Re: Who Will Save Us From The Bushes?


Unclaimed Mysteries wrote:
> mianderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > TimV wrote:
> > And that "Nature" magazine, it's a real small
> >
> >>pointless journal that no one really has much respect for.
> >
> >
> > heh......I bet if someone analyzed all the articles in Nature related
> > to the environment the authors would *overwhelmingly* have views that
> > are more in line with those whacked out environmentalists than rush
> > limbaugh's. After all, when republicans are forced to hold senate
> > hearings on environmental issues they wouldn't have to call the same
> > small group of hacks as witnesses each time if there was an extremely
> > large and well respected group to choose from that share their views.
>
>
> Rush Limbaugh displays a profound lack of understanding when it comes to
> both science and the way science is done.

very true.

He is eager to bolster his
> positions with the aura of science. When he finds a single study that he
> likes, he latches on to it to the exclusion of opposing views.

this is very true and I'll never forget what he did once(maybe 10-12
years or so ago???). It was on his tv show, not his radio show.
Anyways this was when pressure was continuing to intensify regarding
the big tobacco companies and their insider documents and such, and
there was a study that dealt with questioning the actual mechanism of
smoke irritants in the pathogenesis of both lung cancer and COPD. So
what does limbaugh do? Basically says that we really don't know what
the exact relationship between smoking and lung cancer is and that you
can pretty much manipulate the data to show anything you want.
~170,000 people will die this year from lung cancer. Between
155-160,000 of those deaths will be due to smoking. Since 9/11/01 more
than 200 times as many people have died from lung cancer due to
smoking(not smoking, just lung cancer due to smoking!) than died in the
terrorist attacks............

And before people go off on a "but what about mcdonald's....should we
make bigmacs illegal too"because they are dangerous rant", it's not
even close to the same thing. If you consume mcdonald's food in
reasonable quantities as many people do, there is no health risk. If
you consume cigarettes as they are intended to be consumed, your
relative risk of developing lung cancer is about 22.0. And that's not
even getting into the issue of one being a very clearly defined
etiology while the other is a lot more murky......

.

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