Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 12

New York Times: Obesity as a Disease?

Austin, TX

November 29th, 2011 12:00 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/28/should-legislation-protect-obese-people/the-problem-with-the-disease-label

We should make a clear distinction between the disease and its cause or causes. Lung cancer is a disease, but smoking is not (although the associated addiction may well be). Smoking is to lung cancer as overeating is to obesity. So, sure, obesity is a disease because being seriously overweight has unavoidable physiological consequences that fall within the definition of disease: diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular stress and high risks for certain cancers. But the cause is, except in rare cases, overeating. Overeating is not a disease, it is a modifiable behavior. The fact is that we eat too much, and eat too much that is unhealthy. While not popular to state, the fact is that overeating is a choice (again, with rare exception), and therefore the consequence of overeating are the results of our own behavior. We need to take responsibility for our actions rather than look to blame others for any limitations we have imposed upon ourselves. The legitimate core issue of discrimination here has nothing to do with appearance, but with limited capabilities associated with obesity. But unlike with many other disabilities, this one is clearly a consequence of choice rather than a consequence of birth. Age, race, religion and sexual preference do not hinder someone's ability to perform, and they are rightfully protected against discrimination. Beyond those, I would not hire someone I knew incapable of doing the job for which I am hiring him or her. That is not discrimination. The time has come for us as a society to stop dancing around the issue of obesity: we're fat because we eat too much. It really is that simple. The good news is that we can do something about our weight using three simple rules: eat less, eat well and exercise. We need to stop making excuses for something that is entirely within our own control.

Jeff Schweitzer

Co-author, Calorie Wars: Fat, Fact and Fiction

www.jeffschweitzer.com

An Acorn Is Not an Oak

A fetus is to a person as an acorn is to an oak. Sure, one has the potential to become the other, but is not that other in its current state. The rules governing the cutting of mature trees is not the same for gathering acorns for good reason; the potential to become something does not make you that thing.

You might counter than a baby is not an adult but both deserve the same moral treatment. Or that since the acorn and tree share the same DNA that they cannot be distinguished. Both counter arguments fail. Taking the last first, if I just died, I have my full complement of DNA. Do I deserve to continue enjoying all the benefits of a living person? Should I still collect my social security? After all, I've still got my DNA. And a baby and adult are indeed the same, simply an immature form of one to the other. A baby needs only nutrients and time to mature into an adult . An acorn is a different cycle of life; it must transform to become a tree, not just grow bigger. An acorn is not a tree as common sense would dictate.

If I have a full architectural plan to create a home, and a builder to implement those plans, nobody would say that the plans and builder are the home. Together they have everything necessary to build the house; still, they are not the house.

This is not a political issue, but a religious one masquerading as politics. Proposition 26 in Mississippi (rejected by voters) and its kin elsewhere are nothing but an attempt by Christian extremists to create a theocracy, to impose their religious views on a secular state. Other than religious zeal the effort has no justification.

Most of us would agree, left and right, that prevention, not abortion, is the vastly preferred method of family planning. Abortion is an invasive surgical technique, physically and psychologically traumatic, expensive, and potentially dangerous. Unwanted pregnancy should be exceptional rather than routine. Part of the adult responsibility commensurate with having an active sex life is prudent and careful use of contraception.

Abortion foes claim that the procedure is murder, based on the notion that a fertilized egg has the same suite of rights enjoyed by all humans. The belief that a few cells derived from a fertilized egg is a human being is a sad example of good intentions based on misguided notions of biology. The small ball of cells is potentially a human being, but so are eggs and sperm, even if to an unequal degree. All require certain conditions to realize the potential to become human. Ovulation and male masturbation would be acts of murder by the same logic that confers the status of humanness on a fertilized egg or early-stage embryo. A fertilized egg has no special status compared to an egg not fertilized. Both have the potential to become human given the right set of circumstances. The moment of fertilization is nothing but one action in a series of millions that take us from a single cell to an independently living being. Granting that moment special status is completely arbitrary and meaningless biologically.

Clearly somewhere between a just-fertilized egg and a baby about to exit the birth canal lies a distinction between potentially human and human. Because that line is difficult to draw does not mean that the line does not exist. Yes, the division between potentially human and human is increasingly difficult to distinguish with time from conception, but even later stages of the embryo pass milestones that offer important guidelines.

In the absence of a central nervous system, the embryo is incapable of any sensation. Until a brain is formed with a functioning cortex, the embryo has no ability to form any conscious thought. Neural development begins early, but the process is slow relative to other organ systems. We know from Biology 101 that the three main lobes that will become the brain form by the 29th day. About six to eight weeks after fertilization, the first detectable brain waves can be recorded, but the brain is not nearly fully formed, and the cortex is little distinguished. Before eight weeks, in the absence of any brain function, the growing embryo is little different in its human potential from a fertilized egg. Abortion at this stage is as fully acceptable as menstruation. Biologically the distinction is trivial.

Later stages of growth do not offer a sign as clear as brain development, but the fetus provides another point of determination, although one involving a higher emotional and ethical cost in the hierarchy of decision-making. Before a fetus is capable of living outside the womb at week 23, even with invasive medical intervention, the line from potential to actual human has not been crossed. Before week 23, a premature baby cannot survive. We cannot call something human that has no hopes of survival as an independent being. Again, biology speaks loudly: no human baby has ever been successfully delivered before the middle of the 22nd week. Viability between weeks 23 and 26 is uncertain, but possible. About 10% of babies born at 23 weeks survive. The Office of Science and Technology Assessment reported, too, that 10 percent of babies weighing less than 2.2 pounds born before 28 weeks survived. Lungs do not reach full maturity until week 34, and a suite of life-time medical problems can be expected for births before that milestone. Medical advances can only push this point of viability so far back toward conception, because functioning lungs, even if not mature, must be present for a fetus to survive outside the womb. No amount of medical intervention before that point of development will change this fundamental fact of biology. These undeniable facts of embryogenesis establish a second threshold for abortion at or before 23 weeks. A science-fiction scenario of an artificial womb in the far future would not change this calculation of natural development. This hard biological reality corresponds closely but not precisely to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that states could not bar abortion until "the point of viability" which was set at around 24 to 28 weeks of pregnancy.

Note that about 90 percent of the 1.6 million abortions in the United States each year occur in the first three months of pregnancy, well within the biologically clear limit of 23 weeks.

Beyond the point of viability outside the uterus, the threshold for when an abortion is a reasonable choice certainly becomes significantly higher. Even many pro-choice advocated would agree that late-term abortions are difficult to justify, except in the extreme case of rape or incest in which the victim had no access to medical care earlier in the pregnancy.

