In Venezuela They've Been Reading Manhattan Contrarian!

I have repeatedly declared subsidized public housing to be the "worst possible public policy."  (Well, actually it's subsidized public housing in Manhattan that is the worst possible public policy; elsewhere subsidized public housing is just almost as bad as the worst possible public policy.)  But the things that make subsidized public housing so terrible as public policy are the very things that make it so attractive to cynical left-wing politicians.  Subsidized public housing creates a permanent and immobile dependent class trapped in poverty that perceives itself as owing its somewhat desirable homes to the incumbent politicians, and therefore can be counted on as a secure bloc of bought votes.  For the cynical politician, what's not to like?

Down in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was everybody's favorite caricature of the socialism-inspired evil dictator for a fourteen-year reign spanning from 1999-2013.  In that period he did everything he could to drive his country into the ground -- all in the name of socialism and justice, of course. And naturally, blow-out construction of subsidized public housing was at the top of Chavez's political program.  After nibbling at the subject in the early years of his tenure, in 2010 he embarked on what he called his "great housing mission," setting out to build some 350,000 units of public housing in 2011 and 2012, and then 300,000 per year thereafter.  An article here in Britain's left-wing Guardian from 2013 of course gives a favorable review to Chavez's efforts and recommends the same for Britain.  To give an idea of the massiveness of Chavez's public housing efforts, the Guardian reported that construction went from 5% to 16.8% of the national economy in this period. 

And boy did it all seem to be going great -- at least if you believed the totally phony numbers for the economy put out by Venezuela at the time.  Historical economic data compiled by Focus Economics here shows that Venezuela reported economic growth of almost 25% in 2011 over 2010, and another 20% in 2012 over 2011.  Of course, in reality the economy was undoubtedly shrinking and the numbers were completely cooked.  How much of the supposed "growth" came from putting a totally fake value on the currency, and how much came from counting blowout wasteful government spending at 100 cents on the dollar in GDP, and how much came from the luck of temporarily high oil prices, and how much came from other phony manipulations, is anybody's guess.  Anyway, in 2013 Venezuela reported that growth had leveled off to about zero, and then in 2014 and 2015 they just stopped reporting economic statistics altogether.  By that time, from things like multi-hundred-percent inflation and completely empty store shelves, not to mention the collapse of oil prices in late 2015, the economic disaster was becoming too obvious to continue to put out the phony statistics with anything close to a straight face.

Those who follow world events will know that last month the opposition in Venezuela finally scored massive victories in legislative elections, and took control of both houses of the National Assembly.  They have stated an explicit agenda of undoing much or all of the massive state expansion under Chavez and his successor Maduro.  But the public housing blowout is something that is particularly tricky to undo.  After all, the whole idea here was to create a massive bloc of permanently bought votes that could always be counted on to support the leaders and political party that provided the largesse.  Telesur here puts the number of public housing units built in Venezuela in just 2011 to 2014 at 642,000.  Taking all public housing residents, we're talking about a voting bloc of probably a couple of million in a population of around 30 million.  Propose to take those units away from their occupants, and no politician could survive.

And that's where the Manhattan Contrarian proposal comes into play.  Back in November 2014 I laid out how a new crowd of elected leaders could get out from under the disaster of public housing without forfeiting all political viability.  The simple answer is -- give away the public housing to the residents!  No charge.

Now, I am not saying by any means that this policy is perfect.  It definitely gives an undeserved windfall to those who happened to win the lotteries to get into the public housing.  It treats the taxpayers of the country shamefully.  But the perfect can often be the enemy of the good.  Exiting from the burden of public housing will provide tremendous benefits both to the country as a whole and also to the residents.  To be perfectly cynical, a way needs to be found to make a topping bid for the residents' support, without which any exit strategy will be politically blocked.  Giving the housing to the residents provides that missing piece.  And, at no additional cost to the taxpayers, for whom the public housing is just an ongoing burden so long as it is in public ownership or control.

And thus we come to the report in yesterday's New York Times of the latest proposal from the new leaders of Venezuela's National Assembly.  The headline is, "Old Adversaries of Chavez Take a Page From His Playbook."    Yes, they are proposing to give away the housing to the occupants:

Twenty thousand people live in this concrete bastion built by President Hugo Chávez. He gave them the keys, and they gave him their votes.  There was one thing Mr. Chávez promised but never handed over en masse, though: the property titles that would allow his supporters to sell their homes and cash out.  But now that Mr. Chávez’s old adversaries have taken over Venezuela’s Parliament, they are adopting the tactic and doing it one better. They want to give away the deeds to hundreds of thousands of homes that Mr. Chávez and his movement built — and win the loyalties of the nation’s poor for years to come.

