OT: Why Do People Reject Science - Wrap Up

SMenasco wrote:Most of the time I try to be respectful. However, this snide, vile thought process that generated the dead baby remark by whatever a BlackSpinner is, gets the Leftie Elitist Grand Award. The name certainly fits well. It has always been beyond my understanding that marxists, socialists and anarchists just don't connect the dots regarding the tremendous uplifting of life provided by a profit-based economy. I doubt they even consider where the electronic wonders, tvs, smart phones, i-pads, computers, etc. came from and why. And I would bet that left wing elitists, for whatever reason, support these lazy, self-centered unemployed bums that are camping out, making a mess and damaging small businesses, most not even knowing why they are protesting and what they want, except a little smoke, a little drink, a little roll in the hay and the overthrow the capitalist system. All this claptrap is a direct result of the crazy marxist-leaning tenured university professors that are training these ne'er-do-wells that are crapping on people's property and in public spaces. There are abuses in every system known to mankind; except there are fewer in reasonably regulated free enterprise for profit economies. You know these people don't understand what our system is all about, since we don't teach much of it in school, especially high school. Did you ever give a fast food cashier some change to keep from getting more change back? Anything other than what's shown on the register is beyond them.

Dead babies? What a poisonous attitude! I will take part of the blame for a lot of what's wrong and causes "dead baby" remarks as well as the protests. I do believe that my generation caused a lot this crappy attitude and behavior, by giving our kids all the neat stuff we never had, since we want them to have it better than us. We spoiled them. But I don't think you are a spoiled person, BlackSpinner. I think you are just someone with a nasty agressive disposition that's lurking around waiting to attack.

So in order to feel better, I think I'll go chop a tree down, choke a chicken, drive around without a destination, select both paper and plastic, leave all the lights on, pour used oil along the fence, and kill a cow and devour the carcass.

from the first post -
Even relatively small threats to profits can cause vested interests to spring into obfuscatory action as is revealed by the case involving the makers of aspirin. Aspirin consumption by children with viral illnesses increases the risk of Reye's syndrome — fatal in one third of all patients — by 4,000 per cent.

When this evidence became known, the aspirin industry geared up a counter-campaign that delayed the introduction of simple warning labels on their products about the risk of Reye's syndrome by more than five years.

Before the warning labels became mandatory in the US, some 500 cases were reported annually; today, less than a handful of cases are reported each year.

mars wrote:

VVV wrote:

I did not know people reject science and do not want to read through these posts. So I went back to the opening post and see that it is about climate change and environmental science.

mars wrote: OT: Why Do People Reject Science

In the context of the opening post could it be that people are not rejecting science but are rejecting Al Gore who is a very biased and self-serving promoter and profit-taker of things to do with global warming and creating alarm about the environment; and is also being a huge hypocrite in his homebuilding and transportation activities as it pertains to his own "carbon footprint"?

I don't see that people reject science but then I acquired two science degrees in the sixties and spend most of my career working amidst scientists in a high tech company. So maybe I was blinded to the dark?

In another thread VVV talked about tolerance - and I said - and he then said -

Re: Can this forum be edited to have sub-topics?
Postby VVV on Thu Dec 01, 2011 8:43 pm

mars wrote: Being tolerant implies that you do not lie about what you do not agree with.

Maybe you can state what you believe I distorted and lied about?
.....................................V

No problem

The first post is about what it is headed - Why Do People Reject Science - and climate change is but one example. Picking that one example, and ignoring the other examples, and you then saying the thread is about global warming - is a distortion of what the thread is about, and a lie.

And then pretending your lie is the truth, off you go on a rant about global warming.

And just looking at your first words we see -

I did not know people reject science and do not want to read through these posts.

really - you did not know that people reject science - no need for me to comment about that !

Mars

mars wrote:
Here is my latest update to this discussion -

The full article is in the New Scientist -

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... truth.html

which you will have to be a subscriber to read it in full.

