Science

And Here Is The Documentation Assembled By The Critics Of Cato of The Cato Institute

Part of the “Critiques of Libertarianism” site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 08/27/10.

The Cato Institute is a “libertarian” quasi-academic think-tank that acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. There is no significant participation in Cato by its tiny libertarian minority. These libertarians do not fund Cato or affect its goals. Cato is a creature of corporations and foundations.

The major purpose of the Cato Institute is to provide propaganda and soundbites for conservative and libertarian politicians and journalists conveniently free of reference to funders such as tobacco, fossil fuel, investment, media, medical, and other regulated industries.

Cato is one of the most blatant examples of “simulated rationality”, as described in Phil Agre’s The Crisis of Public Reason. Arguments need only be plausibly rational to an uninformed listener. Only a tiny percentage will notice that they are being mislead. That’s all that’s needed to manage public opinion.

Links

A Critical Assessment of “Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths”.

The Cato Institute, heavily funded by tobacco companies, hired Levy and Marimont to denounce statistics about smoking related deaths. This article refutes their key arguments, finding them unscientific and inflammatory.

Media Moguls on Board: Murdoch, Malone and the Cato Institute

An Extra! (the magazine of FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting ) article that describes how media giants use Cato to lobby Congress for corporate welfare and legal monopolization.

Why Privatizing Social Security Would Hurt Women

An Institute For Women’s Policy Research rebuttal to Cato Institute proposals and claims about Social Security privatization.

An Analysis Of The Cato Institute’s “The Case Against a Tennessee Income Tax”
Senate finance panel examines Cato report, recognizes propaganda

Citizens For Tax Justice lay open the shoddy errors behind this typical example of the claims Cato makes. The Tennessee Senate finance panel also identified a large number of other errors.

Who knew? The Swedish model is working.

Paul Krugman points out that CATO and other conservatives were dead wrong in their predictions for Sweden, and that big welfare states do sometimes work well. From The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive.

Libertarian Think Tanks

Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World” gives credit where it is due.

Do Windmills Eat Birds?

David Case, executive editor of TomPaine.com, exposes a quotation out of context by CATO in a case of pretend environmental concern.

Millionaires One and All

(PDF) Details the fallacies underlying the CATO Social Security Calculator. Under realistic assumptions, you’d accumulate 1/10th to 1/30th of what CATO estimates. Part of The Social Security Network.

Rethinking the Think Tanks

Sierra Magazine’s article detailing the corporate financing of anti-environmental propaganda from thinktanks like Cato.

Internet Bunk: The Junk Science Page

The CATO Institute is a corporate front that employs Steven Milloy to tarbrush opponents scientific arguments as “Junk Science”. Robert Todd Carroll’s excellent The Skeptic’s Dictionary details Milloy’s unscientific part in this PR campaign.

Read more…

The Immortal Jellyfish

From Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth to Dr. Douglas Grey’s theory of Engineered Negligible Senescence¹, humans have always been fixated on immortality. Yet, in spite of all of our medical and genetic engineering advances, we have still not managed to achieve this feat. Mother Nature, however, has already beaten us to the punch, with an immortal jellyfish.

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may, in fact, be the only immortal creature in the world. It is the only one we have discovered thus far.

This jellyfish achieves everlasting life through the process of transdifferentiation: a process by which one type of cell transforms into another type of cell. Usually, animals can only use transdifferentiation in order to regenerate organs or limbs (e.g. salamanders). Turritopsis nutricula, however, transdifferentiates throughout its entire life, enabling it to cycle from an immature polyp stage, to a mature adult, and then back to its polyp stage again.

http://blogs.currentprotocols.com/2010/04/06/immortal-jellyfish/

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s
******** Thursday, August 26, 2010 *******
**********More Here @ 3 pm (PST)*****

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Public Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

(This article refers directly to today’s issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. If you have not yet seen it, please, before reading further, click HERE.)

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s…

Another transformation of Society: Immortality (for us humans) could soon be a reality, but extended life spans are already here.

by Steven M. Finger

This is what you will want to know:

.

.

Here are the keywords to our thinking today: Life span, extended life spans, Immortality,  Changing Society, Self-Improvement, Social Change, and Society & Culture

Here are links to today’s items:

[1] Your Welcome to Sage Crossroads

[2] The Immortal Jellyfish

[3] About Getting Older from the Old LA Free Press

July 9, 2010 – What ties our articles together today

by Steven M. Finger

Well, before I got to the ‘bigger picture’ as a constant theme, we began each day with a cartoon, and more than 80% of the time, we ended with one as well.

Have just gotten word that there is a thought out there that my glee of it all has gone by the wayside as I looked further outside.  So, let’s nix that thought all – and here’s an especially happy moment to share -Ringo Starr and his band mate Paul! (A video of the moment.)

(And, yes, I’ve still a word, a bit later, about what their being on stage – and more – is likely to mean to many of us, in a cultural sense.)

