January 2012

Does positive thinking lead to positive outcomes?

by Michael Fumento on January 31, 2010 · 2 comments

in Odds & Ends

Recently I wrote a positive review (no pun intended) of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America for Forbes Online. A reader nevertheless wrote to me: “studies show that optimism leads to more positive outcomes.” My response:

No, actually they don’t. They find correlation but not causation. Being fat is associated with overreating, but not too many people would argue that being fat causes you to overeat anymore than they would see a cart behind a horse and presume that the cart is pushing the horse forward. I allude to this in my book review.

As far as success and riches go, yes, studies of both individuals and nations do link greater wealth with a more upbeat attitude. But our pathological positivism thrusts the cart squarely before the horse, insisting that attitude leads to circumstances. Evidence that suggests positive attitudes lead to positive results – like cheerier people being more likely to get a job or promotion – could merely reflect societal prejudice against those with negative or merely realistic attitudes, Ehrenreich points out.

Ehrenreich writes of a plenary session on “‘The Future of Positive Psychology’” featuring the patriarchs of the discipline, Martin Seligman and Ed Diener. Seligman got the audience’s attention by starting off with the statement, ‘I’ve decided my theory of positive psychology is completely wrong.’ Why? Because it’s about happiness, which is ‘scientifically unwieldy.’”

So we’re left to consider this logically. And logically circumstances are more likely to dictate attitude than attitude is to dictate circumstances. The connection in the first case is obvious; in the second case you have to provide all sorts of explanations as to why this might be the case.

Now, I have a friend who has a positive attitude despite current very negative circumstances. But why?

Because as he says he’s utterly convinced the novel he’s completing will be a best-seller notwithstanding that he’s never even written a novel before and the objective odds are he won’t even get a publisher. But he’s factoring a best-seller into his mental attitude.

Unfortunately John Kennedy Toole probably had exactly the same attitude and for the best of reasons. “A Confederacy of Dunces” was a fantastic book. It did in fact become a best-seller. But not before every publisher poor Toole went to rejected it outright and he killed himself. If Toole had a more sanguine attitude he might have gone on to write other books, gotten one of those published, and then gotten publishers to look at the first book. We know of similar examples, as with J.K. Rowling.

I’m sorry, but there’s nothing inherently good about positivism and, again as I note in my book review, there are indeed studies showing that pessimists are better able to handle bad news than optimists. All that said, I’m not pushing pessimism per se – although pessimists do serve an important function in society as a brake on the optimists – I’m pushing realism.

John Stossel salutes my swine flu work

by Michael Fumento on January 30, 2010 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness

[Herewith his blog for Fox Business, titled "Swine Flu Hysteria." I agree with him about the pharmaceutical companies. As I've written elsewhere, in addition to the usual bureaucratic desire for growth in power and budget, the WHO was seeking to cover its tracks for an earlier hysteria - that of avian flu. Moreover, it has been remarkably open (Even if I'm the only one to report on it) about seeking to exploit swine flu to engineer hard-left political change including the redistribution of wealth between countries and instituting "social justice."]

“The Official Word to All, Get a Swine Flu Vaccination Now” was the New York Times headline earlier this month. That followed months of headlines like:

“Swine flu has killed 540 kids, sickened 22 million Americans” (USA Today)

“U.S. prepares for possible swine flu epidemic as global cases rise” (CNN)

But Michael Fumento writes that the facts on swine flu hardly live up to the months of hype.

Hidden within the latest edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
FluView was this sentence: “The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza was below the epidemic threshold”…

You may recall all those additional deaths we were supposed to suffer as a result of swine flu – 30,000 to 90,000, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (a number I previously disputed)…

But like New Zealand and Australia, the United States can actually expect considerably fewer overall flu deaths because of the swine flu…

Only 161 new infections were reported to CDC-monitored labs last week, compared to 11,470 at the epidemic’s mid-October peak.