They must have been reading Manhattan Contrarian!  The genius of the proposal is that it has Maduro and his supporters completely flummoxed.  If it's a good idea for the government to give to some people a lifetime right to occupy a unit of public housing, why isn't it an even better idea to give them a deed so they can sell the unit, or mortgage it, or rent it, or otherwise turn it into cash income?  The true-blue socialist approach of no real ownership is revealed as just a device to keep the poor poor and dependent.  Here is how Maduro has responded, according to the Times:

In a fiery State of the Union address before legislators this month, Mr. Maduro vowed to do what he could to block his opponents’ work.  “You will have to topple me first to approve a privatization law,” he said to the applause of leftists.

The Times even includes quotes from some people who were awarded the public housing units only to then realize that the socialist dream isn't what it's cracked up to be.  For example:

Coromoto Carmona, 40 and unemployed, looked out a window that was laden with bars. She told the story of how she got her home here and how it has become a place where she feels trapped. . . .  In 2004, she received a thrilling call from the government: She would attend a meeting at Mr. Chávez’s presidential mansion, La Casona, where he would personally award her a new home.  She moved into her two-bedroom home with nine members of her family. But problems soon emerged. . . .  Mr. Chávez’s government had promised her and others the titles to their homes. But Ms. Carmona received only a laminated piece of paper saying she was allowed to live there. If she leaves, it is unclear if she will be able to find anywhere else to live.  “It’s like jail here,” she said.

Ah, the joys of socialism.  This will be playing out for a while.  But meanwhile, Maduro and his henchmen have no real answer to the proposal.  The likelihood is that the longer the discussion goes on, the more support they will lose from what had been a group of core supporters.

Now, meanwhile, back here in Manhattan, isn't there any way we can get this proposal onto the table?

FDA Decides To Kill Thousands Of Innocent Teenage Boys

In a post back in September, I had this to say about the FDA:

The FDA would gladly see half of the American people die while they consider and reconsider for years approving some drug, in order to establish the proposition that the FDA and only the FDA has the bureaucratic say-so to determine when and how a drug can be marketed. 

And, to prove that I'm not making that up, the FDA a few days ago issued its ruling on a new drug application from a company called BioMarin for a drug called Kyndrisa intended for the treatment of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.  The ruling is that the company has not yet submitted sufficient proof that the drug is effective to satisfy the FDA.  Tests must continue, unless the company gives up.  Oh, meanwhile there is no approved treatment whatsoever for this disease.  It arises from a genetic defect limited to boys.  About one boy in 3500 gets it, meaning about 500 new cases per year in the U.S.  It is 100% fatal.  Typically, the boy is in a wheelchair by his early teens and dead somewhere between the ages of 20 and 30.

The issue here is not that the FDA legitimately thinks this new drug is some kind of snake oil, or even that it has harms that outweigh the benefits.  The opposite.  The cause of Duchenne's has been identified (at least, within the limits of our flawed scientific processes), namely lack of a protein called dystrophin; and the drug in question (along with others under development by other companies) has been specifically designed to supply the missing protein.  Nor is the issue that no patients in trials to date seem to have benefited from the new dystrophin-supplying drugs.  For example, this from the Wall Street Journal on January 20 (relating to another one of the drugs, on which an FDA ruling is expected imminently, but anticipated to be equally negative):

Kathryn Wagner, a leading Duchenne physician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says she plans to speak in favor of the Sarepta drug at the coming FDA meeting. She said she has seen patients benefit from the drug in clinical trials.      

Instead, the problem is that the disease is rare enough and serious enough that it is very difficult to get sufficient numbers of patients into the clinical trials to meet the FDA's standards of "statistical significance."  (One of the clinical trials for the drug Dr. Wagner was discussing is reported in the Journal article to have only 12 patients in each of the treatment and control groups.)  So the bureaucrat's answer is obvious: the trials will continue -- and continue, and continue, and continue -- until our standard for establishing our prerogative and maintaining our fiefdom has been met.  Meanwhile, thousands of innocent boys and young men become crippled and die unnecessarily?  What does that matter, when bureaucratic control is at stake?