Mars

sososotiredofmars
Also Posted As:
(NJSleepless)

sososotiredofmars wrote:

Mars, as your Sig suggests, it may be time to quit the bottle so you can better understand the discussions you have. It's strange that you need to cite and point out others quotes to help your arguments instead of permitting the readers to figure it out for themselves. How's that Majorska treatin ya?

Maybe if you hit up an AA meeting you wuld be less of an ass?

You want to insult me, do it in public, not behind everyone's back.

Hose_Head wrote:

Hi Mars. Very interesting thread......................... you may be interested in these two articles:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -fall.html "The US is the most powerful scientific nation on Earth and yet the status of science in public life has never been so low. Why?"

and

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... truth.html "Opponents of science are experts at winning the battle for hearts and minds. It’s time to learn their game and beat them at it"

Science in America: Decline and fall

The US is the most powerful scientific nation on Earth and yet the status of science in public life has never been so low. Why?

By Shawn Lawrence Otto | 1 November 2011 of the New Scientist

Posted by N4CM Opinion 1 Nov 2011

THE big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.” So said Michele Bachmann, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, in 2008. Bachmann also thinks that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can cause mental retardation and that science classes should include creationism. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of a scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

Bachmann’s rival, Texas governor Rick Perry, advocates biblically based abstinence-only sex education. He argues that evolution is “a theory that is out there – and it’s got some gaps in it”. On climate change, Perry says “the science is not settled… just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact… Galileo got outvoted for a spell”.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells voters that embryonic stem cell research is “killing children in order to have research materials”. Rising Republican star Herman Cain claims there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is anything other than a personal choice.

Republicans diverge from anti-science politics at their peril. When leading candidate Mitt Romney said: “I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer… humans contribute to that”, conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh responded with “Bye bye, nomination”. Romney back-pedalled, saying, “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman argued that “the minute that the Republican party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem”. Huntsman has since been marginalised by Republican pundits.

The intellectual rot runs wide. Ninety-six of 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress either deny climate change is real or have signed pledges vowing to oppose its mitigation. This July, San Francisco’s board of supervisors, all Democrats, passed an ordinance requiring cellphone shops to warn customers about radiation hazards such as brain cancer, despite no scientific evidence. Elsewhere, elected leaders harass and intimidate scientists they disagree with, inaccurately claim that scientists say carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, pass resolutions stating that Earth has been cooling and instruct teachers to teach their students that astrology controls the weather. Absurd comments are now not only politically acceptable, but passionately applauded. What could be happening?

Over the course of the next 40 years, science is poised to create more knowledge than humans have created in all of recorded history. Even as this overwhelms us, the unanticipated consequences of past advances are boomeranging back – climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, population, overfishing and many more. We are now 100 per cent dependent on science to find ways to preserve our environment and support our population, but policymakers increasingly reject the answers science offers or pretend the problems don’t exist.

Knowledge is power

This is where Thomas Jefferson’s assumption about a well-informed public poses a problem. Jefferson believed that it required “no very high degree of education”. In today’s world, dominated as it is by science, can democracy still prosper?

Judging from Congress, the answer may be no. Less than 2 per cent of its 535 members have professional backgrounds in science. In contrast, there are 222 lawyers, whom one suspects largely avoided science classes in college. Lawyers are trained to win arguments, and as any trial lawyer will tell you, that means using facts selectively for the purposes of winning, not to establish the truth. No wonder ideology and rhetoric have come to dominate policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality.

What happened? To understand the troubled relationship between US science and politics we have to understand the nation’s history.

Contrary to recent claims, the US was not founded as a Christian nation. The early settlers were Puritans seeking freedom from authoritarian Christianity. To be a Puritan was to study both the Bible and the book of nature in order to discern God’s laws, a process called “natural philosophy”, which today we call “science”. In 1663, 62 per cent of the members of the Royal Society were Puritans, including Isaac Newton.

The writings of Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume deeply influenced Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Newton teased out the difference between belief and knowledge. Bacon laid out how we could build knowledge using inductive reasoning. Locke defined how knowledge is different from and superior to “but faith or opinion”. Hume defined freedom as the ability to choose to do something or not.

