Junk Science Week: The Rubber Duckies
Terence Corcoran Jun 17, 2011 – 10:59 PM ET
Junk Science Week grand finale: The third annual Rubber Duck Awards, in which we do our small bit to recognize the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who each year advance the principles of junk science. Junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, when risk is exaggerated or discounted, when science is adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.
The Rubber Duckies are named in honour of Rick Smith, president of Environmental Defence Canada and co-author of a remarkable piece of junk science literature, the 2009 Slow Death by Rubber Duck. In the book, Mr. Smith perpetrated a science scam over bisphenol-A and established himself as Canada’s pre-eminent scaremonger and distorter of science. Let the awards begin! (Financial Post)
The Rubber Duckies: Bloomberg pushes his health obsessions
By Lawrence Solomon
The Rubber Ducky Award for Integrity in Junk Science goes to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who selflessly backs his deeply held personal beliefs by proselytizing, by personal philanthropy, and by spending his city’s money. When nagging and money can’t buy compliance, Bloomberg uses his police powers.
Take the food that others eat, one of Bloomberg’s biggest obsessions. Bloomberg didn’t like New Yorkers’ taste for trans fat, so he lectured them on its evils. Then he asked restaurants to abide by voluntary trans fat restrictions. Then he banned trans fat outright at restaurants.
Now Bloomberg has his city leading the nation on an anti-salt campaign. (Financial Post)
The Rubber Duckies: ‘Buy local’ is a slogan for xenophobes
By William Watson
For 235 years, since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, enlightened, liberal and scientifically justified opinion has favoured open borders and internationalism.
“The tailor does not attempt to make his own shoes,” Smith wrote, “but buys them of the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not attempt to make his own clothes, but employs a tailor.… What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage.”
The English political economist David Ricardo showed, writing 45 years after Smith, that even if you don’t do anything well, if everyone specializes in what they do least badly and then trades that output with others, the sum total of output is maximized. You can’t get more out of the world’s capital and workers than by taking advantage of the specialization domestic and international trade makes possible.
Under this liberal internationalism policies of protectionism, isolationism and nationalism became verboten. The increase in living standards that followed was, by all historical standards, spectacular.
But now this world is being turned upside down. “Progressive” opinion tells us we should buy as many things as we can locally, within at most a 100-mile radius of where we live. Even big companies, who should know better, take care to point out in their ads how many of their inputs they source locally. They should be taken out behind the woodshed and have good sense spanked back into them. (Financial Post)
The Rubber Duckies: Scaring cell users
By Lawrence Solomon
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a working group of the World Health Organization, wins an Honourable Mention in this year’s Rubber Ducky Award for coming close — but not quite succeeding — in giving a full-throated scare to holders of the world’s five billion wireless phone subscriptions.
There is “an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with wireless phone use,” IARC announced in a press release, which then clarifies in a footnote 2: “chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.”
And in footnote 3, dealing with other cancers: “The available studies are of insufficient quality, consistency or statistical power to permit a conclusion regarding the presence or absence of a causal association between exposure and cancer, or no data on cancer in humans are available.”
Memo to IARC: To win a Rubber Ducky, drop the footnotes. (Financial Post)