Researching this post, I came across a 2014 debate sponsored by the Southwestern Law School Law & Medicine Society and the Federalist Society between libertarian NYU law professor Richard Epstein and a law/medicine guy from Southwestern named Ryan Abbott.  The subject of the debate was the closely-related subject of the FDA's unending efforts to quash speech about off-label uses of otherwise-approved drugs.  Abbott took the pro-FDA side of the debate.  Abbott's presentation gives a good sense of the progressive's reverence for the all-knowing and perfect bureaucrats -- who are always referred to as "we" because the true progressive feels himself to be one of this privileged elite.  And meanwhile, the mere non-bureaucrat is treated as ignorant, helpless and completely incapable of making any decision or acting for himself.  Excerpts:

The central problem with off-label drug use is that we have an information deficit. When the FDA approves a drug for on-label use, that approval is based on scientifically valid and statistically significant evidence that says, we are going to give you a drug, which is potentially dangerous, but it is likely that the benefits outweigh the risks. We know that because we have studied the drug in a controlled environment. That information is simply not available with off-label use.

Over 70% of off-label prescriptions used are not based on scientific evidence or significant scientific evidence.2 That’s a real problem because all drugs have a risk of serious side effects, and patients shouldn’t be exposing themselves to risk without evidence that a drug will be effective. . . .    

So not only are patients using drugs we don’t know are safe and effective, but we are not getting good feedback to inform future practice. . . .  How do we balance patient access with preventing harm, and what role should the FDA play? 

The whole approach is based on the dead-wrong idea that an elite can achieve perfect knowledge and make better decisions than individuals acting in their own interest.  Could a guy fancy enough to have both law and medicine degrees not know that all important human decisions are based on imperfect information and involve some degree of risk?  The answer is yes.  And it's not just Mr. Abbott, and not just the pooh-bahs at the FDA who keep drugs off the market while thousands die, but the entire federal bureaucracy that has bought into this narrative.

Will Trump's Controversial Immigration Plan Actually Make Any Real Difference?

Yesterday a commenter named Oddstar expressed the view that I had "missed the point completely" on the subject of the Trump candidacy.  According to Oddstar, the main focus of Trump's candidacy is not, as I had argued, seeking to transform our government by supposedly replacing incompetence with managerial competency, but rather is seeking to have the government push back against immigration to avoid having demographic transformation spell "the end of the Republican Party and the conservative movement."  I responded to Oddstar in the comments, but I thought that the subject deserved the treatment of a full post.

I admit that I don't understand what inspires the voters who say that they back Trump.  It's entirely possible that a perception that immigration is out of control and transforming the country for the worse is the biggest factor in their inspiration.  The problem I have is that even Trump's proposals, as radical as some of them sound, do not really envision major change to the fundamental aspects of our immigration regime that are bringing about the ongoing transformation (and that have continuously transformed our country since its founding).  Trump's immigration proposals would offend lots of people, foreign and domestic, for not much noticeable change even over several decades.

Here is a link to Trump's "Immigration Reform" plan.  The majority of it deals with the issue of illegal immigration from or through Mexico.   He's going to "build a wall" and "make Mexico pay for the wall."  He's going to step up immigration enforcement and make it really, really strict.  Interestingly, there is no reference in this plan of Trump's oft-mentioned proposal for a "pause" in immigration from Muslim countries.  Possibly, he came up with that one some time after this plan was posted last fall.  The subject of legal immigration does come up, but is discussed in vague terms.  He's going to require employers to "hire American workers first," and increase "prevailing wages" for immigrants under the H1B visa program.  But there's nothing on any specific lowering of legal immigration quotas or on how many legal immigrants Trump thinks should be allowed into the country in a year.  Certainly, he does not propose eliminating legal immigration.

Trump's proposals do not really deal with the big numbers in immigration that drive the ongoing demographic transformation of the country, and instead deal with what are essentially side issues.  Consider the subject of illegal immigration from Mexico.  I have long thought that most to all Mexicans who might potentially come to the U.S. were already here.  After all, there are only about 120 million Mexicans, and the segment of the population most likely to emigrate -- poor but ambitious young men aged about 20-35 -- is only a small slice of that.  Many segments of the Mexican population are proportionately far less likely to emigrate (for example, those with successful careers in Mexico, women and children) and some large groups are not likely to emigrate at all (for example, those over 50).   The 5 to 6 million Mexicans already here illegally are really a very large part of the segment of the Mexican population that might potentially seek entry here.  