But the moral uncertainties of late-term abortion have no bearing on the question of whether a fetus or a fertilized egg is a person. Just because we cannot define a point at which a fetus becomes a person in the spectrum of life does not imply we cannot know when we are clearly on one side or the other of that point. I know when something is green and when something is blue but I cannot tell you when one color yields to the next. Any attempt to define where one color ends and the other begins becomes arbitrary because green turns to blue across a smooth gradient of frequencies with no inherent boundaries. But we still know when something is green or blue. We also know that a fetus is not a person even if we do not know when that transition to person-hood eventually takes place. Nothing about biology or ethics compels us to call a fetus a person. The debate has plenty of gray in the middle in which honest people can disagree. However, calling an early fetus or fertilized egg a person is a religious view unsupported by fact or reason; that has no place in a secular society.

Those people who hold those views are welcome to act on them accordingly; but please do not impose your religious views on those of us who do not share them. I am not forcing you to act personally in any way counter to your personal beliefs; you have no justification to impose your views on me, to legislate my wife's or daughter's relationship with their doctor, or interfere with how they decide to deal with their own bodies. My views do not interfere with how you live your life; yet your views seek to change mine. No conservative has ever explained the ironic disconnect between the stated disdain for big government and the desire to have that very government enter my bedroom and doctor's office. So to those of you who support Prop 26 and similar pieces of heinous legislation, I offer you this advice: back off.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of Calorie Wars (July 2011) and A New Moral Code (2010). Learn more about Jeff at http://jeffschweitzer.com.

Occupy Wall Street Only Scratches the Surface

The protest movement on Wall Street has a broad field of complaints against numerous targets that defy easy description. "We are the 99%" is the closest the movement comes to a unifying rallying cry. But broadly speaking one can generalize that the protests primarily focus on economic inequality caused by corporate greed and corruption, and the stranglehold of special interest lobbyists in Washington. Their rage is fueled by recent reports documenting the growing disparity between rich and poor, and ever-greater concentration of wealth in a small percentage of the mega-wealthy.

While those complaints ring true, the protestors are missing an even bigger point. They are complaining about the symptoms of the disease rather than the underlying pathology itself. A man who is pushed off a cliff may die of a heart attack on the way down, but the cause of death is not heart failure. Likewise, corporate greed may suck the lifeblood out of our financial system and drain the bank accounts of middle class America; and lobbyists may well control Washington, but those are secondary problems reflective of some deeper malady. Corporate greed is to economic inequality like that man's heart attack is to his tumble over the abyss.

So what then is the fundamental problem? The problem is that Wall Street is a grand lie built on a fraudulent foundation of quicksand. Wall Street is a casino rigged against investors sold false hope by unscrupulous companies sanctioned by government to deceive and bilk customers. Major stock exchanges are openly manipulated to favor large investment banks and brokerage houses at the expense of tax payers and individual investors. As the Wall Street protestors point out, the little guy missed out on the trillion dollar bailout offered to Wall Street's biggest banks and brokers. Your risk is privatized while their losses are socialized. Wall Street exists because society is eager to believe in financial miracles. The economic crises we now face, and the inequalities that result, were not only predictable, but as inevitable as the collapse of a house of cards in a strong wind. Unconvinced? Let's see what we know as fact.

We know that the trading system is inherently corrupt, weighted in favor of brokers who only make money by encouraging more trading. But something more sinister than just commission padding is involved. The SEC now alleges, for example, that Goldman Sachs deliberately misled gullible and trusting clients by selling them mortgage securities that Goldman Sachs was itself shorting. The media was full of wild and ridiculous analogies when this was first reported, but we can do better in three easy steps using the fictional auto company "GMS" as an example to explain the scam: 1) GMS built a car with fatal flaws intentionally integrated into the design so that the car would blow up a few blocks from the dealer lot; 2) GMS sold the car fraudulently to a faithful buyer as brand new, reliable, and long-lasting; 3) GMS had the car insured so that when the vehicle inevitable self-destructed after the sale GMS would earn a huge payout. GMS made money when selling the car and made money when the car exploded, which GMS knew it would because the car was designed specifically to do so. Only the buyer was hurt. He purchased an automobile from a dealer he trusted, confident in his choice, unaware that the car was rigged for a short life on the road and clueless that his investment was worthless. GMS created a double win by engineering a guaranteed loss for the duped client. Such behavior would be clearly illegal in car sales, not to mention highly unethical. But not on Wall Street.

We know that dubious ethical behavior is embedded into the fabric of Wall Street. In the case of Goldman Sachs, peddling rotten mortgage securities was not a first foray into problems selling short. The company paid a fine of $450,000 to settle SEC allegations (without admitting wrongdoing) for violating short-selling rules in 2008 through 2009. That trifling amount does not even constitute a hand slap and predictably, in the face of such miniscule fines, no lesson was learned.

We know that even giant Goldman Sachs is just a tiny drop in a vast sea of corruption, just the latest in an unbroken chain of malfeasance to make the news. Does the name Bernard Madoff or the amount of $50 billion ring a bell? Remember Kenneth Lay, Andrew Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron? How about Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco's ex-chairman and chief executive? Remember WorldCom? That company had the fine distinction of perpetrating accounting fraud that led, at the time, to one of the largest bankruptcies in history. Let us not forget the Rite Aid executives who were accused of securities and accounting fraud that forced the drugstore chain to restate more than $1 billion in earnings. Executives at the company were charged with colluding in overstating Rite Aid's income in every quarter from May 1997 to May 1999, forcing the company to restate results by $1.6 billion, the largest restatement ever recorded at the time, according to the SEC. And who can forget the Adelphia Communications scandal? In that sordid case, the company inflated earnings to meet Wall Street's expectations, falsified operations statistics, and concealed blatant self-dealing by the founding family, the Rigas, who collected $3.1 billion in off-balance-sheet loans backed by Adelphia.

We know that six years ago Morgan Stanley, promoting a staid image of conservative trustworthiness, agreed to pay $50 million to settle federal charges that investors were never informed about compensation the company received for selling targeted mutual funds. Dick Strong of the Strong Funds admitted to skimming his investors to benefit himself. What was his punishment? Strong was allowed to sell his fund business for hundreds of millions of dollars.

We know that, in all, almost two dozen firms were implicated in scandal in 2004. Mutual fund firms agreed to fines totaling more than $2.6 billion in more than 100 settlements, almost none of which was returned to shareholders. The SEC settled with Putnam Investments, at the time the fifth largest mutual fund company, which allegedly had allowed a select group of portfolio managers and clients to flip mutual fund shares to profit from prices gone flat. Other mutual funds allowed the favored few to buy and sell shares in rapid-fire fashion. Oddly, this practice is actually legal, but harmful to innocent shareholders not lucky enough to be included in the game. You and I do not get to play. In a preview of the trillion dollar bailout five years later, wealthy clients were given special treatment. Perhaps most annoying, the practice that led to the mutual fund scandal in the first place was never addressed by regulators, even as the foundation was collapsing underneath them. Well-connected investors still had the chance to trade after the market has closed long after the scandal broke. Any effort to increase shareholder power was and is vigorously fought. A proposal that would force the SEC to give shareholders a greater voice in selecting board members was defeated in October 2004. Commissioner Harvey J. Goldschmid, an advocate of the proposal, said "The commission's inaction at this point has made it a safer world for a small minority of lazy, inefficient, grossly overpaid and wrongheaded CEOs." Nothing has changed since.

