A disease cluster scare implodes; a new one is born

By Michael Fumento

Yesterday I wrote that a scare over a scleroderma cluster in South Boston had been resolved when the state department of health found no links to anything manmade, but rather than the sufferers were simply genetically more inclined to developing the disease.

But now Florida activists have just goaded the Palm Beach County Health Department into declaring a cluster of child cancer cases in the town of Acreage. Residents are alternately angered and terrified, including by none other than uber-activist Erin Brockovich herself, about whose cold-blooded antics I've published 15 articles. She came to town to express her concern and outrage, with two law firms in tow handing out contracts labeled "Contingency Fee Agreement & Power of Attorney."

Implicated have been radioactive well water, pesticides, solvents, jet fuel, and other causes. Everything but coincidence, as health officials obviously believe. Meanwhile, in addition to being terrified over their kids' health, people in the town have found they can't move if they want to because their property values have collapsed.

Implicated have been pesticides, solvents, radium, jet fuel, and other causes. Everything but coincidence, as health officials obviously believe.

I found out about this because I received an email today that read in part:

I wrote to you earlier because Erin Brockovich was starting hysteria and pressing the government to call our community a cancer cluster. Now, with skewed population numbers and a number as small as three, the health officials have deemed us a pediatric cancer cluster. Now people are calling to condemn this community with 12,000 CHILDREN (not total). People are scared and trying to blame whatever and whoever.

An unofficial poll by a newspaper online website found two-thirds of those voting thought Brocko was only out for personal gain (Oh, such ingrates!), and some comments by townspeople seemed to reflect, shall we say, a certain degree of anger. Here's one.

The people of the Acreage have alot to lose, cant move, cant refi, cant sell, cant do anything with your property but still pay taxes and your mortgage for how ever many years this takes.

No mortgage company is going to work with anybody out here till this is over how long do you figure it will take? 5 years? 10 years? And while were all sitting on worthless property we will have the added cost of city water to be stuck with..

And while this is going on we all live on dead ground good for nothing... Show me the proof!!! You can't there is none!!!!

I dunno. Call me insensitive. But I don't think doing this to people is right.

Indians Objecting to Paleface Wind Farms

By Michael Fumento

Despite massive subsidies, wind power still only provides about two percent of U.S. energy. Part of the problem is inherent. It takes a lot of turbines to produce the power that a single coal-fired or nuke plant can produce. So wind farms are going to comprise a lot of turbines. And that causes problems, as we've been seeing in a 10-year fight over constructing a 130-turbine offshore wind farm near Martha's Vineyard.

It would be the first offshore wind project in the country and furnish about 75 percent of Cape Cod's energy.

Ian Bowles, the Massachusetts energy and environmental affairs secretary, has called the project "symbolic of America's struggle with clean energy. Its symbolism has risen above the number of megawatts."

Although some protests have been dealt with, including potential hindrance to navigation and fishing and harm to birds, Indians are still against it. (I used to say "native Americans" until once when I was interviewing two of them and I kept saying "native Americans" and they kept referring to themselves as "Indians.")

The Indians in the area practice a sunrise ritual on the sound and also say they may have artifacts buried beneath the seabed, according to the Washington Post. They've gotten the sound qualified for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which could restrict its commercial use.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says that although his department is trying to broker a deal between the tribes and Energy Management, the company seeking to build the farm, "I'm not holding my breath for a consensus." If both sides can't settle on a compromise by April, he says, he's going to just lay down the law himself in April and probably tick off everybody.

Michael Moynihan, director of the Green Project at NDN, a centrist think tank, told the Post, "It is emblematic of the difficulty of getting wind online, anywhere in America, with a system designed a century ago that is frankly hostile to renewable energy."

Right. If it were just a few tightly-bunched turbines, it wouldn't be a problem. But these farms, in addition to things like chopping up birds and bats have a big and obvious footprint.