And sure enough, when you look into the statistics, you find that illegal immigration from Mexico has been net negative since 2007!  That is, for eight years now, more illegal Mexicans have left the U.S. each year than have arrived.  Here is research from Pew that shows that the number of illegal Mexicans in the U.S. peaked at approximately 6.9 million in 2007, and had fallen to approximately 5.6 million by 2014.  Of course the tremendous irony here is that making it impossible to get back in may slow the outmigration of illegals and cause the number here to remain higher than it otherwise would.  But let's not trouble Mr. Trump with such complexities.  And, by the way, the Pew research also shows that illegal immigration from the rest of the world (which in the aggregate adds up to about the same amount as the illegal immigration from Mexico) has also been net negative since 2007.

Trump's proposal for a "pause" in Muslim immigration deals with relatively tiny numbers in the overall picture.  According to data compiled by Breitbart here, the number of immigrants from Muslim countries obtaining permanent resident status in 2013 was about 123,000; another about 40,000 obtained refugee or asylum status.  

But what are the big numbers in the immigration arena that are currently driving the demographic transformation?  Primarily two things: (1) Legal immigrants, and (2) children (and grandchildren and great-grandchildren) of illegal immigrants already here.  Legal immigrants currently arrive at a rate of around one million per year, and over time that adds up a lot -- the total number of legal immigrants living in the country is estimated by Wikipedia at 37 million.  (Trump uses a figure of 42 million -- close enough.)  Children of illegal immigrants under current practice receive what is called "birthright citizenship" under the 14th Amendment.  There is a controversy over whether that is a constitutional right versus something that can be changed in a statute by Congress, and I won't attempt to resolve that controversy here.  But Wikipedia here has an estimate that there are approximately 4.5 million children of illegals in the country today who have the "birthright citizenship" status, with about 300,000 per year added to the total.

So what does Trump propose to do about these big numbers?  To start with, he has no proposal at all to lower the million per year of legal immigrants, at least no quantitative proposal.  On the birthright citizenship issue, he does take the position that a statute could do away with it.  OK, but, assuming that the courts went along with that, would Trump and a Congress really try to take the citizenship away from the 4.5 million who think they already have it (as opposed to only making a prospective change going forward)?  And how about the as-yet-unborn children (and grandchildren, etc., etc.) of those 4.5 million -- would anyone really take the position that they don't have citizenship status?

In summary, with illegal immigration net negative for years now, and no real prospect for another big wave of illegals coming from Mexico, there are only really two places where the ongoing demographic change of the country through immigration can be materially altered, namely by change to legal immigration quotas and by change to birthright citizenship rules.  And either of those, if implemented today, would only proceed to effect change very slowly over many years.  The legal immigration piece is by far the bigger of the two.

Now, how do we feel about the number of about one million per year for legal immigration to this country.  Even most people in the conservative and libertarian movements support some substantial level of legal immigration, if not precisely that number.  Here is a comment by Noah Rothman from the magazine Commentary from last August:

Trump’s “plan” is an assault on not merely the illegal immigrants who have violated American laws, but those who have played by the existing rules to come to the United States. The proposal amounts to a declaration of war on America’s immigrant community, an attack on the foundational nature of America’s character as a melting pot for all the peoples of the world, and the inception of a police state that is incompatible with a free republican democracy.

So, Mr. Trump, do you propose lowering the million per year, and if so to what?  Half a million?  Ten thousand?  Obviously, this is a subject on which he does not want to be pinned down.

By the way, there are things in Trump's plan that even I can get behind.  Exhibit A:  he proposes that immigrants be permanently ineligible for welfare and handout programs.  Amen to that.  That level of foolishness is what gets us people like the Tsarnaevs.  The funny thing is that people who are ineligible for welfare, and therefore work because they have to, tend to end up grateful, while those who take handouts tend to end up resentful and angry.  It seems counterintuitive, but there is plenty of evidence to support it.

Anyway, the idea that Trump's proposals as to immigration are going to fundamentally alter demographic transformation of the country just looks to me to be wrong, and not a reason to support Trump.

Roy Spencer, Donald Trump, And The "Main Project" Of The Government

A recurrent theme here is that the "main project" of the government, and of each and every one of its agencies, is to promote and enhance further growth of the agency in particular and the government in general.  Examples of prior posts are here and here.  One of the great advances of the past twenty or so years is that the conservative movement has gradually caught on that this is a huge problem.  Without constant push back, the state has a tremendous internal incentive to grow unchecked like a cancer and rapidly take over our whole economy and our lives.