We know that other forms of favored trading are common as well, designed to benefit insiders. Fund shares, unlike stocks, are priced only once daily at their 4 p.m. closing price. That is true for you, but not for those favored clients who keep getting special bennies. Some funds allowed a few big clients to lock in the closing price after 4 p.m., letting them profit from late-breaking news. That is the ultimate insider trading. Sure, even companies have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but the list of firms tied to the 2004 mutual funds investigation was impressive, and included Janus, Strong, Bank of America's Nations Funds, Bank One's One Group funds, Alliance Capital, Prudential Securities, Fred Alger Management, Merrill Lynch, and Wilshire Associates.

Corruption is not a rare anomaly on Wall Street, but the norm, a constant thread throughout history, but we continue to pretend otherwise. How can anybody review this truncated list of fraud and abuse on Wall Street and dismiss corruption as the outlier? Yet almost everybody does.

Yet even those examples are not the most egregious. Warning signs in flashing neon could not be more obvious than corruption at Fannie Mae, accused of fleecing investors. The Justice Department opened a formal investigation in October 2004 following reports that the mortgage company might have manipulated its books to meet earnings targets. Sound familiar yet again? This is after Fannie tried to hinder an official investigation by refusing to provide relevant information.

What did we learn from these growing series of never-ending scandals? Absolutely nothing. Not one darn thing. Greedy and unscrupulous lenders are easy to blame, and rightfully so, but pinstripe suits are in fact minor players in the crisis. The proximate villains are government deregulators working in conjunction with commercial banks to create a grand Ponzi scheme of hiding risk. However, even obscene self-proclaimed masters of the universe and criminally compliant feds are not alone in their culpability.

And here is where I diverge from the protestors on Wall Street. We the American people, individual investors, families struggling to fund retirement accounts, bear responsibility for this crisis because we bought into the lie that Wall Street is real. As with religion and faith, people want to believe, and will therefore ignore obvious facts that contradict hopeful thinking about investment returns. The structural flaws of Wall Street are readily apparent to anybody who wishes to see the truth, but few do. Since the early 1930s, voices of reason have been sounding the alarm but investors gorging on hope refuse to listen, and the scam self-perpetuates.

Wall Street is an elaborate con never intended to work for individual investors. We as a society allowed this to happen by pretending we could have something for nothing, that we could create wealth with no risk, that we could invest with impunity no matter how weak the underlying fundamentals. We were had, but we let ourselves be taken on the false hopes of empty promises. We drank the Kook Aid. We believed that Wall Street was legitimate instead of a fantasy created by greed and fraud sanctioned by a compliant government.

We never questioned the ridiculous price of real estate. We seriously entertained insane ideas like the "end of the business cycle" touted by Wall Street gurus while the economy was inflating on an unsustainable bubble. We believed the economy would expand forever. Remember the effort under George Bush to privatize Social Security? We forgot the lessons of history from the 1920s and 1930s. We voted for politicians who are nothing but pigs at the trough.

You might reasonably claim after reading the above paragraphs that I am blaming the victim. But I am not. An analog will help here too. Let's say we all accept building codes that are designed to protect us from earthquake damage. We build our house according to code. A tremor hits and our house collapses. We are victims of the earthquake, unambiguously. But let's say we knew beforehand that the codes were developed fraudulently to benefit a few contractors, and a government willing to look the other way. We accepted the flawed building codes anyway because it made our construction costs lower. We are not then free of responsibility for the collapse of our home. I don't diminish the causative destruction of the earthquake, but much of the damage could have been avoided or minimized if we did not succumb to cutting corners. That is what has happened to us on Wall Street. We looked the other way for short-term gain at the cost of long-term economic growth and stability.

Yes brokers, bankers and investment houses criminally abused our trust while the government turned a blind eye. Many Wall Street CEOs should be in prison for what they've done and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. We were robbed; we are the victims of institutionalized fraud. But the fact is we trusted naively and hoped unrealistically. We accepted as fact what should have been questioned as fiction.

Occupy Wall Street protestors are rightfully mad even if their wrath is somewhat misdirected. On the other hand, the movement's core complaint of economic inequality resulting from a skewed playing field touches on a real political problem. Many Republicans pray at the altar of the free market, worship small government and view all forms of regulation as sinful. That dogmatic semi-religious approach to government has predictably led us to the edge of the abyss again and again. We have developed an American myth about the magical efficiency of market forces and have deified entrepreneurs. We have developed a growing disdain for government as an obstacle to progress. Neither is entirely true or false: capitalism is not wholly good; government is not entirely bad. Both the private sector and government are essential, and both are flawed. Wall Street is the worst example of such flaws. Our future lies in our ability to balance one against the other, extracting the best from both and minimizing the worst from each.

Wall Street is the product of a long trail of greed, crime and corruption. The market looks nothing like that envisioned by Adam Smith. We must see that Wall Street's inherent structural flaws and fraudulent foundation demand reasonable government regulation; we've seen what happens when those are relaxed. Protesting the consequences of greed is a start, but only a start.

Warning: Drinking Tea Party Rhetoric May Cause Cancer

That the Grand Old Party is hostile to environmental regulation is no grand revelation. But the most recent assault on the EPA is, even for Republicans and Tea Party enthusiasts, an unusually reckless and irresponsible attack on reasonable attempts to clean our air. We are talking coal ash. Nothing like taking in some lead, cadmium and mercury with each breath and every sip of water to brighten one's day. That is just the price we must pay to reduce government interference into our private affairs.

But coal is particularly nasty. Yes, the attraction to coal is powerful and obvious because the United States sits on a reserve of nearly 250 billion tons of coal, 112 billion of which are high-quality bituminous and anthracite coals; the remainder mainly being lower-energy and dirtier lignite. With such abundance the siren song of energy independence is difficult to resist. However, burning even the highest quality anthracite is dirty business. One 500 MW power plant generates about 3 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. Other toxic byproducts include fine-grain particulates, heavy metals like mercury, lead, chromium and nickel, trace elements such as arsenic and selenium, and various organics like dichloroethane, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, and trichloroethylene. Oxides of nitrogen and sulfur are common pollutants from coal, and are found at higher levels in anthracite than in bituminous coal. The known health consequences of this toxic brew of air and water pollution are many, and include nervous system problems in infants and children, asthma, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, a suite of cardiovascular problems and kidney disease. The environmental impacts are well documented, and not pretty.