One reason that there are fewer deaths — a reason little reported by the overheated media — is that most swine flu is milder than seasonal flu. The Council of Europe now wants an investigation of the United Nation’s World Health Organization. It claims WHO, in league with pharmaceutical companies, declared swine flu a pandemic to sell vaccine. The WHO denies the accusation, saying the pandemic is not over.

I doubt that WHO bureaucrats hype swine flu to promote pharmaceutical companies. I suspect that they do it because it inflates their self-worth.

After all the media coverage, scaring us to death, now we’ll see if there are stories that inform us of how deadly swine flu really turned out to be.

Why scientific arguments don’t go very far anymore

by Michael Fumento on January 30, 2010 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness

Do vaccines cause autism? Here’s your answer.

Jenny McCarthy, by virtue of being a former Playboy Playmate who claims her son had autism but that she personally cured him, has been anointed an expert by the media as evidenced by appearances on such shows as Oprah, ABC’s 20/20, and Good Morning America. Typical of her evidence was her appearance on Larry King Live in which she countered three knowledgeable physicians  with “Bullshit!” immediately followed by “My son died in front of me from a vaccine injury!” (Yes, it’s on YouTube.)

A stunned King asked what or who she was talking about, whereupon she admitted he was actually alive.  This woman to many Americans – including the newsmakers – has more authority than every medical journal in print or every scientific panel that’s ever met.

Flu Update Jan. 29: What Swine Flu ISN’t Doing

by Michael Fumento on January 29, 2010

in Health and Illness

Deaths down, hospitalizations down, infections reported to CDC-surveillance labs down. Again the usual disclaimer that this probably represents a time lag in reporting and this are probably all actually the same as the week before. The only aspect of interest again is that of 164 positive samples those labs have received, only two clearly were not swine flu. So here we are, approaching what is the peak of the annual flu season (mid-February) and it does appear that, as was the case in Australia and New Zealand, the milder swine flu has simply brushed aside the far deadlier seasonal flu. In essence, swine flu has become our seasonal flu. And a lot fewer of us are going to die this year as a result.

Grab Your #SoTU Pom-Poms

by Wayne Crews on January 29, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy

and shake them for this Presidential Pep Rally from the objective and non-partisan National Academies Press.
There are NAS books and government programs elaborating on every utterance from Wednesday night’s State of the Union Address. Read the books; after all, you helped pay for them.

The Money behind an Anti-Tea Party Hatchet Job

by Ivan Osorio on January 29, 2010 · 3 comments

in Labor, Politics as Usual

My colleague Lee Doren uncovers the money behind an online hatchet job on the tea party protests:

I just came across a new website titled: http://www.TheTeaPartyIsOver.org

It is paid for by the American Public Policy Committee. Well, according toopensecrets.org, the two donors for American Public Policy Committee this year are Patriot Majority and Patriot Majority West.

However, according to opensecrets.org, the 2nd largest contributor in 2008 to Patriot Majority was SEIU and other top Unions around America.  I imagine the diversion of Union money gets much deeper than this.

Here’s some more on these groups. Patriot Majority founder Craig Varoga is a Democratic political strategist who once worked for former  Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack’s  short-lived presidential campaign, and now runs a consultancy called Independent Strategies. His consulting partner, George Rakis, is a former political director of the Democratic Governors Association, which, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, was the largest single contributor to the American Public Policy Committee during the 2008 election cycle.

UPDATE: It’s worth nothing that the single biggest donor to Patriot Majority, by far, is the nation’s largest government employee union, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which gave the group $5.8 million in the 2008 election cycle. Government employee unions, as would be expected, have a vested interest in promoting the growth of government.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Brit M.D. who tied MMR vaccine to autism acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly”

by Michael Fumento on January 29, 2010 · 2 comments

in Health and Illness

The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism – and subsequently made rates of measles and other diseases skyrocket – acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in doing his research for a landmark 1998 Lancet paper, says Britain’s official General Medical Counsel.