Roy Spencer had a post on Friday that addresses the climate change branch of this "main project," and is very related to my own post on Friday.  Roy's post is titled "On that 2015 Record Warmest Claim."   For those unfamiliar with Dr. Spencer, he is a research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and is one of the people (along with John Christy) responsible for producing the satellite-based temperature series generally referred to as UAH.

Unlike the guys from NASA and NOAA, Spencer takes on the problem that the NASA/NOAA temperature series show 2015 to be the warmest year ever, while the satellite series from UAH and RSS do not.  Spencer starts out by declaring a modesty that is completely lacking in the NASA/NOAA guys -- and which, to my mind, is the fundamental hallmark of the real scientist versus the unprincipled advocate:

I’m not claiming our satellite dataset is necessarily the best global temperature dataset in terms of trends, even though I currently suspect it is closer to being accurate than the surface record — that will be for history to decide. The divergence in surface and satellite trends remains a mystery, and cannot (in my opinion) continue indefinitely if both happen to be largely correct.      

And then he gets to what he calls the "elephant in the room":

By now it has become a truism that government agencies will prefer whichever dataset supports the governments desired policies. You might think that government agencies are only out to report the truth, but if that’s the case, why are these agencies run by political appointees?  I can say this as a former government employee who used to help NASA sell its programs to congress: We weren’t funded to investigate non-problems, and if global warming were ever to become a non-problem, funding would go away. I was told what I could and couldn’t say to Congress…Jim Hansen got to say whatever he wanted. I grew tired of it, and resigned.

"We aren't funded to deal with non-problems."  I would say it's an obvious truism.  And this principle goes way beyond the climate wars.  It's the complete explanation for why no amount of government anti-poverty funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) poverty (as measured by the government); why no amount of government anti-hunger funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) hunger (as measured by the government); why no amount of government housing funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) the "housing shortage" (as measured by the government; and on and on.  More generally, it's the fundamental reason why government failure is a political rather than a managerial problem.  Better management can never do away with the fundamental problem that everyone in the government has a desperate need for the problem they are dealing with to persist.  The government fails because its fundamental imperative is that it must fail.

And then of course we have stepping into the Republican presidential nominating process a guy whose message, if he has any message, is that the government is failing not because of that fundamental imperative, but rather because it is run by incompetent people and if only you put a really competent businessman like him in charge, everything will promptly be fixed.  In short, this message is the opposite of the message that the conservative movement has been gradually building for decades.  The one message is, "Government is fundamentally not competent to fix or address the personal problems of the people, and therefore it must be drastically cut back."  The other (Trump) message is "The government's only problem is bad management by incompetent people; put me in charge and I can and will fix everything."

Last week the National Review ran a big forum in which some 22 prominent conservative writers expressed their reasons for opposing Trump as the Republican nominee.  Many of them remarked on Trump's message being very much the opposite of the main conservative message of smaller and limited government.  Contributors noted that Trump had supported, among other things, the Obama "stimulus," single payer healthcare, the auto company bailouts, the bank bailouts, aggressive use of eminent domain, trade protectionism, stricter gun control, and numerous other such government-as-solution-to-everything proposals.  

To me it seems almost impossible that anyone could be such a narcissist as to believe that if only the people put him in charge of the $4 trillion annual enterprise known as the federal government, that by the force of his brilliance and managerial competence he could cause it promptly to succeed at the myriad of tasks at which it has heretofore been failing.  But then, Obama is clearly such a guy.  Now we have another one in Trump.  With any luck he won't be given the chance to fail; but if he does get the chance, the odds of failure are virtually 100%. 

It's Easy To Prove Your Hypothesis If You Just Pretend That The Adverse Evidence Does Not Exist

In my last post I discussed what seems to me a very odd fact, namely that the proponents of the diet-heart hypothesis in the field of nutrition somehow massively carried the day against their opponents despite huge amounts of contrary evidence that would seem to completely refute the hypothesis.  Thus the diet-heart hypothesis really started to get traction in the 1950s following the six- and seven-country studies by Ancel Keys, purporting to show a neat and direct correlation between dietary fat and heart disease in the populations of seven countries -- Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.  Yet even at the time Keys published his studies, it was widely known that data from other countries (for example, France, Switzerland and Mexico) would contradict this seemingly neat pattern and refute the hypothesis.  Keys just ignored these other countries.