But all of those inconvenient truths are just part of a liberal conspiracy if you believe the GOP. Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted 169 times to weaken environmental laws on the notion that such regulations slow economic growth. The argument is that regulatory compliance is too costly to industry. What is forgotten in that logic is that exposing our children to toxic chemicals in our water and air cost the United States $76.6 billion in health expenses in 2008 (the number is certainly bigger now). And that figure does not include economic losses resulting from workers taking sick leave due to illnesses caused directly from exposure to pollutants. Nor do these figures take into account the positive impact on job creation when investing in clean water and air. Even without those adjustments, by any measure the economic impact of pollution greatly exceeds the total estimate annual cost of complying with environmental regulations: about $25 billion. To put these numbers in perspective, Exxon earned a profit of $10.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. The Clean Air Act Amendments (1990) are estimated to create $2 trillion (with a "t") in economic benefits in the 30 years following passage; compared to the total cost of complying with those amendments over that same period coming in around $65 billion. That is a cost/benefit ratio of 1:30. Any good businessman would look at that balance sheet and draw the obvious conclusion.

The GOP's assault on the EPA is an ideological attack with no foundation in fact, a political temper tantrum. Take away the theatrics, and the idea that growth suffers under environmental regulation is dangerously misguided in the short term and tragic when seen decades out. The idea is wrong because history has shown clearly enough that environmental regulations do not cost a net loss of jobs; and that the lack of such regulations leads to unrecoverable losses, costly clean ups and irreversible health consequences. We can look at both more closely.

Short Term Myopia

The ideological mistake made by the GOP is to sacrifice long-term security for quick but unsustainable gains. This feels good now but our children are going to be angry when they realize what we've done. The very Republicans who advocate for fiscal responsibility are borrowing from our environmental future to pay for immediate gratification, no different than a family accumulating debt on a wild charging spree.

To regain some perspective on a more balanced approach to the environment, I suggest we take a quick flight over Hispaniola. Hispaniola is the Caribbean island home to Haiti, where the impoverished nation's barren, brown eroded hills butt up starkly against the lush green growth of the Dominican Republic forests to define a border of intense contrast visible from space. The Dominican Republic chose to protect its forests; Haiti did not, which Republicans would applaud because they claim all forms of environmental regulation cost jobs. In the short-term the claim is often correct; in this case such regulation would have cost some forestry jobs. But the cost of inaction was much higher. Haiti's population grew from 3 million in 1940 to 9 million at the turn of the century. Forests were cleared for cropland to feed the growing number of mouths. Downed trees were used as fuel for cooking, or sold as charcoal for cash to supplement farm income. Unfortunately the trees eventually ran out, and with 98 percent of all trees gone, so too went all of their ecosystem functions. Flooding became more frequent and more severe because trees were not there to slow down and absorb the water. Crop yields dwindled in the face of flooding and erosion. With no trees, rains now wash almost 40 million tons of precious dirt into rivers every year. The rapid buildup of sediment in waterways killed off vital fisheries, leading to food shortages. With little water being sopped up by trees, aquifers were not replenished, leading to severe shortages of drinking water. With no trees, with diminished resilience, every storm brings another cycle of destruction. All because nobody thought to stop chopping down trees until there were no more.

In the case of Haiti, poverty was the underlying cause of destruction. But here in the United States, the philosophy and consequences of eliminating environmental regulations is fully consistent with what happened in Haiti, even if driven by other forces. According to Republican philosophy, this is just an example of the free market working its wonders, unencumbered by pesky government regulations.

A Republican would say that no government regulations should be put in place to save the forest because after all doing so would endanger forestry jobs. Of course once the forest was denuded, all forestry jobs would be lost permanently, the very jobs that the absence of regulation was supposed to save. We can see that in fact regulations in this case would save rather than eliminate jobs.

So Haitians must now survive in a world with no trees. At some point long before the forest was irreversibly destroyed Haitians knew that people would have to come up with a means of survival once the forest was completely cleared. When surviving without trees became an inevitability, ideally society (through government regulations) would have transitioned to a post-tree economy before the forests were actually gone. Continuing to cut trees at that stage did nothing to prevent the inescapable transition, only made a post-tree economy that much more miserable with erosion, choked waterways and scarce drinking water. Blind disdain for environmental regulations might feel good, but leads to the very consequences advocates mean to avoid.

Modern western societies are now repeating the mistake of the Haitians with our fossil fuels.

Unlike with the trees of Haiti, we are not in danger of running out of oil any time soon. Oil is in fact relatively abundant still, just more difficult to reach. As mentioned, coal is abundant and easy to mine. But we are running out of time nonetheless. As oil supplies become more difficult and expensive to secure, we can easily see a future in which oil is inevitably no longer our primary fuel. As the impacts of coal settle in, we know that at some point in the future our economy must be based on renewable energy sources. Yet we continue to deplete our resources and pollute the air we breathe and water we drink without any serious effort to transition to a post-fossil fuel world. Our children will look back and with great regret say about us: "At some point long before oil was depleted Americans knew that people would have to come up with a means of survival once the wells ran dry. When surviving without oil became an inevitability, ideally society (through government regulation) would have transitioned to a post-oil economy before the fossil fuels were actually gone. Continuing to pump oil at that stage did nothing to prevent the inescapable transition, only made a post-oil economy that much more painful and miserable."

We know for a fact that left to our own devices humans will deplete or destroy a resource even knowing the dire consequences that will ensue. Appropriately designed and properly implemented public policies of regulation, taxation, incentives, and legislation can help prevent this tragic outcome. Such policies, highly specific to each country's and region's particular circumstances, would create an environment in which individuals acting in their own personal best interest at the same time contribute to society's long-term needs. Some confidence in a sustainable future goes a long way. Government has a critical role here, in spite of conservative objections, at least in removing perverse incentives and counterproductive subsidies.

Jobs, Environmental Regulations and Green Growth

Ignoring the most obvious argument that environmental problems are too costly not to address, let us look at the false choice offered by the right: economic growth or environmental protection.

The next few centuries belong to the country smart enough to be the first to master green technologies and renewable energy. The false dichotomy between growth and the environment is an anachronism born from the failures of conservative thought. Conservatives believe that growth is only possible at the expense of the environment, and that any and all efforts to protect our resources impede growth. That philosophy is wrong on every count. Way back in the prehistoric times of 1988 as the Chief Environmental Officer at the Agency for International Developed I funded an effort to explore the economic incentives for conserving biological diversity. The results were published in a book authored by Jeff McNeely, who provided case study after case study that showed unambiguously that environmental protection was not only conducive to economic growth, but essential to it. We've known this now for 20 years, but the right keeps insisting on hiding from the facts.

