My mother is a die-hard liberal who watches MSNBC exclusively for her news. My brother, who is a conservative, would often change her TV channel to Fox News when he was in town visiting her. One day I paid my mother a visit and to my astonishment found her alone watching Fox News! I asked her why was she watching Fox News. She meekly said to me "Well, Fox has a lot more news than MSNBC"! She had grown weary of listening to endless "opinion talk" from Chris Mathews and others and wanted to hear some actual news coverage.

I read a book recently about the climategate scandal called "The Hockey Stick Illusion". A large portion of the book discusses the "peer review process". Before reading the book I always assumed that papers submitted to scientific journals were scrutinized by a team of experts, and that they would perform rigorous analysis of the work before it would be published. Instead I found out that a team of experts does indeed read the material, but that is about it. Nobody checks the authors calculations, nobody tries to replicate their results, nobody checks on their data to make sure it isn't fraudulent. They simply read over the author's submission and say "Ah, it sounds good to me. Let's print it." Once in a while they will send a few questions to the author. They just assume that the author's figures and calculations and sources are correct.

I asked my wife about this, because she is a researcher in infectious disease and she writes and submits papers to science journals. She completely agreed and added that people think the peer review process is some sort of magical thing that bestows automatic credibility on a subject. Instead, it is a crude filtering process that weeds out the worst papers, and puts everything else out into public view for others to analyze. The real peer work that gets done is when others try to replicate what the first scientist claims he achieved.

The trouble with G****l W*****g advocates is that most of their work cannot be replicated by the very nature of the subject. It has to be relegated to the realm of speculation until we can know more. They are free to make predictions far into the future so that if it fails, their original predictions will have been long forgotten. The few results that can be tested, are short term predictions of g****l w*****g done by the computer models, and those have failed miserably.

I'm not sure what you think I am kidding about. Here is the site to see for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallup's_most_admired_man_and_woman_poll
And I said nothing about the color of his skin.

Just a quick addendum to my post.
I looked up Gallop's "most admired list" going back to 1946. Every single president is on there for most of his years in office. For those of you on each side of the political spectrum, this includes: Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Elder Bush, Younger Bush, and Clinton. The first ladies usually win the women's award (with the curious exception of Michelle Obama).

I guess as long as you become president, you will be admired by a good number of people no matter what you do.

This is the third time that I have seen this poll quoted on UglyHedgehog this week. The part they don't include telling you is that the United States sitting president almost always wins this poll, which dates back 68 years. It is more a measure of who is the most well known person America, rather than who is the most competent. In the actual count, Obama got 30% of the v**e, while Hillary got 19% of the v**e for female. Perhaps there should be a runoff poll?

Hey Racmanaz,
Thanks for posting some actual science material in this thread, instead of the usual brief opinions. Though admittedly, the guy in that last link you posted is just a nutcase.
I have been studying this issue for a good eight years or so, and I find that most of the general public who believe in G****l W*****g do so simply because they heard about it in the news, or from a public figure that they trust. They never seem to know any of the salient facts about the science. This subject can be enormously complex with contributing factors from many different sciences, so it is easy to BS people in wh**ever direction you want to by selectively citing certain facts.
I think that too many people put their complete trust in news sources and persons of authority instead of examining the facts for themselves.

This is an area of vast misinformation. I am not surprised that you found a chart showing the U.S. way down the list on infant mortality. This is because almost every other country in the world LIES about their infant mortality rate. The United States and only a few other countries (i.e. England, Austria, Sweden, Slovakia) actually use the World Health Organization's definition of a live birth as "an infant showing any signs of life".

Most other countries have strict thresholds for what is considered a live birth. For instance, many European countries don't count babies that are born under a certain weight and/or are born prematurely. Most of them die and thus are not counted in the infant mortality rate. Some even have requirement that the baby be a certain number of centimeters long or else it is not counted in the statistics. Babies who die within 24 hours are also not counted in many countries.

Most other countries also literally give up on premature babies and make no attempt to save them. This includes highly industrialized western countries as well as third world countries. These too are thrown out of the statistics. The U.S., on the other hand, takes the most extraordinary measures to save all premature infants. When these babies die, they ARE counted in the U.S. statistics. The U.S. saves the largest number of preemies in the world.

I don't know why there is such a discrepancy in reporting actual raw infant mortality rates around the world, but it makes an actual comparison very difficult. We used to distrust only the data that came out of c*******t countries or dictatorships. But on this issue, sadly, we can't trust the data coming out of highly industrialized western nations.

The charts you are looking at are ones like the United Nations uses which measure healthcare largely on the basis of how much they are socialized and other factors and not strictly on the actual quality of medicine. I once saw a chart that ranked the U.S. right near Venezuela and Cuba. The story on actual medical care is that the U.S. is the top country. We lead in things like infant mortality rate, cancer survival rate, and cardiac care. Why do you think that so many foreign heads of state come to the U.S. to get treatment instead of Venezuela or Cuba? We get a lot of them here at the Cleveland Clinic.

Yes, like Medicare. And you are right that most of the civilized countries have largely socialized medicine. I used Cuba and North Korea as examples because they are 100% socialized. But it should tell you something that the U.S. has the best standards of healthcare in the world when we have not had socialized medicine. We also provide most of the research and development of medicine for the rest of the World. We also manufacture most of the drugs and v*****es.

I don't know how you expect socialized medicine to take the burden off American countries(?) or make life better for millions of Americans except by shifting the burden onto other Americans and making those lives more difficult.

Obamacare may not be fully socialized medicine like in Cuba or North Korea, but it is definitely a gigantic shift in that direction. You have people that are getting their healthcare paid for by others, without the individual being required to contribute one cent.

Iran Contra may have been an underhanded scheme by Reagan, but it did not involve the U.S. making war.

I think it is silly to call Obama a republican.

1. He supports unlimited a******n.
2. He supports gay marriage.
3. He wants to tax America as high as he can get away with.
4. His deficit spending has more than doubled that of G.W. Bush.
5. He tries to expand welfare as much as he can.
6. He has cut military spending even more than Clinton.
7. He supports legalizing marijuana.
8. He signed into law socialized medicine.
9. He has encouraged i*****l i*********n and made it as easy as possible for them to stay, although admittedly, Bush was not so strong there either.
10. He has publicly announced that he will not enforce certain laws that he does not like.

About the only thing that he did that remotely resembles republican ideals is that he continued the war on terror. Even here though, he does things that no republican would have done. For instance, making war without ever consulting Congress, ordering the k*****g of all terror suspects without attempting to capture even a single one, giving miranda rights to foreign terrorists, etc...

Please tell me where I am wrong.

This is the second time in about five hours that Mr. Dirtpusher has posted on this subject, this time quoting a different article on the Gallup Poll.

What he doesn't tell you from the first article that he posted, is that the "most admired man" award almost always goes to the incumbent U.S. President, no matter what his record. Not a very good indicator of success.

Didn't anyone read this article carefully? It says that the incumbent president of the United States almost always wins this award. And you know we have had some sub-par Presidents before Obama, so this award doesn't say much about the competence of the office-holder.

Do you really think carbon dioxide is a harmful gas? Was this quote by Michelle Bachman supposed to make us feel ashamed?

There is no context for the Reagan quote, so that very short quip could have meant anything.