Jefferson incorporated these ideas in America’s founding document and they laid the philosophical and legal foundations of the US. If every human had the potential to build knowledge about reality and truth using science, no king or pope could claim a greater authority than an ordinary citizen. All men were created equal. This justified a secular government that respected and tolerated religion, but did not base its authority on religion – instead basing it on liberty, reason and science.

This thinking served the US very well for some 200 years. But then things began to go wrong.

It would be too easy to point the finger solely at the religious right. In reality there were many forces at work, from both ends of the political spectrum and from within science as well as without.

A good starting point is the second world war, which transformed science from an exploration of nature into a weapon. Radar and the atomic bomb had big impacts on the outcome, as did sonar, synthetic rubber and other innovations.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who had coordinated these efforts as director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, gave President Harry Truman a document titled “Science, the Endless Frontier”. In it, he made the argument for permanent government funding of research.

If anything, Bush made the argument too well. Relieved of the burden of selling the value of their research to philanthropists, scientists turned inward and in many ways withdrew from civic engagement. University tenure programmes were developed that rewarded research and publication but not public outreach. Scientists who did reach out to the public were often viewed poorly by their peers. Politics became something that could taint one’s objectivity.

Science is politics

But to view science as apolitical is a fundamental error. Science is always political because the new knowledge it creates requires refining our morals and ethics and challenges vested interests. Withdrawing from the conversation cedes these discussions to opponents, which is exactly what happened.

As scientists were retreating into their labs, America was reflecting on the dark side of knowledge. The atom bomb profoundly affected public consciousness as moral ambiguity combined with the threat of nuclear annihilation. The effects of chemical pollution began to be felt. Disasters ranging from toxic waste to dangerous medical devices shattered public confidence. A deep distrust of both government and science set in among baby boomers.

Meanwhile, religion was organising. Struggling to attract new members, fundamentalist churches found a rallying call in the increasing moral complexities of science. Using television, the voice of Protestantism grew evangelical, angry, anti-science and intensely political.

Even as these criticisms mounted, science was enjoying increased funding and prestige in universities, supplanting the humanities. The humanities pushed back. Postmodernism emerged, drawing on cultural anthropology and relativity to argue that there was no such thing as objective truth. Science was simply the cultural expression of western white men and had no greater claim to the truth than the “truths” of women and minorities. This fit well with the politics of civil rights and also conveniently placed the humanities back on top. In pop culture it became a secular religious movement that preached creating your own reality – the New Age.

Many positive things came out of postmodernism but the idea that there is no objective truth is just plain wrong. And yet a generation of Americans was taught this incorrect idea. As they became leaders in politics, industry and the media this thinking affected their regard for truth and science. Without objective truth, all arguments become rhetorical. We are either paralysed in endless debate or we must resort to brute authority. This is the abyss the US now faces.

The situation was worsened in 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission set aside the fairness doctrine. Until that time, broadcasters who use the public airwaves were required to present controversial subjects, and to present them fairly. Once the doctrine was set aside, a new breed of radio and television newscaster took over. Rush Limbaugh and others earned massive ratings by voicing outraged opinions on political matters. At the same time, cable TV and the internet were coming online, providing innumerable alternative news platforms.

News shows now had to compete with entertainment, and so became more emotional and opinionated. A generation of journalists with a postmodern education decided that “objective” reporting was simply getting varying views of the story, but not taking a position on which represented reality. “It’s not our role,” explained White House correspondent David Gregory when asked why he didn’t push George W. Bush on his lack of a rationale for going into Iraq. This problem, called “false balance” now pits, for example, climate scientists against deniers. This gives undue exposure to extreme views – a situation that has been compounded by the elimination of most science and investigative reporters from cash-strapped newsrooms.

Finally, there is the influence of vested interests. Between January 2009 and June 2010, for example, the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. They spent an estimated $73 million more on anti-clean energy ads from January through October 2010. Much of the effort was to cast doubt on the findings of climate science or impugn scientists’ reputations and motives. It worked, largely because the news media allowed it to.