Compare that with the nearest power plant to my home, which I often pass on my bike rides. It's small, but probably provides more power than hundreds of turbines. Nonetheless, being coal-powered it drew the ire of a number of local residents. So the owners did something really smart. They built a wooden wall around the plant, then painted a very nice mural on it depicting local history.

This being the land of George Washington, the murals include such as Washington's crossing of the Delaware. The wall isn't that high, yet it's enough so that if you didn't already know the plant was there you wouldn't know it was there. It has smokestacks, but you never see anything come out of them. The only ugly aspect was the coal pile, and it's now obscured.

Out of sight, out of mind. But you can't do that with wind. Solar has its own problem, also based on inefficiency, in that it requires huge tracts of land for all the panels needed.

But if you're looking for new facilities that don't produce greenhouse gas emissions there is a fourth solution. Nuclear power. A natural gas-burning power plant under construction has just exploded, killing five people. Every year, American coal miners die violently in mines or slowly from exposure to coal dust. Nuclear power in this country has never killed anybody. No birds, no bats, and most importantly no humans. That's also true in France, where 70 percent of their power comes from nukes.

And today's nuke plant designs are less prone to accidents than ever.

The writing is on the wall. Go nuclear.

Toyota's Troubles

By Michael Fumento

While driving with my future wife along California's scenic but treacherous Pacific Coast Highway in 1991, my brand new Toyota suddenly fishtailed and dove straight off a cliff. That's the "after" picture you see.

I was uninjured, but my wife suffered both a broken neck and crushed skull. I was told I would probably lose her, but she had a miraculous recovery and today only suffers epilepsy. A week after the accident I read Toyota was replacing the model at half year because, according to one car magazine, driving experts said it suffered from sudden "terminal" oversteering.

So you may think I assume that Toyota is guilty not only of having faulty accelerators but of covering up the fact for two years. But you'd assume wrong. They may well prove guilty of both charges, but we need to keep in mind that the allegations are all based on driver reports. Some of these are clearly going to be related to news events. And some will be opportunistic.

Yesterday a letter to the editor of the Washington Post began, "Toyota, I'm mad as hell! I blame you - not only for a faulty product but for the cover-up: a slow, secretive roll-out revealing too little, way too late." It continues, "In September, driving a 2009 Camry on a clear day, I had a terrible accident. Despite strenuous braking efforts, I was unable to decelerate. I hit two other cars and rolled and destroyed my car. I was seriously injured. The cause, however, appeared not to be a faulty floor mat-the only responsibility Toyota acknowledged at that time."

He then relates that he replaced the car with a 2010 Camry and "the gas pedal on that car stuck and the car uncontrollably gained speed."

The second incident seems to match the general accusations against Toyota, but the first and truly serious one does not. Braking is an entirely different system from acceleration. Uncontrolled acceleration or lack of de-acceleration would not override slamming the brakes.

This is sheer opportunism and you will see it across North America and probably the world, regardless of whether there's a real problem with Toyotas or not. And we're talking about the world's largest automaker. I'll have more to say on this in an upcoming article, but this is going to be bad.

Yes, WHO faked a pandemic and is now lying about it, my Forbes article

By Michael Fumento

The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying "The sky is falling!" like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. "The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible," the agency claims on its Web site.

But I've been documenting the hoax since before a pandemic was declared, back when the WHO was just posturing about a proclamation.

I first showed that swine flu was exceptionally mild, when by definition flu pandemics had to be severe. I later showed that the WHO changed the definition to match swine flu, which required it to eliminate severity as a factor. That in turn makes the definition of "flu pandemic" absolutely worthless.

I also explained why the WHO did it. That it wasn't mere bureaucratic turf-enlarging, but rather first an effort to cover up yet another WHO hysteria, over avian flu, and then an attempt to bring "social justice" to the world and redistribute wealth between nations. That from the very mouth of its secretary general!