Environmentalism is not the ideology of left-wing socialists, but instead the true engine of all future economic growth. Just as the United States rose to greatness on the engine of industrialization, the world's next great superpower will come to dominate by advancing green technologies.

The false choice offered by the right is dangerous not only to the environment but to our national security. The next superpower will be the country that moves quickly to solar, wind and (sane) biofuel power, and finally to hydrogen. You have doubts? Consider the national security implications of moving successfully to a hydrogen economy free from the tyranny of foreign oil. The Middle East will become nothing but another spot on the map, contributing no more than Tanzania or Lichtenstein to world affairs. Consider the benefits of clean energy from sun and wind giving life to factory and farms with local sources of power invulnerable to attacks on a national grid. Imagine a transportation sector that pollutes nothing but a few drops of water from each tailpipe. Imagine this as you contemplate the price of oil climbing back up to $140/barrel or more.

Opportunities abound. Yes, as we transition to an economy less and less dependent on oil, some jobs will be lost. But that will be more than offset by those that are gained as the United States again takes the lead in creating a new global industrial revolution. Let us not forget those forestry jobs in Haiti, which are no more. According to Worldwatch Institute, a conservative estimate is that 2.3 million people now work worldwide directly in the renewable energy industry. The wind power industry employs about 300,000 people, the solar photovoltaics sector another 170,000 jobs, and the solar thermal industry, at least 624,000. More than 1 million jobs are found in the biomass and biofuels sector. The U.S. wind energy industry in 2008 installed about 42 percent of all the new electric generating capacity added, and created 35,000 jobs. Clearly these sectors and the number of jobs would expand exponentially as we wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

The future belongs to those seeking to integrate green and growth. This is how our national interests will be secured. This is where jobs will be created. The United States should rightfully lead this charge, but only will if the faithful right-wing skeptics get over their allergic reaction to all environmental regulation. Until we get past the GOP's knee-jerk hatred of all things government, outside of the military, we will continue to auction our species' future on eBay for pennies on the dollar.

Remember once lushly forested but now barren Haiti. That is the vision of our future in the hands of the GOP in the House. Republicans are dismantling our future as they seek to dismantle the EPA. It makes no sense.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of Calorie Wars (July 2011) and A New Moral Code (2010). Learn more about Jeff at http://jeffschweitzer.com.

The Church of America

England's King Henry VIII tired of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because she failed to produce a male heir to his throne. But the Catholic Church believed that marriage was for life, and therefore did not allow divorce. So in 1527, the king solved his dilemma by ordering the Archbishop to grant him a divorce against the express wishes of the Pope. The Archbishop was fond of keeping his head attached, so complied. With this one act King Henry split from the Vatican and created the Church of England, to which he named himself head. He promptly married Anne Boleyn.

This lesson from history was well understood by our founding fathers when they created a secular republic. We do not need a Church of America: what the founding fathers knew in 1776 holds true in 2011. In spite of right-wing Christian rhetoric to the contrary, that we are a secular nation cannot be denied. The facts supporting that conclusion are unambiguous, overwhelming, and indisputable. The Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1777, the U.S. Constitution (1787), and the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) are purely secular documents. I have previously reviewed each in detail. Searching for references to god in any of these documents is akin to looking for Rick Perry at a gun control rally. Nowhere to be seen.

Our national obsession with god in politics is a recent phenomenon, and would seem completely alien to any of our founders. "In God We Trust" was first placed on United States coins in 1861 during the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt tried to remove the words from our money in 1907 but was shouted down. Only in 1956 was that phrase adopted as the national motto by the 84th Congress. The clause "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was inserted only in 1954 when President Eisenhower signed legislation to recognize "the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty."

For the first 180 years of existence, the United States never included god in its motto, on its currency, or in any document creating the republic. We were born a secular nation and remained one for nearly two centuries.

The religious right claims, incredibly, to know more about the intent of our founders than the founders themselves. We really need to stop this ridiculous argument about being a Christian nation. If there should be any doubt, let us listen directly to the words from those who created our great nation. This from Thomas Jefferson in an April 11, 1823, letter to John Adams: "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." He went on to say in his concluding paragraphs, "But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding…"

Jefferson said long before the United States existed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination."

The final word, however, belongs to John Adams, who said when signing the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Since he helped found the country, he would certainly know on what principles the nation was founded. Should we not take his word over some preacher's interpretation almost 300 years later?

And yet in spite of the clear intent of those who created our country, we continue to argue the point. The Rev. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Dallas, preaches to a flock of about 10,000 followers. The good pastor insists that only "followers of the lord Jesus Christ" are qualified to occupy the Oval Office. The Church of America.

Jeffress is in the news as a result of his accusation that Mitt Romney, as a member of the Mormon cult, is not a Christian. More noteworthy but overlooked was Jeffress's self-answered questions when he introduced Rick Perry at a Value Voter Summit:

Do we want a candidate who is skilled in rhetoric or one who is skilled in leadership? Do we want a candidate who is a conservative out of convenience or one who is a conservative out of deep conviction? Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person — or one who is a born-again follower of the lord Jesus Christ?

The first question impugns Obama because he speaks well; the second disparages Romney as a flip flopper. The third lauds Rick Perry for his Christian ideals.

Let us be clear what we have here: a pastor of a large church using his pulpit to endorse a political candidate to lead a Christian nation. He endorses Perry because he is a true Christian, and suggests rather explicitly that no Christians should vote for Romney.

Jeffress's activism is but one example of invasive religious meddling in politics, which presents us with two problems; first is the consequences of political campaigning from the pulpit; and second is the threat to our founding principles separating religion and government unambiguously established at our origin.

Campaigning for Christ on the Back of U.S. Taxpayers

Of course I fully support Jeffress's right to express his political opinion openly. But he cannot play politics while simultaneously claiming the rights and benefits that our society conveys upon apolitical organizations. Places of worship now enjoy property tax exemption as long as they do not violate IRS statutes that prohibit political campaigning by any tax-exempt religious group. Jeffress has clearly crossed that boundary by his open campaign to get Perry elected.

Some churches are now thinly masked political machines hidden behind the veil of "values" politics. The pulpit in fact has become a central point for political rallies on the right. Some churches have thrown off the pretense of being non-political, but have paid no price for doing so. Examples of political activism are abundant.

In 2004, the Catholic Church interjected itself directly into presidential politics. Referring to candidate John Kerry, the church declared that any person who is "personally opposed to abortion, but supports a woman's right to choose" incurs automatic excommunication. The Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley said that pro-choice Catholics are in a state of grave sin, and cannot take communion. If any doubt lingered that the target of these pronouncements was Kerry himself, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke went so far as to forbid Kerry from taking communion when the candidate was campaigning in the area.

If that example is too subtle, O'Malley's predecessor, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros urged Catholics not to vote for Barney Frank and James Shannon, two liberal Democrats in Congress.

