. The kids eat up all their shit and then leave, without so much as a thank you. Since dung beetles typically live anywhere from three to five years, they may repeat this humiliating process several times in their lives. Once the dung ball is used up, the female leaves and looks for another sucker. Go figure.

The scarab beetle that was once so revered by the ancient Egyptians is a prominent member of the dung beetle family. What the Egyptians found so note-worthy about the beetle is difficult to say, although it was associated with Khepri, the god of the rising sun. The image of the scarab beetle was related to the concepts of death and rebirth and renewal and transformation and was a key element of funerary symbology. Many pharaohs were buried with a dung beetle carved from precious stones placed upon their chests near where their hearts had recently been. Dung beetles even rushed out of the subterranean crypts to attack Brendan Fraser and Rachael Wiesz in 1999’s The Mummy. That was, however, given the harmless nature of the dung beetle, just a bunch of shit.

The dung beetle is pretty much a blue collar sort of a guy. It does the dirty work that needs to be done and never complains. It accepts its place in the scheme of things and makes the best of its situation, but there is more to the story than the pedestrian pathos of a life filled with shit; despite its uncomplicated nature, the dung beetle is not so different from us. It rolls its ball of dung like a miniature Sisyphus with the dedication of an obsessive-compulsive IRS agent. It places love and family above comfort and convenience and isn’t afraid to fight when its rights are challenged. It knows the value of having lots of shit and may even take somebody else’s shit if the opportunity arises. But more than anything, the dung beetle seeks to craft order from the chaos of life; it seeks to take the shit cast off after the process of life itself has sucked all value from it, and, stubbornly disputing the inexorable finality of entropy, it defiantly builds an empire of dung. Rock on brother from another mother. We feel your pain.

Who Knew?

I recently stumbled across one Dr. Robert Lanza who is the principle proponent of a metaphysical construct (I hesitate to use the term “theory”) known as “Biocentrism”. I jetted over to Wikipedia to read a brief outline of the concept and found what I would describe as something Timothy Leary and Neils Bohr might have dreamed up late one night over a cup of chamomile. As previously emphasized, I am just a humble wormhole repairman, which does not make me an expert on much of anything; after all, the guy who fixes your brakes is not necessarily a metallurgical engineer, but there was something oddly compelling about the shear cosmological arrogance of Dr. Lanza’s musings and something compellingly odd about the fact that there were actual qualified physicists who suggested they might have merit.

Biocentrism appears to be an elaboration upon the quantum observation problem, which is just a more formal articulation of the tree falling in the woods thing. Quantum mechanics is really complex and indecipherable, even for those who have made a profession of it, so it would be useless for me with my superficial understanding to attempt to provide clarity to the subject, but the question at issue is whether reality exists independent of an observer, or whether consciousness is a prerequisite for defining reality. Without even having to resort to Depak Chopra or Shirley McClain, there are perfectly reputable physicists who will tell you that probability wave functions really are collapsed by observation and that each resolution of a quantum state will create a whole new universe where the thing that happened here didn’t, or visa versa. This gives me great comfort since it means that somewhere in the paniverse one version of me is good-looking, rich and living in sin with Salma Hayek.

Dr. Lanza speculates that time and space are methods of perception, not external realities, eliminating distinctions between here and there, past, present and future, and alive and dead. He suggests not that consciousness is a property of the universe, but that the universe is a property of consciousness and therefore (to quote Wikipedia) “there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life”. So, if we, or some other conscious beings, were not present in the universe, there would be nothing but an indeterminate probability cloud bereft of history or meaning, sort of like Sarah Palin’s brain.

Anyway, let’s pretend for a minute that we actually understand what all this is supposed to mean and that there are no problems such as defining “consciousness” or establishing how consciousness could evolve in a universe where nothing definitive is happening. My question is; who gives a rat’s ass? Don’t get me wrong; I adore scientific speculation and have an irrational faith in technology’s unproven ability to redeem human failure, but ultimately I think we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that our presence in this universe and its associated burden of consciousness is the only “fact” that really matters. We spend an inordinate amount of time examining the how and why of things, and when that results in cool stuff like organ transplants and life-like sex robots, all the better, but when it results in people blowing up the other people who have arrived at a different answer to the questions of how and why, or when people are so consumed by the speculation that they ignore the wonder of daily existence, well, then its just plain foolish.