Now with a European watchdog group calling hearings on what it's labeled a "false pandemic," the WHO is claiming 1) that it didn't change the definition, and 2) that there was never a definition that required severity.

These are incredibly bold lies, given that you can find the old definition on the Web and people like me tell you right where to go to find it. Like here.

My Forbes piece, "Why The WHO Faked A Pandemic," has a video clip of WHO swine flu "czar" Keiji Fukuda (see picture) lying through his teeth, along with another link to written testimony in which he lies about a different aspect.

The European group calls the WHO's actions "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century." Just so, and the more the WHO does it's CYA routine, the worse it gets. Pinocchio's nose is already poking out the window.

American Spectator's Tom Bethel writes about my views on Wikipedia

By Michael Fumento

In an American Spectator piece, "Global Warmists Feel a Chilly Wind," Tom Bethell states, "Two weeks ago I wrote an article here about global warming and the advocates - call them warmists - who tamper with Wikipedia to reflect their own biases. One warmist named William Connolley, a green ideologue in Britain, had rewritten 5,428 climate articles. His goal was to bring the articles into line with Green Party dogma."

He states, "I contacted Michael Fumento, a science writer who often endorses non-consensus positions. (He has done good work lately in drawing attention to the scare tactics of the "flu-pandemic" promoters; and, earlier, in questioning "AIDS" in Africa. It can be diagnosed there without an HIV test.) Fumento wrote:

The Wiki thing is highly problematic and Wikipedia has expressly been a thorn in my side. Problem is that despite what you hear, wikis are NOT self-correcting. They're "last-person correcting." If under the World Series entry on Wikipedia I write that the 2009 Series was won by the Cubs, that's what the entry says unless and until somebody else fixes it. Then I can go right back and change it. In short, wikis favor those with the most time on their hands - a testament to the expression about idle hands…

Case in point regarding my own entry: Somebody keeps inserting that I'm a scholar at Hudson Institute. I haven't been with Hudson since 2006. So I keep asking a friend to correct the entry. He does so. And within a short period it's been changed back. I can't even guess at the motives but somebody out there has a vested interest in me being seen as still with Hudson.

I can go on. My original Wiki entry was horrible slanted against me. That's essentially true for all conservatives. When Wikipedia gets political, it tends to be left-political. I changed some of the disinformation and documented it as Wikipedia is supposed to require, though you can randomly look at entries and find such terminology as "documented needed." But I thereupon found myself permanently banned from editing a Wikipedia entry. (Yes, I could always use a false IP address.) But who knows more about me than me?

Other people have since done a lot of work to make my entry more fair, but even now under where it lists my freelancing it mentions only one journal, a conservative one. I've freelanced for scores of major publications over the last quarter century including many mainstream ones such as New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, USA Weekend, and indeed just days ago the LA Times for the second time. I've had the cover the leftwing New Republic. These are all on my website, and indeed you can find a number just on my "bio" page on that site. Why do they list just one publication and make it a conservative one?

Yes, it's a rhetorical question.

I find that Wikipedia can be a heck of a lot of fun. I watch a show on the Military Channel about, say, the P-51 Mustang and I go to Wikipedia and read lots more about it. It also find it can generate good leads for information. But you'll note that I've long since given up using Wikipedia for hyperlinks in my articles. There's a reason for that.

Another "man-made" disease cluster solved

By Michael Fumento

What man-made pollutants were causing the mysterious cluster of scleroderma in South Boston?

Scleroderma is a rare, incurable, sometimes fatal illness that hardens muscles and internal organs. It's victims are overwhelming women. It's an autoimmune disease, meaning the body's immune system is attacking itself.

There's been a cluster of the disease in a section of South Boston which has long confounded citizens, except that they knew it had to have a man-made cause. Some blamed a nearby power plant. Others hazardous waste sites.

It got national media attention and led to an 11-year Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In their just-released findings they did indeed find "higher than expected cases" in a neighborhood of about 30,000 people.