In a debate during the 2006 gubernatorial election, Sarah Palin stated that religious leaders should be able to support a particular candidate from the pulpit. That is not terribly surprising coming from her. Her religious mentor, Pastor Kalnins, told followers they would go to hell if they supported Senator Kerry during the 2004 presidential election.

In 2008, in a repeat of 2004, a South Carolina Catholic priest, the Rev. Jay Scott, threatened his parishioners that a vote for Obama would deny them communion. The priest said that any support for Obama "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil." The Mormon Church actively lobbied against and funded opposition to Proposition 8 in California.

With these examples, we can no longer even bother pretending otherwise: churches are political organizations that routinely and openly violate IRS statutes, undermining any claim they might have had to property tax exemptions. And while the vast majority of Americans believe otherwise, the Supreme Court ruled in 1970 that exempting church property was permissible, but not required by the constitution (Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York). We have no obligation to exempt churches from property tax.

What has been obscured by time is the nature of the Supreme Court's decision in Walz, a close vote of 5-4. The minority wrote an opinion supporting the argument that state exemption for church property indirectly caused the state to make a contribution to religious bodies, in violation of the First Amendment. Exempting churches from property tax was one vote away from being declared unconstitutional.

The Tenth Circuit Court further clarified the Walz ruling in 1972 (Christian Echoes National Ministry, Inc. v. U.S.), holding that "tax exemption is a privilege, a matter of grace rather than a right." The Supreme Court went even further in that direction in 1983 (Regan v. Taxation with Representation), ruling 8-3 that tax exemption was indeed equivalent to a tax subsidy. Justice Rehnquist wrote:

Both tax exemptions and tax deductibility are a form of subsidy that is administered through the tax system. A tax exemption has much the same effect as a cash grant to the organization of the amount of tax it would have to pay on its income.

That is not the ravings of a left-wing nut job, but the words of a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who sat well right of center. Even conservative courts have ruled consistently that churches have no special privilege in property tax exemptions.

James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, James Garfield and Ulysses Grant all opposed the exemption. Grant said to Congress, "I would also call your attention to the importance of correcting an evil that, if permitted to continue, will probably lead to great trouble in our land… it is the accumulation of vast amounts of untaxed church property."

The argument for exemption on the basis that churches are non-profit and provide charitable services to local communities holds no water. Other organizations with identical characteristics do not benefit from the exemption. The exemption is clearly focused on religion. Extending that privilege can no longer be justified when a religious leader actively campaigns for one candidate or one Party. Nobody can doubt that Jeffress is campaigning for Perry.

Windfall in a Tough Economy

The estimated value of untaxed church properties in the United States is on the order of $300 billion to $500 billion (a wide range because no central database collates these numbers from counties across the country). Undeniably, residents pay higher taxes than they would if religious institutions paid their share on this vast sum. Churches use city services, rely on good streets, are protected by the police, and would expect the fire department to respond to a blaze on church property. Yet churches do not contribute to the city accounts from which funds are drawn to pay for those services. Everyone else has to pay more to make up the difference. Across the nation tax authorities report that exemptions for property and buildings used for religious purposes contribute significantly to and are often the biggest cause of lost revenue.

Every time a new church is built on land that could generate property tax, all other tax payers are placed immediately at a disadvantage by becoming the source for that lost revenue. That must stop. Churches should be taxed like the big businesses they have become. The U.S. Treasury reported way back in 1968 that established religious organizations no longer depend primarily on charitable contributions and members fees, but rather on the return from multiple investments. In 1986, the last year for which I can find accurate numbers, religious organizations earned an annual investment income of $10 billion with investments well exceeding $100 billion. That number is probably five to ten times greater today. As a taxpayer I am now directly subsidizing the Church's political activities to the tune of billions of dollars.

Enough already. If preachers and ministers want to play politics, fine. If religious leaders want to agitate to create a Christian nation, they have the right to do so. But if they do, we should immediately revoke any privileges of tax exemption. The playing field becomes extraordinarily skewed when only one team has to play by the rules.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of Calorie Wars (July 2011) and A New Moral Code (2010). Learn more about Jeff at www.jeffschweitzer.com.

New York Times Dialogue on the Death Penalty

As with all human institutions, the criminal justice system suffers in various degrees from corruption, incompetence and malfeasance. Even the most ardent supporter of the death penalty would agree that, in some cases, innocent people are convicted, and the guilty walk free. We know this from the 138 exonerations of death row inmates.

The penalty of death is too permanent to accept inevitable errors or willful misconduct by the police, judges or prosecutors. The danger of executing an innocent person is greater than the societal benefit derived from putting a guilty prisoner to death, particularly when reasonable alternatives exist, such as life in prison with no possibility of parole.

The rationale for imprisoning a convicted criminal is threefold: to protect society from future harm, to deter other would-be criminals and to punish the offender. Jail fulfills these objectives; no circumstances warrant use of the death penalty.

JEFF SCHWEITZER

Spicewood, Tex., Sept. 28, 2011

Original Article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/opi...

The Continuing Calamity of the Calorie Con

The time has come for all of us struggling to lose weight and stay thin to reject the daily dose of nonsense we get from self-proclaimed experts.  We can only take control of our diet if we first dismiss all the "advice" that leads to nothing but failure.

 

"What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won't matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you're eating [emphasis added]." That quote comes from cardiologist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian as cited in The New York Times.

 

In that same article, Dr. Mozaffarian goes on to slay a straw man by noting that, "Also untrue is the food industry's claim that there's no such thing as a bad food."

 

I do not know Dr. Mozaffarian but I am sure his motives are good.  But nobody is helped when he and other experts speak loosely and forget basic biology.  The doctor is certainly in good company, because his claims or those similar to them are widely believed to be true, often mentioned by prominent doctors on television and frequently shouted at us from the pages of tabloid newspapers. But these claims are wrong, factually, demonstrably, false.  The first claim about "kinds of calories" is patently incorrect, confusing the calorie as a unit of energy with the quality of food as a source of nutrition and health.  The second claim is absurd: of course there is bad food, but that has nothing to do with calories as we will soon see.

 

So what do we do in the face of this constant barrage of bad advice?  Well, knowledge is power, and we can overcome the allure of easy promises, false claims and bad biology with just a little insight into the world of the calorie.

 

A calorie is a unit of energy defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree. There are no more "kinds of calories" than there are "kind of degrees Fahrenheit" or "kinds of electron-volts."  How silly would I be if I claimed that one gallon of water occupied a different volume than another gallon of water sitting right next to it? Well, the claim that there are different kinds of calories is equally ridiculous.  A defined unit of measurement does not change by what is being measured or when the measurement is taken.

