As IF Times

link Italian court ruling sends chill through science community | Reuters.

In today’s “you can’t make this stuff up” arena, comes this story about scientists being imprisoned for not predicting an earthquake.  In most jobs, if someone screws up, they get two week’s notice and then shown the door.  In Italy, apparently they are held to a higher standard.  The article tells the story of these unfortunate scientists who gave the town an all clear signal but then only 3 days later, the big one hits.  Talk about shaky forecasts.  What they should have done in hindsight was to recommended to the village what they do in this part of the world; that is tell everyone the big one will most certainly hit any day and to purchase as much disaster insurance as possible.   What’s the downside? Tell everyone the worst.  This medieval court outcome should send shivers to anyone exposed to the prediction racket.  I’m sure Italian stockbrokers, doctors and even weather forecasters are just a little bit more nervous today.  Imagine a stockbroker making a bad market call  and then phones home to tell the wife that he’ll be home… in about 3 to 5 years.

Well if they’re going to put scientists in the clink for not predicting disasters, maybe there will be a push to call journalists out for not exposing BS from politicians.  If we apply the logic of this Italian court ruling to these shores, maybe some reality gets forced back into the media business.  If media knew that political pronouncements were whoppers and failed to warn the public of such, then perhaps there should be consequences. The very reason for the majority of the scribblings on this site is because of the proclivity of media to promote stories that range from subtly coercive to outright pants-on-fire untruths.  Of course when politics are concerned, there’s an expectation of fabrication or exaggeration, but the media are not supposed to be complicit.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,  Dorothy Rabinowitz for example illustrates the kind of guffaw provoking fairy tales that are pushed out for public consumption every day.  As she artfully points out, the fibs are not even subtle any more, they’re Bunyanesque in their affrontery.  We quote at length  from her article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578067041987322754.html?mod=googlenews_wsj here:

“…In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.

“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”

“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.

All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years…”

As we said, we expect politicians to have big noses, but it’s supposed to be the job of media to point that out.  There are still naive people in this day and age who think that if something is in print or on TV, it must be true.

And speaking of BS, the greatest whopper still getting mileage is the fiction of Global Warming.  Exactly the opposite of the Italian scientists, the GW crowd are predicting doom and extinction every time a penguin goes missing.  We still experience ‘respected’ scientists and of course politicians who are beating the “we’re all going to die” drum.  The narrative is that, despite millions and millions of years of the earth’s existence, the influence of man in the last blink of time, in geologic terms,  will be the undoing of the planet.  Somehow through the ages, the earth has survived earthquakes, great freezes, meteor strikes, bad weather and shifting of tectonic plates, but now, because we’re running a few cars, the earth will collapse and extinction will come to all life.

All we’re saying is that if scientists can be imprisoned for acts of omission, things they have no control over, then we should also incarcerate people for acts of commission, in which perps had complete knowledge of their duplicitous stories and still pushed them out.  This is all backwards.  Let’s fire the incompetents, but jail the liars.

link More than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage: survey | Reuters.

Seems that everything is done by polls these days, especially when it comes to election time.  Everyone wants to slice off a bit of demographic to imply significance from some bit of esoterica.  The standard technique is to isolate some segment of society and then make conclusions about their preferences as it pertains to the larger group.   This kind of segmentation has a lot to do with the messages being conveyed by the various political groups who would pander to whomever is likely to give the most votes.

An Internet search fails to find even an estimate of the number of polling firms operating in the U.S., but we are all familiar with the big name ones: Gallup, Rasmussen, etc.  There are also the newspaper  related polls such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters to name a few.  Suffice to say though, if you want an opinion about something, someone will provide it for a fee.

The ubiquity of polling has created a political environment in which factions are pitted against each other in order to secure votes, which of course encourages polling to measure the temperature of any identified demographic, which brings us into a vicious cycle.  If you are catering to left handed people, the right handed people get disenfranchised and resentment between the two factions will escalate.   When people bemoan the polarization of the political process, this is ground zero of the cause.   Instead of saying anything substantive, politicians will employ strategies to rope in the desired demo as articulated by poll results.

The particular sample in the link above purports to show the proclivities of 26 million people via a sample of 1760.  The conclusion is that more than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage.  I don’t know about you, but I think that this is not only a leap of logic, it’s a 3 day train ride of logic based on a sample of 1760 Latinos.  I would treat this conclusion with as much skepticism as if a sample of college men in San Francisco implied that 60% of college guys everywhere harbored homo-erotic fantasies involving Brad Pitt.   Angelina maybe.  To imply that all persons of an ethnic slice are likely to hold homogeneous opinions is naive at best, racist at worst.  I’m not convinced that all Chinese, all Germans or all Italians can be pegged by a sample of 1760 of them.

The real danger here is that in today’s attention deficit society, nobody reads the body of the polls.  They read the headline and ka-bing, it’s now a fact.  This is reminiscent of the early days of television advertising when marketers could say pretty much anything they wanted.  It was not uncommon to hear that “4 out of 5 doctors preferred Parliament cigarettes” or that “4 out of 5 Dentists choose Crest”.  Bottom line is, polling is as much marketing as science.  My poll of 5 people confirms this.