But they found the significant cause was not the environment, but rather genetics.

"It's not necessarily that the community they were living in was producing this disease," Robert Simms, the chief of rheumatology at Boston Medical Center and a researcher in the study told the Boston Globe. "When you look at the data, it does not support that."

The study found that people with a family history of specific autoimmune-rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, Raynaud's disease, lupus, and thyroid disease, were more likely to develop scleroderma.

"For the women afflicted with the disfiguring disease," said the reporter, "the findings have come as a bitter disappointment."

"I believe there is a cumulative effect," said Mary Cooney, a South Boston activist who has been working with the state on the study. "If these women had grown up in West Roxbury or Hyde Park, they would not have gotten the disease."

Have sympathy for these women. They are no hardcore environmental activists receiving tens of millions of dollars from mega-foundations to prove a that which isn't. As one put it, "I thought that if we had an answer then we could fix it," adding, "It would help us make sense of why so many of my neighbors have this horrible disease."

As Simms put it, the women were seeking "emotional validation."

That said, clusters like these are quite common and virtually never pan out (the main exception is drug side affects), but the media play them for all they're worth - to attack perfectly safe technologies.

The most famous, or infamous as it were, is probably the Long Island breast cancer cluster.

As I wrote back in 1997:

Since the early 1990s, women in the Northeastern U.S., especially Long Island, New York, have been claiming that A) they are suffering an extraordinary rate of breast cancer, and that B) the cause most assuredly lies in the hand of man.

What the specific pollutant is, they have been at a loss to say - pesticides in general, chlorinated chemicals, power lines. The point is that some faceless, nameless corporation run by insensitive (no doubt cigar-chomping) white males has to be at fault.

Environmentalists have willingly accommodated them in this belief. Not long ago the left-wing magazine Mother Jones featured a cover with a woman wearing a gas mask as a brassiere.

But nothing ever came of it. One study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that women in the Northeast are indeed more likely to die of breast cancer than in some regions of the country, but less than others. It also found the risk was almost completely due to certain risk factors which these women have incurred, including having children later in life and greater rates of alcohol use and obesity.

But the activists didn't want to hear this. Cindy Pearson, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based National Women's Health Network, told the Boston Globe the study "doesn't set my mind at ease, and it doesn't make me think there aren't environmental factors at work."

Yet in 1993 still another study found that the Long Island breast cancer rate wasn't extraordinary. Using a computer database, the Long Island-based newspaper Newsday discovered, "The highest breast cancer incidence rates were in the San Francisco Bay area, suburban Boston, and suburban Chicago, not on Long Island. Nassau and Suffolk (the counties making up Long Island) ranked right in the middle of the group studied."

Did this mollify the Long Island activists? Far from it. "The fact that Long Island isn't alone isn't a comforting thought at all - it's an even more disturbing message," one told Newsday.

Get it? The original problem was that Long Island's breast cancer rate was so extraordinarily high. When it turned out it wasn't extraordinarily high it was proof of an even greater problem.

Since I wrote my article, the National Cancer Institute released a study giving man-made chemicals on Long Island an all clear.

"Long Island is not the breast cancer capital of the United States," as the activists say, Dan Fagin, who covered the Long Island "epidemic" for 12 years at Newsday, told the British Medical Journal. "It's the capital of breast cancer activists."

Yet the NCI is studying the situation to this this day and probably always will. There are still activists. And still grant-hungry researchers willing to confirm, reconfirm, and then reconfirm again findings. This though the money and effort could be so much better spent on finding and reducing real risks.

"Killer Cans And Toxic Baby Bottles," my piece in Investor's Business Daily

By Michael Fumento

Should we worry about a common chemical almost all of us carry in our bodies that activists claim causes a list of diseases longer than you'll find in a major medical center?

Having for decades labeled the plastic ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) safe, the Food and Drug Administration has just announced it's not so sure anymore.

Some U.S. jurisdictions have already restricted BPA use, and entire states like New York are considering bans.

