Correlation does not imply causation

[thewayne]

"Before Obamacare, there had never been a confirmed case of Ebola in the U.S."
—Nick Muzin, Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz

And the USA had not had a mass-casualty terrorist attack until George Dubya Bush was in office. And coincidentally, the USA never had a confirmed case of Ebola until Ted Cruz was in office. Your point?

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I'd ask if you were serious, but..

Wow.

Yet, I suppose it's just an exceptionally crude deployment of their favorite, oldest trick: say something that puts your opponent on the defensive. It doesn't matter how idiotic the assertion is, though definite bonus points if there is nuance involved, just that the reply must involve some kind of explanation - which is inherently less dramatic than outlandish headlines.

Global warming's seen more than its fair share of such idiocy, tragically - the scientific side has to respond in a tone of logic and knowledge, versus the spirit of emotional assertion, which is, unfortunately for us all, so much more inherently persuasive to many people.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

When I read this to my wife yesterday as we were pulling out to go bike riding, she laughed so hard that she stalled the car. The amazing amount of idiocy that goes on over here can be truly astounding, and Cruz is pretty much the head of the Congressional Nutters Brigade. The dude is a Senator, and he actively interferes with the operations of the House of Representatives, serving to further undermine the Speaker's already tenuous base.

This country's biggest problems (to me) concentrate around greed and religion: too much of both. Too many people in power trust their "guts" and media pundits with no background in science over scientists. Just last weekend a dean of a college at New Mexico State University (and not the dean of one based in science) gave a talk that slammed astrophysics up one side and down the other over the Pluto Is/Isn't A Planet issue. Part of his diatribe was probably prompted by the fact that Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto (at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ) retired to NMSU and helped start up the astronomy program there. At my wife's observatory, Apache Point (managed by NMSU), they used to and hopefully still have a copy of Tombaugh's book on the discovery of Pluto that was not only signed by him, but was also hand-annotated.

Part of the problem with global climate change denialism is both religious and money-driven, with a bit of politics thrown in. The religion is based around the Biblical concepts that God will never again destroy the world by flood, therefore what's happening is just normal variance. The other part of the religion basis is that we are stewards of the Earth, therefor we can do whatever we want with it. The capitalism aspect is based on Wall Street's drive to push for quarterly profits, blinkering people to look at long-term problems and solutions. This flows over in to not looking at things long-term. There's an old Mark Twain quote: Climate is what they predict, weather is what's happening. And they don't understand that the shrinking ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica represent a real problem for sea level rise because they don't understand the simple physics of the displacement of objects in water.

[silveradept]

Really? That's not actually true - there have been people treated in the United States for ebola before this president.

Still, the Organized Ignorance Brigade is in fine form, with their insistence that ebola is both airborne and that you can prevent the spread of it by simply shunning or quarantining anybody who traveled to a possibly-ebola region.