Let's get formal for a minute.  In the definition of a calorie above I refer specifically to degrees Celsius at one atmosphere, and the gram calorie (or small calorie) versus the original definition based on the kilogram. Note that when discussing food energy the common unit is actually the kilocalorie, but the prefix is almost always dropped, so people say calorie when meaning kilocalorie. Also, the amount of energy required to raise water temperature depends on the starting temperature, making the definition vulnerable to variability. For the sake of simplicity, I mean calorie, not kilocalorie, and I mean that one calorie is equal to 4.2 Joules.

Nowhere in the definition of a calorie is there any mention of the source of fuel needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree. To heat the water you can use a BIC lighter, burn coal or torch banana peels. The only important thing is the total energy necessary to raise the water temperature by the specified amount. Burning one calorie is burning one calorie no matter what is being consumed by the fire.

Therefore, we come to an important conclusion: one calorie of carbohydrate is exactly equal to one calorie from fiber, which is precisely equal to one calorie from saturated fat. One calorie of fruit equals one calorie from a fudge bar. As a unit of energy, a calorie remains constant, always, across all foods. That is a fact of definition, and cannot be disputed anymore than you can dispute the length of an inch or centimeter.  A calorie is a fixed and defined unit of energy.  Period. There are not different kinds of calories just like there are not different kinds of inches. An inch will always denote the same defined distance between two points no matter what is being measured.  The calorie will always denote 4.2 Joules, no matter in what food the energy content is being measured.

Dr. Mozaffarian and many of his colleagues in the medical profession make the classic and common mistake of confusing calories with food quality, mixing up the energy content of food with its nutritional value, two completely independent measurements. There are not different kinds of calories!  Remember one calorie equals a defined and set amount of energy, no matter if that calorie comes from donuts or Dijon mustard. A calorie is always a calorie. An inch is always an inch.  A gallon always defines a specific volume.

 

If you consume one pound of fudge you will consume more calories than if you eat one pound of broccoli because calories are more densely packed into the sweet. But if you take a small nibble of fudge equivalent to one calorie or a big bite of broccoli equal to one calorie, you will have consumed one calorie whether that came from the vegetable or confection.  In terms of energy content,  it matters not whether your calorie comes from fudge or broccoli.  In terms of nutritional health, the source of food matters greatly; to remain healthy you need a balance of protein, fiber, vitamins, fats, and other essential nutrients, and you must get those from the foods you eat.  That is why there are indeed "bad" foods, those that do not contribute to nutritional health, or worse, exacerbate a decline in health such as saturated fats that contribute to coronary disease. 

 

We all need to be clear about this:  in terms of weight loss, all that matters is calories in versus calories out, in spite of "expert" claims to the contrary.  (All the many factors that can impact how many calories you burn are important but not the focus here). This equation is a matter of thermodynamics: when calories in equals calories out, you will not gain weight.  Any deviation from that truth would mean you have developed the perpetual motion machine, getting free energy from nothing.  In terms of health, you must make sure those calories contribute to your well-being by providing all the essential nutrients. The energy content of a chunk of food is a completely separate measurement from that food's nutritional value.

I pound home this point because the calorie concept is so pervasively misunderstood that any intelligent discussion of weight gain typically goes downhill from there. The indisputable bottom line is that when discussing weight loss (ignoring for the moment nutritional health), and weight loss alone, the source of calories you consume does not matter.  Because a calorie is always a calorie, no matter the source. The only thing that matters for weight control is total calories you eat, regardless of where they come from, compared to total calories you burn (no matter how you burn them). That is a consequence of biology and physics that cannot be changed by wishful thinking or urban myths. There are no "kinds of calories." A calorie in healthy food is identical to a calorie from unhealthy food; the choice of what foods we eat to constitute our total calorie intake is entirely up to us. 

 

Counting calories always matters when trying to lose weight; but we must eat well if we wish to maintain our health while counting the total calories we consume. I would lose weight if I consumed nothing but 1200 calories of fudge every day.  I'd be sick, too, because I am not getting my essential nutrients, but I would lose weight. Energy in must be less than energy out if we wish to lose weight; energy in must equal energy out if we wish to maintain our weight; and energy in must exceed energy out if we wish to gain weight.  We count calories to control weight; and we make sure the foods we eat making up those calories are healthful so we get our balance of essential nutrients. No other formula works.  It really is that simple.

 

Next time you hear an expert talk about "kinds of calories" change channels and run for the hills.

Faith and Reason, Science and Politics

Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires and volcanic eruptions inevitably bring out the tired idea that natural disasters are a warning from god. Sinners beware. Perennial predictor of doom Pat Robertson said that the earthquake in Virginia was "one of the signs of the end." Remember that he noted after the disaster in Haiti in 2010 that god was punishing those particular heathens for making a "pact to the devil." He said further that the Haitian earthquake was a "blessing in disguise," an idea that might have caused some disagreement among those mourning their dead and the injured, sick and homeless. Remember, too, that Robertson also claimed that Hurricane Katrina was god's punishment for legalized abortion, and that Florida's weather woes are due to the state's support for Gay Days at Disneyland.

Michele Bachmann recently waded into these troubled waters with her declaration (later denied as jesting) that god's recent climatic tantrum was his way of getting the attention of politicians and telling them they should listen to god and the American people. Glenn Beck opined that the earthquake and hurricane on the East Coast were "God reminding you you're not in control." He added that the "hurricane is a blessing," echoing Robertson's sentiment about Haiti.

Perhaps many mainstream believers will dismiss these extreme views as distorting the image of the faithful. But therein lies the core problem with faith: there are no boundaries, no constraints, no self-corrections. All you need is belief; if you believe something to be true, it is. Therefore, Pat Robertson's belief that a Virginia earthquake is the wrath of god is no more or less valid that the more mainstream belief in a virgin birth. Beck's belief that god created a hurricane to remind us we are not in control is just as valid as the belief that god's flesh-and-blood son died for our collective sins. Beliefs cannot be arbitrated to determine which one is valid, because there is no objective basis on which to compare one set of beliefs to another.

For centuries people have attempted to reconcile faith and reason. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences was founded in 1936 by the Vatican to promote scientific progress compatible with the Church's teachings. Here on the pages of The Huffington Post, Jeffrey Small argues that science and religion have common ground. Others writing for HuffPost make similar appeals. Jonathan Dudley claims that the Christian faith requires accepting evolution. Dudley says that "Christians must accept sound science, not because they don't believe God created the world, but precisely because they do." The sentiment is similar to what famous geneticist Francis Collins said: "When something new is revealed about the human genome … I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humanity now knows something only God knew before." He also said: "I am unaware of any irreconcilable conflict between scientific knowledge about evolution and the idea of a creator God; why couldn't God have used the mechanism of evolution to create?"