Albert Einstein said that “a perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem”. Albert was a very wise fellow, and the quote begs the question; when we figure this all out and have teased each and every secret from nature, will we be any closer to understanding anything than we are now? Dr. Lanza may be correct in at least one sense; whether his speculation reflects anything true about the physical realities of space and time, it is certainly true that we create our own realities through attitudes and actions and that the presence of each of us contributes to the reality of us all. Whether anything really means anything, much of it means something to me, and that is as real as it gets.

Mercury, Winged God of Fallibilism

In case anyone cares, I am now boycotting Jim Carey movies. He is on my list with Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone, Shirley McClain and a host of others I have identified as promoters of junk science, conspiracy theories, channeling, colon detox and fad diets. Why Jim Carey you ask? Well, Mr. Carey and his intellectually accomplished wife, Jenny McCarthy, are at the forefront of promoting the scientifically unsupportable idea that certain childhood vaccines cause autism and the also scientifically unsupportable claim that autism can be successfully treated by removing accumulations of heavy metals, such as mercury, from the body. Ms. McCarthy, who initially came to the attention of the public by showing us her ample bosom in numerous Playboy editions, has a son (not with Jim Carey) who has been diagnosed with autism. In all fairness to Jim Carey, if I were sleeping with Jenny McCarthy on a regular basis and she said the Earth was flat, I would probably also go all over the country positively extolling the flatness of the Earth, but that still wouldn't make it true.

Without digressing into a Doctoral dissertation on the efficacy of thimerosal (a mercury based preservative in some vaccines) and the evolution of the diagnosis of autism (which is also pretty eye-opening), suffice it to say that these are complex subjects which have been given great attention by government, industry, academia and regular people affected by the issues. I will be the first to concede that "scientifically unsupportable" does not mean "wrong"; it simply means that use of the scientific method does not support a causal link between, in this instance, mercury and autism. Science does not know what causes autism, but with the current knowledge base it would be just as valid to propose that milk, strained carrots or sex during pregnancy (or some combination thereof?) causes autism. Since the standard definition of autism represents a range of neurological and behavioral conditions, it is possible that these various elements have separate causation and that a complex web of environmental and genetic factors are in play, as with many other human afflictions. I would simply point out that it is unlikely those most burdened with the financial, emotional and physical costs of dealing with autism would be the ones to most objectively adjudicate these complex questions. Anecdotal evidence and the flawed science of those seeking to exploit the hope, fear, frustration, anger and desperation of the parents of children affected by autism cannot be substituted for reason, logic and mathematics.

But let me follow another train of thought in addressing why Mr. Carey will no longer receive my financial support for his artistic endeavors (even though I have thoroughly enjoyed many of his movies and almost all appearances on In Living Color). One of the things that troubles me the most about Mr. Carey's crusade is that he actively advises parents not to have certain vaccinations for their children, apparently due to what he perceives as the possibility of the child being harmed by the vaccine. While I believe his concerns are not well founded and are clearly not supported by a substantial majority of the scientific community, I am willing to accept that he is earnestly trying to protect the interests of other families and spare them the heartbreak that he and Ms. McCarthy have suffered with their son Evan, but good intentions, in, and of, themselves, accomplish nothing. Having said that, what if Mr. Carey were right and there was a real, statistically verifiable risk of developing autism associated with certain childhood vaccinations? Would that justify a campaign to discourage getting the MMR or other vaccines?