These factors have combined to create an assault on science that is unprecedented in American history. Cut loose from objective truth, America’s public dialogue has become one of warring opinions and policy paralysis. Progress is made by brute authority, over the laws, despite the data, and against the will of opponents – the very situation Locke and Jefferson were hoping to avoid.

Anti-science ideology has taken hold before, differently, but history may provide some lessons. The fundamental elements were similar when the Soviet Union elevated the ideology of Lysenkoism ahead of the warnings of geneticists, whom Trofim Lysenko called “caste priests of ivory tower bourgeois pseudoscience”, not unlike Sarah Palin’s characterisations of global warming as “doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood”. Soviet agriculture was set back 40 years.

The political right in Weimar Germany called Einstein’s theory of relativity a “hoax” and said he was in it for the money – much as climate deniers argue today.

During the Nuremberg trials, Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, recounted the use of new technology to deliver a uniform ideological message, much like today’s political echo chambers: “Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.” In other words, “Dittoheads”.

In his Great Leap Forward, Mao set forth a plan to transform China into a modern society in 15 years. Scientists who advised against his ideas were harassed or jailed. Mao’s policies led to the greatest famine in human history and the deaths of over 40 million people.

The US is obviously nowhere near any of these situations, but is reaching a crisis point uniquely its own. With every step away from reason and into ideology, the country moves toward a state of tyranny in which public policy comes to be based not on knowledge, but on the most loudly voiced opinions.

The solutions are as multi-faceted as the problem. Above all, scientists must reengage in the national civic dialogue (see opposite) and reasonable politicians should challenge opponents to science-themed policy debates.

I am involved in two projects that aim to make this happen. One is the American Science Pledge, which calls on candidates to pledge to defend science and base public policy decisions on data.

The other is ScienceDebate2012.com, a grassroots campaign for a presidential debate on science, technology, health, medicine and the environment. In 2008 we persuaded Barack Obama and John McCain to join such a debate; Science Debate 2008 was the largest political initiative in the history of American science. Scientists would do well to support such efforts at even greater levels today. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “in every democracy, the people get the government they deserve”.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the assault on science in America and the CEO and cofounder of ScienceDebate2008. He is also an award-winning screenwriter.

Science in America: Selling the truth

Opponents of science are experts at winning the battle for hearts and minds. It’s time to learn their game and beat them at it

This article is from the 29 October 2011 issue of New Scientist by Peter Aldhous

John Holdren, science adviser to President Barack Obama, is a clever man. But when it comes to the science of communication, he can say some dumb things. In January, Holdren welcomed the prospect of climatologists being called to testify before Congress: “I think we’ll probably move the opinions of some of the members of Congress who currently call themselves sceptics, because I think a lot of good scientists are going to come in and explain very clearly what we know and how we know it and what it means, and it’s a very persuasive case.”

Fat chance. In March, an impressive array of climate scientists did exactly what Holdren wanted, but their efforts seemed only to inflame the scepticism of Republicans opposed to regulation of emissions.

For researchers who study how people form their opinions, and how we are influenced by the messages we receive, it was all too predictable. Holdren’s prescription was a classic example of the “deficit model” of science communication, which assumes that mistrust of unwelcome scientific findings stems from a lack of knowledge. Ergo, if you provide more facts, scepticism should melt away. This approach appeals to people trained to treat evidence as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The problem is that in many cases, it just doesn’t work.

Perversely, just giving people more information can sometimes polarise views and cause sceptics to harden their line. “We can preach the scientific facts as long as we want,” says Dietram Scheufele, a specialist in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is replicating the same failed experiment over and over again.”

Soft science

The good news is that the latest research on communication and public opinion reveals strategies that anyone who wants political debate to be informed by accurate scientific information should be able to use to get their message across.

Indeed, given recent comments from some Republican presidential hopefuls, it may be high time US scientists put aside their own scepticism about the “soft” social sciences, and embrace what these studies have to say.

First, though, a bit of perspective. While some of the comments made recently by Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and others may seem alarming, it’s important to bear in mind the relatively narrow audience they were intended to reach.