Yet aside from Canada, which is banning BPA baby bottles, nobody else in the world seems worried. What's our problem?

Partly it reflects media adoration for a single homegrown scientist. And strangely enough, it's also a consequence of President Obama's economic stimulus package.

Read the rest here!

And for an excellent longer treatment, my colleague Angela Logomasini has just completed an excellent report on "The Nanny State Attack on BPA: Oregon and Beyond.

Worries about the direction of the Tea Party movement

By Michael Fumento

"The Tea Party is still taking shape," says the front page headline in today's Washington Post. The Post is a liberal paper, but that sounds like a fair headline. The story may or may not be fair, but there were some quotes in there that if representative are worrying.

Thus Jim Linn, an electrical engineer from San Diego, allegedly told the reporter that, in her paraphrasation, "the Constitution must be interpreted in ways that match his understanding of the Founders' intent. That would mean scrapping a lot of the amendments, he acknowledges, but not Nos. 2, 10, 16 and 17."

Of course, the Founders enacted all ten of the first Amendments as the Bill of Rights. That includes Nos. 1 and 3-9. But it's possible those were just his favorites. It's also entirely possible that the Post reported played the old game of interviewing tons of people and just quoting the most outlandish ones. Let's just hope this fellow isn't representative.

More worrying was this regarding former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. "When Tancredo said, 'His name is Barack Hussein Obama,' the audience booed loudly."

Let's be clear on this. Obama did not choose his middle name. He did not choose the parents who gave him that name. O! would that we could have chosen our own parents. Among other things, mine would have been wealthy.

Here's an explanation of why that middle name is used against him.

Debbie Schlussel, self-identified "conservative political commentator, radio talk show host and columnist," blogged in 2006 that:

Obama's full name - as by now you have probably heard - is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Hussein is a Muslim name, which comes from the name of Ali's son - Hussein Ibn Ali. And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim.

And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that's not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he's a Christian, but they do not.

And her point being?

It's true that Islam is not "the religion of peace" that Pres. G.W. Bush asserted. The Koran does in fact call for waging war upon and killing non-Muslims. But most Muslims don't accept that as part of their belief system. It's those who do, the Islamists, that we need worry about - not Muslims generally. I've had Islamist Muslims shoot at me with AKs, machine guns, sniper rifles, and mortars. Debbie Schlussel has not. So I know the difference.

Being Muslim doesn't inherently make you evil. But in any case, all Schlussel was able to say is that Muslims consider Obama a Muslim. So what?

I'm Jewish on my mother's side so Jews consider me a Jew. I've been in synagogues four times. I'm a practicing Christian. If Obama thinks he's a Christian and goes to a Christian church - which we knows he does, he has to be considered a Christian.

But no, the point is being a Muslim is inherently bad and that like it or not Obama is a Muslim. We know that's her point because she titled her blog: "Barack Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim."

Gad, lady! He was never a Muslim, any more than I was ever Jewish!

But apparently that's why saying all three of Obama's names at a Tea Party rally is a way to rile up the masses.

And that's worrisome.

Flu Report Feb. 5 - What Swine Flu ISN'T Doing

By Michael Fumento

Here's an amazing fact. Traditionally flu season peaks in mid-February. Essentially now. Yet in mid-October CDC labs reported 11,908 positive flu samples. This past week they reported only 119, in turn fewer than the week before! NO states are reporting widespread flu activity.

There in a nutshell is your awful swine flu epidemic everybody warned of.

As I've repeatedly written, 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 whether the health authorities end up admitting it or not, as was the case in Australia and New Zealand where they had NO swine flu vaccine, a lot fewer of us are going to die this year as a result.

"The Damage of the Anti-vaccination Movement," my LA Times piece

By Michael Fumento

The Doctor who launched the modern anti-vaccine movement acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly," Britain's General Medical Council has ruled. But fear not. Dr. Andrew Wakefield is still a hero to his many acolytes. And others, with curious credentials, fight on to terrify parents into not getting their children inoculated.