Maybe Keys could be forgiven for doing early studies much less lavishly funded than what we would expect today?  Well, consider that as late as 2007 one Dr. Daniel Steinberg -- a long-time promoter of the diet-heart hypothesis, leader of the so-called LRC study in the 70s and 80s, and main author of the 1984 "consensus statement" recommending the low fat diet to all -- wrote a book called "The Cholesterol Wars."  In that book, Steinberg cites the Keys studies as a principal proof of the link between diet and heart disease; and Steinberg discusses the Keys studies without mentioning the existence of the multiple other countries where the data do not support, and indeed would refute, the hypothesis.  And then he confidently asserts that the hypothesis is proved.  (The subtitle of the book is "The Skeptics vs the Preponderance of the Evidence").  Hey, it's easy to prove your hypothesis if you get to pretend that the adverse evidence does not exist!

So now in the field of world atmospheric temperatures (sometimes known as GAST -- global average surface temperature) and whether they are increasing, we were treated a couple of days ago to the big release from NOAA declaring 2015 to be the "warmest year on record"; and, by the way, "by a wide margin"!!!!!  The NOAA release is confidently assertive and admits of no ambiguity:

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2015 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record.  

Of course, everybody who follows this knows that there are three independent data sources that attempt to track GAST -- one based on a ground-based thermometer network that is the source of the NOAA series (with the same or substantially-overlapping networks of ground-based thermometers also used by other agencies like NASA and the UK's CRU); a second based on satellites, with the data processed independently by two entities known as UAH and RSS; and a third based on radiosondes (balloons).  Everybody who follows this also knows that the ground-based thermometer records have been greatly "adjusted" by the people who publish them, and that all or nearly all of the increase in temperatures in recent years is in the adjustments and not present in the raw data.

So wouldn't you think that NOAA in its release would at the minimum acknowledge the existence of the other contrary data and attempt somehow to deal with the contradictions?  Well, take a look at that release; and, if you will, follow the link through to their full end-of-2015 Report.  You will not find the slightest mention that the satellite or balloon data even exist.  And of course that also means that you will not find any attempt to explain the discrepancies between and among data sets, or to justify why one is better than others.

And then there are the lapdog environmental-crusader journalists.  Don't they have some responsibility to their readers to give some kind of fair picture of the evidence?  Check out the New York Times article by crusader Justin Gillis that appeared in the number one position at the upper right of yesterday's print edition, "2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As World's Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say."  It's all just parroting and promotion of the NOAA (and NASA) line, without the slightest questioning.  There's a chart of the NASA data series right there on page 1, with a scrunched vertical scale to make the temperatures appear to zoom up over the past several years.  Then there's this quote from Gavin Schmidt of NASA/GISS, also on the front page:

“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”    

Huh?  Everybody who knows anything knows that the satellite and balloon data sets directly contradict this statement.  Does he really think we are this uninformed?  The two main satellite-based data sets, UAH and RSS, both show a pause exceeding 18 years, and neither shows 2015 as the warmest or second-warmest year (although 2015 is one of the warmer years in both sets, as would be expected in the presence of a strong El Nino).

At Breitbart a few days ago, James Delingpole points to a new video by climate super-alarmist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann and others (Mann is the climate equivalent of Steinberg and Keys) attempting to discredit the satellite data.  OK, they are entitled to make their points, however flimsy.  But John Christy of UAH immediately produced this chart showing the extremely close agreement between the satellite and balloon data sets, even though the methods of producing the two are completely unrelated:

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I can only think that the idea is if you just present your own cooked data loudly enough and prominently enough and often enough, and just completely ignore all contrary evidence and pretend that it does not exist, then eventually you will carry the day by sheer force of will.  That certainly was the game plan of the diet-heart promoters, and it seemed to be working for a very long time.  But recently the contrary evidence has become just too overwhelming.  

Will that happen for the global warming hypothesis?  Probably when the next big La Nina kicks in.  Will they really be able to make enough data adjustments to make that go away?

"The Big Fat Surprise": How Science Is Corrupted By Government Money And Government Process

I haven't made a practice of reviewing books here, but it's time for an exception.  A few weeks ago a reader named Nina Teicholz, who is also an accomplished writer in the health arena, wrote to offer me a copy of her recent book, titled "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet."  I took her up on the offer, and shortly after that the book arrived in my mailbox.  And then I actually read it, which is somewhat remarkable given that I'm about 20 books behind at any given time.  