This is presidential primary season, when candidates must appeal to the most ideologically committed voters to win their party’s nomination. When Perry invoked Galileo in contending that “the science is not settled” on climate change, it was a message crafted to appeal to hard-core Republican voters and big-money donors within the oil and coal industries – not to the majority of Americans who accept that our planet is getting warmer and that human activities are largely to blame.

In fact, few objective measures support the idea that fundamentally anti-science ideology has taken hold in the US. Scientists are generally held in high public esteem, scientific knowledge shapes up fairly well compared to other nations, public interest is high and investment in research remains healthy. “You can’t find a society that’s more pro-science,” argues Dan Kahan of Yale University.

Even so, there are a few key areas of US public opinion where this picture begins to break down. People aren’t empty vessels waiting to receive information. Instead, we all filter and interpret knowledge through our cultural perspectives, and these perspectives are often more powerful than the facts. That poses a problem for some areas of science, which have come to clash with the values of a sizeable proportion of the US population.

Evolution provides the clearest example. Religion is a bigger factor in the lives of Americans than it is for citizens of most other developed countries. Evangelical Christian churches that preach literal interpretations of Genesis are especially influential. No wonder the US comes near the bottom of the pile in international surveys measuring the percentage of people who accept evolution (see “Darwin’s doubters”).

Cultural filters also explain why some social conservatives – including Bachmann – are willing to believe anecdotal reports that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can cause mental retardation. Here, evidence that the vaccine is effective and poses little risk is being filtered through the fear that a product designed to protect against a sexually transmitted virus will encourage promiscuity among teenage girls.

Such biases are not the preserve of the right – many of those who falsely believe that childhood vaccines cause autism are left-leaning supporters of “natural” medicine who distrust the pharmaceutical industry.

But on climate change, again, it is those on the right who are butting heads with scientists. Climate is especially interesting because polling indicates a relatively recent and strengthening ideological split on the issue (see “Divisive climate”). The most ardent sceptics are those who identify with the Tea Party movement, according to a poll run earlier this year for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. For these voters, the cultural filter seems to be the idea that taking action to limit climate change means “big government” intervention in the US economy, anathema to staunch conservatives.

Hammering another nail into the coffin of the deficit model, Kahan’s latest survey of more than 1500 US adults indicates that far from overcoming our cultural biases, education actually strengthens them. Among those with greater numeracy and scientific literacy, opinions on climate change polarised even more strongly.

Kahan’s explanation is that we have a strong interest in mirroring the views of our own cultural group. The more educated we become, he argues, the better we get at making the necessary triangulation to adopt the “correct” opinions. On issues like climate change, for most people these cultural calculations trump any attempt to make an objective assessment of the evidence.

As well as explaining how intelligent and educated people come to misunderstand where the scientific consensus lies, Kahan’s work suggests a way to drag debate back towards what the science actually says: change the messenger.

Trusted voices

Kahan scores people on two cultural scales: heirarchists versus egalitarians and individualists versus communitarians. Liberals tend to be egalitarian-communitarian, while conservatives are more often hierarchical-individualist.

In one experiment Kahan examined attitudes to the HPV vaccine. When presented with balanced arguments for and against giving the vaccine to schoolgirls, 70 per cent of egalitarian-communitarians, and 56 per cent of hierarchical-individualists, thought it was safe to do so.

Kahan then attributed the arguments to fictional experts described so as to make them appear either egalitarian-communication (liberal) or hierarchical-individualist (conservative).

The “natural” pairing, with an egalitarian-communitarian arguing in favour of the vaccine, and a hierarchical-individualist arguing against, drove the two camps a little further apart. But, crucially, swapping the messengers around had a dramatic effect: 58 per cent of egalitarian-communitarians and 61 per cent of hierarchical-individualists rated the vaccine as safe (Law and Human Behavior, vol 34, p 501).

These findings suggest that one way to change people’s minds is to find someone they identify with to argue the case. Climate scientists have almost certainly been badly served by allowing former Democratic vice-president Al Gore to become the dominant voice on the issue. His advocacy will have convinced liberals, but is bound to have contributed to the rejection of mainstream climate science by many conservatives.