Jenny McCarthy's expertise is evident.

In 1998 Wakefield wrote and then vociferously hawked an article in the British medical journal Lancet linking autism to the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella). After the council's decision, Lancet this week retracted the article. Among the facts that have come out of the inquiry of Wakefield's research is that two years before his paper appeared lawyers seeking to sue vaccine-makers paid Wakefield the equivalent of $700,000.

But the damage is done. Anti-vaccination groups have popped up like toadstools after rain (there are more than 180 on the Web), while older ones such as the National Vaccine Information Center were reinvigorated. For the most part, these groups have had only a marginal effect on national vaccination rates, but they have encouraged localized boycotts of immunization. (In one Washington county, a stunning 27% of children had vaccination exemptions in 2006-2007.) The result has been a resurgence of diseases gone so long that some doctors don't even recognize them. And children die because of it.

Read the rest of this fascinating, yet sad piece that has a direct human impact (I interviewed a mother whose daughter needlessly died of pertussis) at the same time it makes the point of what happens when a large segment of society just tosses away science in favor of superstition and conspiracy theories. And when we eschew scientists in favor of celebrity experts like Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, whose expertise is readily apparent in the inset image.

No, the Pakistani Taliban aren't finished off. But it's the time to do it.

By Michael Fumento

There is talk that the reported death of Hakimullah Mehsud, courtesy of a drone-fired Hellfire missile, may prove devastating to the Taliban in Pakistan. That's especially so in combination with low public opinion of the group, successful Pakistani army attacks in South Waziristan, and the killing of Mehsud's predecessor courtesy of another one of those fine Hellfires.

Roach bomb!

"If he's gone, it's a fatal blow," said Imtiaz Gul, director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. "At one point, the Taliban had a lot of momentum and a charismatic leader. Now they've been uprooted and lost all credibility."

Yeah, well don't write that obit just yet.

Since my first article written from Afghanistan where I embedded in 2007, I've been saying that the conflict needs to be seen as the Afghan-Pakistan war. Pres. Obama, to his credit, clearly sees it that way. But the massive Pakistani army, one of the largest in the world, continues to allow the Taliban to have a base of operations in North Waziristan.

It's an old cliche but a fitting one, that if you leave part of a cancerous tumor it will eventually grow back to its original size. The Pakistanis claim to be exhausted from their struggle in the south. Tough. They owe us big time for all the aid we've given them and continue to give them, for having supported the Taliban in the first place, and even for giving nuclear technology to rogue nations like North Korea.

Obama needs to crack the whip and get the Pakistanis to root out the roaches from their last nest.

Does positive thinking lead to positive outcomes?

By Michael Fumento

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.

Bin laden joins global warming doomsayers

By Michael Fumento

Apparently oblivious to the amount of carbon dioxide he released into the atmosphere in that nasty little incident in 2001, Osama bin Laden has joined with Al Gore and other warmists to condemn the U.S. as a rogue nation for its alleged contribution to global warming. (The New York Post quipped that he "raised the terror warning level to green.

Alluhu Gaia!

In an audiotape played by Al Jazeera, the al Queda leader warns of the dangers of climate change (If polar bears go extinct, how will he be able to blow any of them up?) and echoing Gore and his ilk called for "drastic solutions" to global warming - "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change," according to the taped message. He declared the world must bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a grinding halt.

"We should stop dealings with the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible," bin Laden said. "I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America." Bin Laden also blamed the U.S. for refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol - notwithstanding that almost no nation that did sign it actually abided by it.

Al Gore was unavailable for comment. Hah!

(Thanks to Jaime Arbona for the photoshopping. Alas, yes, it was photoshopped.)

John Stossel salutes my swine flu work

By Michael Fumento

[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."]

Stossel wearing my former mustache

"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

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.