This is a book that you really need to read.  And not just because you will finally learn some real information about what constitutes a healthy diet.  This is also a story of the corruption of science by government money and government process that has application far beyond just the field of nutrition.

Today, all Americans deeply know, seemingly as part of their cultural heritage, that a healthy diet is low in fat.  Indeed, not just low in overall fat, but particularly low in saturated fat, the kind that is found in large amounts in butter, milk and cheese.  Go to the market, and seemingly every product has a "low fat" option, generally accompanied by the phrase "heart healthy!"  Eat out with your friends, and observe them demonstrating their virtue over you by eating nothing but a salad, perhaps accompanied by a smidgeon of low-fat chicken or fish.  (Maybe this phenomenon is less prevalent outside of Manhattan.  But a great thing about living in Manhattan is how easy it is to horrify your friends by eating an intentionally high-fat meal in their presence.)

I've been on to the scam of the low fat diet for some time (see, for example, here from July 2013).  But it's actually harder than you might think to get your hands on real information on this subject.  Hundreds upon hundreds of articles just take it as a complete given that low fat equals heart healthy, without ever questioning where this idea ever came from.  Besides, the American Heart Association has been on the low fat bandwagon for decades, and same for the U.S. government dietary guidelines.  Hey, everybody knows it!

And now into the groupthink leaps Ms. Teicholz, with a thoroughly-researched tome on the development of the so-called diet-heart hypothesis.  She tells the story of how over the course of a few decades from about the 1950s to the 80s that hypothesis rapidly swept away all dissenters and rose to uncontested dominance in the field.  Oh, even as the evidence relating to the hypothesis ranged from ambiguous at best to completely adverse in many instances.  But the hypothesis was backed by a small group of intensely committed scientists and journalists who managed to get control over the principal scientific organizations (notably the American Heart Association in this instance) and the principal government grant-givers (here NIH and NHLBI), and used that control to marginalize and ultimately de-fund their opponents.

I won't attempt to go too deeply into the details, but a few examples will give some of the flavor. The diet-heart hypothesis owes its triumph more than anything else to the work from the 1940s to the 1980s of one Ancel Keys, a highly energetic and ambitious professor from the University of Minnesota.  In the mid-50s Keys proposed testing the hypothesis by doing a first-ever international multi-country epidemiological study.  In 1956 he won from the U.S. Public Health Service to fund the proposed study a $200,000 annual grant -- at the time an enormous sum.  The countries he chose to study were Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.  And the results:

What Keys found, as he had hoped, was a strong correlation between the consumption of saturated fat and deaths from heart disease.  (page 38)

But here's the thing:  from previous work by Yerushalmy and Hellebore (1950) Keys already knew rough numbers for fat consumption and heart disease rates for 22 countries, which included five of the seven that Keys selected to study (the exceptions were Greece and Yugoslavia).  And the five countries for which these data were known all fit neatly along an upward-sloping line from low fat/low heart disease (Japan) on one end, to high fat/high heart disease (United States) on the other end.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of countries that were known not to fit into this neat pattern.  And these were not small or insignificant countries.  Examples were France, Switzerland and Mexico.  Well, they were just omitted from the study.  Teicholz:

[Keys] might have selected a European country to challenge his fat hypothesis, like Switzerland or France (or Germany or Norway or Sweden).  Instead, he chose only those nations (based on national statistics) that seemed likely to confirm it. . . .  Attempting to explain why Keys did not seek out countries that would offer more challenges to his ideas, [Keys colleague] Blackburn said, "Keys just had a personal aversion to being in France and Switzerland."

Sure. To this day, in books I have read on the supposed support for the diet-heart hypothesis, the Keys seven-country study is cited as among the most important evidence.

By the early 70s the need for some more definitive proof or refutation of the diet-heart hypothesis had become clear, but the main government funders (here mainly NIH) were daunted by the prospective cost.  Were they really going to spend literally billions to provide controlled diets for years to tens of thousands of people in two groups?  Instead, they opted to do two not-inexpensive studies, but kind of on the cheap.  $250 million was allocated to the two studies.  First up was the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, or MRFIT (pronounced "Mister Fit"), a massive test that ran from 1973 to 1982.  Here was the plan: they screened 361,000 middle-aged American males to find some 12,000 with particularly high blood cholesterol, greater than 290 mg/dL.  They divided these into two groups, an "intervention" group and a control group.  The intervention group got multiple such interventions, including counseling to quit smoking, medication to lower high blood pressure, and advice on a low fat, low cholesterol diet.  They drank skim milk, used margarine instead of butter, limited eggs to two of fewer per week, and avoided meat and desserts.  The control group's members were left to do as they pleased.  The men were followed for seven years.  Results?