Might as well write about it now, after all , I did lead with it… mostly to put ‘happy’ first, even following with this second, unlike my custom.  They’re happy, we’re happy for them… and it’s Ringo’s 70th!  And we’re so cool with having these guys up there, surely it’ll be great to see him pounding those drums when he’s 80.  And to think, we weren’t ever gonna trust anyone over 30 – let alone expect that we be paying to see ‘em rock out.  And so… we’ve changed, we’ve really changed.

For some reason, few of us take credit as ‘older and wiser’, but lots of us say ‘we’ve seen it all’ and if not ‘just getting started’, we surely not thinking there’s are a good reason to ‘hang it all up’ – and not even because we can’t ‘retire’ (gosh, do you remember people talking about doing that, and could actually afford to?).

All of that is up there on that stage, and that’s even before we get to the gazillion memories, over the 50 years or so, that we’ve been listening to them.

As to where I went from there… first up is a story that may answer, partially, a question I posed yesterday – will men at home (because of job loss) be taking the family to new heights; will they be looked at as slackers or contributors?  And to tell you the truth, I had no idea that that many guys were doing that much ironing, already.

Also yesterday, I changed the format of this posting itself – including links to many of the articles we had posted before.  Sewing them into the text  itself was distracting for many of you, so I’ll just list a number, and then, at the bottom, you’ll have the link next to it.

That said, these next two stories may not seem related at all – one is about a woman denied health benefits because her check to her insurer was a penny less than they had billed, and the other is about the killing of unarmed people.  So maybe they are related ( yes, I know, my sense of humor IS pitiful.)

But, surely, you would have seen a thread between them if you had had a chance to read, in the days before, one about the Army Captain who lost his home (a fully paid for $300,000 house) because the Homeowner’s Association had not been paid in 2 months, and foreclosed and actually sold it for the less than $3,500 bill.  A $300,000 paid for home of a guy serving in Afghanistan, poof gone.  [1]  Who does that????

Is it the same type of person that thinks that cutting off the utilities of immigrants (who might be here legally) whether their bill is paid or not – taking their money and forcing them to move? [2]

Brings us back to the two articles of today…a woman on chemo is being forced to use her energies and expend her hope on whether or not the ‘customer service’ rep will re-instate her policy without a money order for 1 penny.

And the other story – example after sad, sad example of unarmed people shot by  agents more interested in expediency than leniency.  Cold blooded, heartless killings.

Have many of us bought in to the practicality of corporate machinery, or so distanced ourselves from each other as people of the same society.  What are our cultural mores, nowadays? And why.

Then here’s something – if not morally larger – than physically enormous, made from particles infinitely small.  And the interesting question – if the equation doesn’t work, does it really mean we can co-exist?  (or exist at all??)

And, finally, another cartoon – happy endings!

Protons are smaller than we thought…could the entire universe be wrong?

By Alasdair Wilkins

Protons are 0.00000000000000003 meters smaller than we thought. That sounds like nothing, but it means one of these things must be true: Undiscovered particles are lurking, quantum mechanics needs recalculating…or the universe is impossible. (Here’s hoping it’s the first two.)

The measurements find that the proton is actually about 4% smaller than what decades of previous experiments had found. This new data, the result of years of testing by a team of European physicists, has left scientists baffled. The mathematics of quantum mechanics rely on some fairly finely tuned values for the measurements of various particles, and unless this discrepancy can be explained the entire discipline is in danger of falling apart. Ingo Sick, a physicist at Switzerland’s University of Basel, puts the matter in no uncertain terms:

“It’s a very serious discrepancy. There is really something seriously wrong someplace.” Measuring the size of protons can’t be done directly, but the laws of quantum mechanics provide a very effective indirect approach. The energy levels that electrons occupy in the atom are partially described by the size of the proton, and physicists have keyed in on this fact to arrive at incredibly accurate measurements of the proton radius. Before this experiment, that figure was thought to be about 0.8768 femtometers, a little less than one quadrillionth of a meter.

The new experiment substituted a different subatomic particles for the electrons. Instead, the physicists used the muon, which is very similar to the electron except about 200 times heavier. This much greater relative weight makes them much more sensitive to the effects of protons on their energy level. The research team fired muons at a cloud of hydrogen, displacing the electrons from the atoms and leaving the muons in their place. They then used lasers to figure out the muonic energy levels, and that’s how they arrived at their impossible new figure.

How impossible? The measurement falls so far outside what the scientists expected that it actually took them six years to even notice it. The first two times they ran the experiment, in 2003 and 2007, they didn’t find anything in the tiny range in which they thought the proton radius would be founding. They figured there was something wrong with their laser systems, but on the third try in 2009 they decided to expand the range of where they looked. They quickly found the energy signature far, far away from where they figured it would be.

These findings might mean some of the constant values of quantum mechanics are incorrect, which would entail some fairly major recalculating.

http://io9.com/5581945/protons-are-smaller-than-we-thoughtcould-the-entire-universe-be-wrong

‘A Virus Walks Into a Bar…’ and Other Science Jokes – Brian Malow

Science comedian Brian Malow jokes that a virus is "the ultimate David and Goliath" when compared with humans.

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