Easily available information (because if I have it, it must be easily available) indicates that in the last 150 years an estimated 200 million people world-wide have died from complications related to the measles. The death rate from measles in developed nations is well less than one-half of one percent of all cases, but in poorer parts of the world as many of one-quarter of those infected can die. Mumps is rarely fatal, but can infrequently cause sterility and other serious complications. Rubella is generally a mild disease but can cause miscarriages and severe and life-threatening birth defects. So how many cases of autism each year would be worth eliminating these diseases? It is currently estimated that approximately 1.5 of every 1,000 persons born annually will develop autism, and approximately six per thousand will develop some related condition of varying severity. Even those who believe thimerosal may cause autism can't estimate the percentage of cases that could be the result of other causation, so it would be some unspecified number of autism cases theoretically resulting from the use of thimerosal as a preservative in some vaccines, but other cases of autism are clearly not the result of thimerosal poisoning since children who are not vaccinated also are sometimes diagnosed as autistic. The point is, in allowing for Mr. Carey's logic, there is no way to conduct a cost/benefit analysis on the use of the MMR vaccine with a thimerosal preservative since there is not even theoretically the necessary empirical data to compare disease prevented with diseased caused.

While such a comparison may seem callous and mercenary, it is in fact the same analysis we make, consciously or not, for virtually every action we take. We feed our children into the jaws of war fully understanding that some will not return, but trusting that there is some greater good that will justify the random sacrifice of the few. We each have an approximately one in 4,000 chance that an automobile accident will be the cause of our death, but we all continue to drive and ride virtually every single day of our lives. We accept these risks with the implicit determination that what we get in return is worth the risks we are taking. Preservatives, thimerosal and others, are used in virtually all vaccines in order to prevent the introduction of harmful microbes into the vaccine and to extend the shelf-life of the product. There are both safety and economic concerns associated with this practice, and the interplay between the two dictates the availability of the vaccine and, therefore, the number of children who are able to be protected. It appears to me that Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy are encouraging other parents to take the risk of exposing their children to harmful, or even fatal, childhood diseases simply because their son got the short end of the probability stick. I have not heard anything from Ms. McCarthy on the dangers of breast augmentation procedures, but, of course, that would not fit within her model of reality.

The biggest problem with the anti-vaccine crusade being waged by Mr. Carey and others is that it confuses people with speculation and allegation without informing them. Parents are afraid to give their children vaccines for polio and meningitis, things that can kill them, because of concerns about the MMR vaccine. Many vaccines have never contained thimerosal and should, therefore, not be on the list of suspected autism agents. The Centers for Disease Control have established requirements for the elimination of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative, not because there is science to support it, but because people like Mr. Carey, who have no scientific background, have created a public fear campaign which has become a public health issue in and of itself. Killed virus flu vaccines are one of the few remaining that still are primarily preserved with thimerosal, and flu and flu-related complications like pneumonia kill an approximate average of 40,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. At least some of these deaths are children. There are people who are not allowing their children to receive the flu vaccine because of the non-scientific suppositions of people like Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy.

One of humanity's greatest intellectual strengths, the ability to recognize patterns in seemingly random events, can also be a great weakness when nonexistent patterns are discerned, and acted upon. We can all empathize with Mr. Carey's desire to understand what has happened to his adoptive son and why. We can feel for Ms. McCarthy as she struggles to provide support to a child to whom normal rules of communication and conduct are alien. We can understand the general desire to have all the answers be simple and clear and to feel all we have to do is hit upon the right explanation for things and the boogie-man will go away. Unfortunately we also have to understand that people's judgment can be clouded by grief and fear and that some people will promote certain explanations for political or financial reasons unrelated to the true nature of the issue. Science is not politics; it is not about the popularity or psychological comfort of an idea; it is not about one person's personal experience or the shared pain of an unfortunate few. It is about meticulous and detailed analysis, review and repeatable and verifiable experimentation, and an honest ability to admit and correct error. Science is, of course, flawed, as is all human endeavor, but it is still only a vehicle that takes us where our human urges drive us, much like art and religion. The difference is that science is understood to be subject to change as new facts reveal themselves, whether it be concerning global warming or the health consequences of thimerosal. Right now, science says Jim Carey is wrong, and doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is still just plain, old wrong.