The results, announced in September 1982, were a disaster for the diet-heart hypothesis.  Although men in the intervention group had been spectacularly successful in changing their diets, quitting smoking, and reducing their blood pressure, they died at slightly higher rates than the controls.   

Oops.  Teicholz details how the results of MRFIT were then systematically suppressed and forgotten.  Meanwhile, the remainder of the $250 million went to a study called Lipid Research Clinic Coronary Primary Prevention Trial, abbreviated as LRC.  This study divided 3800 men who had high blood cholesterol again into two groups, both of which were counseled to reduce fat in the diet, but one of which also received an early cholesterol-lowering drug called cholestyramine.  In other words, diet was not part of what was tested; the test was of the cholesterol-lowering drug.  The results were reported in 1984.  The treatment group had "slightly fewer heart attacks" (page 128), but total mortality for the two groups was almost identical.  The treatment group suffered additional deaths from such things as suicide, accidents, and cancer.  And commenting on other similar studies, Teicholz says:

Other cholesterol-lowering studies where diet had been the only intervention consistently found higher rates of cancer and gallstones in the experimental group . . . .  In addition, populations found to have very low cholesterol, such as the Japanese, suffer from higher rates of strokes and cerebral hemorrhage compared to groups whose average cholesterol is higher.  (page 129)  

But somehow the extremely ambiguous results of the LRC study -- a study that did not even test diet at all -- got spun into being the definitive proof of the diet-heart hypothesis.  In 1984 NHLBI organized a massive conference specifically intended to generate a scientific "consensus" on the causes of heart disease.  The conference was organized by Basil Rifkind and chaired by Daniel Steinberg, two of the leaders of the LRC study.  The conference ended with a so-called consensus statement that admitted of no ambiguities:

The conference "consensus" statement, which Steinberg read out on the last morning of the event, was not a measured assessment of the complicated role that diet might play in a little-understood disease.  Instead, there was "no doubt," he stated, that reducing cholesterol through a low-fat, low-saturated-fat diet would "afford significant protection against coronary heart disease" for every American over the age of two.  (page 132)

And thus the low fat diet got an imprimatur of "consensus" from a small amount of highly ambiguous data.  Nothing since has been able to dislodge it.  Example: a long-running study of essentially everybody in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts reported follow-up results in the 90s.  Here are some:

In 1961, after six years of study, the Framingham investigators announced their first big discovery: that high total cholesterol was a reliable predictor for heart disease. . . .  However, thirty years later [1991], in the Framingham follow-up study . . . it turned out that the predictive power of total cholesterol was not nearly as strong as study leaders had originally thought.  For men and women with cholesterol between 205 and 264 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), no relationship between these numbers and heart disease risk could be found. . . .  [F}or men aged forty-eight to fifty-seven, those with cholesterol in the midrange (183-222 mg/dL) had greater risk of heart attack death than those with higher cholesterol (222-261 mg/dL).  (pages 64-65)

Teicholz describes several more studies with results that would either refute the diet-heart hypothesis or are highly troubling in other respects, notably showing higher total mortality for people on low cholesterol diets from causes including cancer, stroke and violence.  But so what?  Since when is it the actual evidence that counts when "science" turns on control of government funds and government-sponsored committees that control grants and publication rights.  The small clique of intense promoters of the diet-heart hypothesis -- notably Keys, Rifkind and Steinberg -- gradually got control of the key associations (e.g., American Heart Association) and government funders (e.g., NIH and NHLBI) and saw to it that their opponents lost their funding, were no longer invited to conferences, and could no longer get their papers published.  And thus,  the day has long since been carried.  It's just a part of our culture.  Everybody knows that a low fat diet is "heart healthy"!

Teicholz overall is a lot nicer about the state of corruption than I would be.  But low key can be very effective.  I'm just hoping that someone other than me pays attention.

Of course, readers will quickly recognize that this story bears remarkable resemblance to the story of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The AGW story is even far worse because all the proposed solutions are catnip to leftists looking for reasons to promote government takeover of everything.  Is there any hope of ever again looking at the evidence to see if the hypothesis has been refuted?  Perhaps if that occurs in the arena of nutrition, the good sense will spread.