So who might do a better job of carrying the climate message to conservative ears? Perhaps the US military, which is worried about the security implications of climate change, or senior figures within the insurance industry, who are factoring the risk of more frequent severe weather events into their calculations.

Of course, scientists themselves could step up to the plate. But their powers of persuasion may be limited. While it wasn’t always so, US scientists tend to lean heavily towards the Democrats’ camp – which helps explain why the idea of climatologists forming part of a liberal conspiracy to whip up alarm and keep federal research dollars flowing has become part of the climate deniers’ narrative.

The appeal of this story to those on the political right illustrates another key finding: how a message is framed in relation to the cultural biases of the intended recipients is crucial to its persuasiveness. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank that seeks to undermine the teaching of evolution in US schools, has learned this lesson well. After failing to get biblical creationism taught in science classes, the institute came back with the “scientific” concept of intelligent design, and two carefully researched talking points: “evolution is just a theory” and “teach the controversy”.

Not only were these frames attractive to the religious right, they were also difficult for scientists to counter without seeming to endorse censorship. Especially clever was the use of the term “theory”. To many people the word is roughly synonymous with “hunch”, so the frame did its intended job of questioning Darwinism’s credibility.

Matthew Nisbet, a communication specialist at American University in Washington DC, has long argued that scientists need to do a better job of framing (Science, vol 316, p 56). Working with Edward Maibach of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Nisbet recently found that framing action on climate change in terms of public health benefits prompts a positive response from a broad range of Americans, including those who are ambivalent when it is framed as an environmental issue (BMC Public Health, vol 10, p 299).

Another promising frame is the idea that climate change presents an economic opportunity for the US through the creation of “green jobs”, although in recent weeks this rallying cry has been muffled by the controversy surrounding the Californian solar power firm Solyndra, which went bankrupt despite being loaned more than $500 million by the Obama administration.

Still, Scheufele is convinced that the most effective frames for communicating about climate change will ultimately revolve around economic opportunities, as concerns about the economy are usually where political debates are won and lost.

For many scientists, talk of “framing” and “selling” ideas to the public sounds uncomfortably like misinformation through the dark art of spin. This misses the point, argue advocates of framing. It’s possible to communicate accurately about science in the context of an engaging frame, they say.

New research demonstrates the value of another mode of communication that should come more naturally to scientists. Jason Reifler of Georgia State University in Atlanta and Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, tested two different ways of presenting the same information about temperature records to people who identified themselves as “strong Republicans” sceptical about human-caused climate change. One was in the form of a line graph, the other plain text.

The text had little effect, but the graph made the strong Republicans more likely to acknowledge that global warming is both real and a consequence of human activities. “Given sufficiently unambiguous graphical information, people are much more likely to acknowledge the facts,” Nyhan and Reifler concluded, in a paper presented in September at the American Political Science Association’s meeting in Seattle.

Taken together, studies of communication provide a recipe to allow science to better inform US political debate: find frames that work with broad sections of the population and stick closely to those narratives; seek allies from across the political spectrum who can reach out to diverse audiences; and remember that a graph can be worth a thousand words. While there’s little evidence the US is in the thrall of a coherent anti-science movement, the penalty for failing to follow this recipe could be the election of a president who is blind to the true scientific consensus on some of the key issues of our time.

Experience elsewhere provides a cautionary tale, argues Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who studies the movement that denies that HIV causes AIDS. Thabo Mbeki’s flirtation with this movement and his refusal to endorse the use of antiretroviral drugs during his tenure as South Africa’s president has been estimated to have caused more than 300,000 premature deaths ( Journal of AIDS, vol 49, p 410).

“You could very easily end up with a US president who holds unscientific views, and that could be as damaging as Mbeki was in South Africa,” Kalichman warns.

Peter Aldhous is New Scientist’s bureau chief in San Francisco

SMenasco wrote:Hey, Mars; piss off, asshole.

Let me make it clear - your rant was not only irrational and abusive, but lacking in human decency and respect.