During over two years of hearings Andrew Wakefield was accused of a series of charges, including that he didn’t have ethical approval or relevant qualifications for such tests, he improperly gathered blood samples (paying children £5 each for the samples at his son’s birthday party), and (here’s the kicker) not disclosing that he had been paid to advise lawyers acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.

The GMC also declared two of Wakefield’s former colleagues at the hospital where he worked had also broken the guidelines.

In 2004, 10 of the 12 co-authors of Wakefield’s paper issued a retraction.

The board didn’t look into accusations that Wakefield had outright faked his data, yet a 2009 Sunday Times investigation, confirming evidence presented to the GMC, revealed that:

In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

But the damage has been done. After Wakefield’s study appeared, new anti-vaccination groups popped up like toadstools after rain. (There are now over 150 anti-vaccine Web sites.) Older ones such as the National Vaccine Information Center were reinvigorated. This in turn caused surges in cases of all three viral diseases, each of which is highly infectious and potentially fatal.

This notwithstanding an absolute mountain of evidence that the MMR vaccine and other childhood vaccines (all under fire) are safe. Some of the epidemiological evidence for this comes from whole countries and one body of evidence includes the entire state of California. I have written repeatedly about this problem.

Measles, mumps, pertussis, and other illnesses are on the rise. The accompanying graph shows U.K. measles cases going from nearly zero to close to 1,500 in just the past four years. Not all children need be vaccinated to prevent any disease, but there need to be enough to maintain “herd immunity” or around a 95 percent rate depending on the specific disease. In many areas, rates have fallen well below that level. The ferocious anti-vaccine lobby (and if you think I’m kidding about the ferocity, you should check out my hate mail on the subject) is literally killing our children.

Because vaccines are so effective, people don’t remember these diseases and how they would kill. But we’re being forced to relearn.

Regulation of the Day 107: Blowing Your Nose While Driving

by Ryan Young on January 29, 2010

in Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Michael Mancini was fined for blowing his nose while driving in London. Authorities claim he violated a law requiring him to be in control of his vehicle at all times. Sometimes legislating common sense doesn’t work as well as planned.

Lou Dobbs Believes Own B.S.

by Alex Nowrasteh on January 28, 2010

in Economy, Labor, Mobility

For years Lou Dobbs made a living trying to convince Americans that illegal immigrants and their supporters were waging a war on the middle class. He now supports a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants because he wants to run for office and garner the support of Hispanics.

Dobbs seems to believe his own rhetoric about immigration and the supposed power of the groups he’s railed against for years. Americans aren’t very concerned about immigration while most of the opinions expressed are from small groups of pro and anti immigration activists on the political fringes. Dobbs failed to convince his viewership to keep watching his show but he convinced himself of the imaginary power of illegal immigrants and their supporters.

“Here’s a way of paying for things that’s not going to cost you anything.”

by Ivan Osorio on January 28, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Politics as Usual

Public employee unions, as I’ve noted previously, make up a permanent lobby for bigger government. Now they have a major victory. Oregonians who went to the polls just voted themselves higher taxes. The explanation shouldn’t be that surprising. As The Wall Street Journal notes:

[A] deluge of money. Local and national public employee unions bankrolled the “yes” campaign, with a $6.5 million blitz in TV and radio ads. That was $2 million more than the business community and taxpayer advocates raised. The cash helped the tax increase roll up a 71% margin in the liberal precincts in and around Portland, even as it lost in most of the rest of the state.

The union message was also as clever as it was disingenuous: All of these taxes will be paid by someone else, such as Wall Street bankers, out-of-state credit card companies, CEOs. Only the richest 2.5% will pay a little more in taxes, the unions also claimed.

An opponent of this tax increase put it well, in The New York Times:

“It was a pretty good offer the proponents were making,” Pat McCormick, a spokesman for the lead opposition group, Oregonians Against Job-Killing Taxes, said sarcastically. “Here’s a way of paying for things that’s not going to cost you anything.”

As Reason‘s Ron Bailey aptly observes, for government employee unions, class warfare pays. (Thanks to Julie Walsh.)

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

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