But these appeals to reconcile science and religion are utterly hopeless, just wishful thinking, hoping that the absurdities of religion can be shoehorned into the realities of science. It is not possible. As science explains ever-more-complex natural phenomena, the need to invoke god to understand daily events and the physical world diminishes. God becomes confined to "gaps" in scientific knowledge, diminishing in stature with each great advance of human knowledge. Forget not that for 1,500 years the faithful were told that god made Earth the center of the universe, and that the Sun orbited our planet. People were burned alive for questioning this orthodoxy. The "god of the gaps" has become an increasingly trivial figure as science narrows the space in which the ignorance that supports god can thrive. The proper response to the overwhelming evidence for evolution is to accept that the ideas of religion have failed. God is reduced to what Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins don't know.

Science and religion are no more miscible than oil and water. Science searches for mechanisms and the answer to "how" the universe functions, with no appeal to higher purpose, without assuming the existence of such purpose. Religion seeks meaning and the answer to "why" the world is as we know it, based on the unquestioned assumption that such meaning and purpose exist. The two worldviews could not be further apart.

Religion and science are incompatible at every level. The two seek different answers to separate questions using fundamentally and inherently incompatible methods. Nothing can truly bring the two together without sacrificing intellectual honesty.

Science can tell us that the Earth rotates counterclockwise (if we're looking down on the North Pole from space). No purpose exists in that fact. The "why" here answers a mechanical question based on history; that particular direction of rotation is a consequence of how the original gases and debris were orbiting the sun prior to coalescing into our planet. Religion might ask "why" God had a yen for counterclockwise, but that question is outside the realm of and irrelevant to the science in question, if such a question is valid at all.

Those who attempt to reconcile religion and faith often appeal to two ideas: 1) without religion the search for objective knowledge using reason and science is an empty pursuit, devoid of meaning and morality; and 2) science is not infallible, and scientists disagree among themselves. Let's tackle the first one first.

Morality, Religion and Science

Science can postulate and study the hypothesis that morals are not derived from religion, nor god's grant of free will, but instead arise from inherent characteristics embedded in human nature as a consequence of our sociality. What we view as moral behaviors — kindness, reciprocity, honesty, respect for others — are social norms that evolved in the context of a highly social animal living in large groups. The evolution of these social norms enabled a feeble creature to overcome physical limitations through effective cooperation. Perhaps morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development. Perhaps religion has masked and corrupted these natural characteristics with a false morality that converts intrinsic human benevolence and generosity into cheap commodities to be purchased with coupons for heaven. Good behavior is not encouraged as a means of advancing our humanity, but instead is enforced with threats of eternal damnation.

One prominent characteristic of human beings is sociality. Functioning as a group in many circumstances conveys significant advantages on members of the group. Associated with sociality is altruism, which is sacrificial behavior that in some way promotes the propagation of the genes of the altruistic individual, usually by aiding the survival of a close relative sharing some common genetic stock. The ultimate altruistic behavior would be dying for the sake of another's survival. An uncle getting in harm's way to protect a nephew is an example. Social cooperation and altruism are significant factors in the success of our species, a fact that underlines the biological basis for a natural morality as a defining and adaptive human characteristic.

In contrast, a religious code of ethics based on personal reward for behaving morally or eternal punishment for not doing so leads to a flawed morality with long-term and serious consequences for humankind. Many of society's ills, including violent intolerance of our fellow humans, result, to a considerable degree, from religious morality based on fear of the unknown and hopes for immortality. Behaving morally for no reward and in no fear of punishment, but because we have the capability of being moral creatures, is one of the traits that can define humanity. Pursuit of such a natural ethic is a means of augmenting what is good in humans and minimizing elements of our darker side.

Christianity has had a 2,000-year run to prove itself an effective means of teaching morality. The experiment has failed. We need another approach. We can choose a path unique to humans by elevating ourselves above the common fate of other species. We can choose a natural ethic. Those who do embrace a natural ethic will find a certain satisfaction derived from knowing one's place in the universe. Amazing clarity is achieved in realizing that life is not controlled by some unseen and mysterious god, but by an individual's power to make decisions, and a personal choice to be moral. There is tremendous joy in understanding that purpose and meaning in life are self-derived, and that these precious commodities are not some gift from above that can be taken away arbitrarily by a wrathful deity working in mysterious ways. With a natural ethic we are the masters of our own fate. Nothing is more powerful, or more satisfying.

Perhaps theses idea are wrong; time, advances in knowledge and further investigation may eventually tell. But the same cannot be said for religious claims about morality. Those cannot be investigated. For those who believe that morality is derived from god, there are no further investigations to the question. And therein lies the biggest and most obvious irreconcilable difference between faith and reason.

Science and Fallibility

We are told that since science and faith are both fallible, both are equally valid approaches to understanding the world and ourselves. Here is what Jeffrey Small says about this:

Bias, preconceived ideas, academic politics, ego and resistance to change are ever-present in scientific and academic communities and often result in institutional opposition to new theories, especially ground-breaking ones. Many scientists initially resisted Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo because they presented a new paradigm of the universe.

Well, exactly! What this proves is that over time, science is self-correcting, while faith is not. While we all know now, due to science, that the Earth orbits the Sun, the Church is still fighting the battle with Galileo. Even today in the 21st century, the Church claims that Galileo shares blame because he made unproven assertions. Unproven assertions! The best the Pope could muster was that he regretted the "tragic mutual incomprehension" that had caused Galileo to suffer. As the new millennium settles in, the Church still claims that Galileo was wrong. The dissonance between Scripture and fact is not a problem relegated to earlier centuries but remains relevant today. Science is indeed fallible, and scientists suffer from all the usual human foibles. But reproducibility, scrutiny from other scientists, the drive for new knowledge, the glory of overturning orthodoxy, all drive science to a better understanding of an objective truth, or our best approximation of it; this method of understanding the world is inherently incompatible with faith. Faith cannot be contested: I believe, therefore it is true. All scientific claims are by nature contestable. Those differences cannot be reconciled.

In reality we need to turn this argument about fallibility on its head. Science never claims to be infallible. There would be no need for more research if scientists believed that they had all the answers, and all of them right. But god, by definition, is infallible. And yet. The Bible's clear statement about the age of the Earth, off by more than 4 billion years, is one example of an important factual error. Sure, maybe this is a mistake of human interpretation of divine will. But with each new discovery proving a Biblical assertion wrong, the Church retreats to the safety of errors in interpretation or dismissing the discrepancy as unimportant. Yet the ever-accumulating factual mistakes must call into question the certainty with which the Church claims that god, or the Bible, is infallible, since their previous insistence has proven unsubstantiated, with glaring factual mistakes. These doubts about infallibility apply, too, to the Church's teachings on morality. If the Bible is the literal word of god, then god has clearly blown it. If the Bible is a flawed interpretation of god's will, then the conclusions about morality can be equally flawed. The issue of fallibility is a problem for the faithful, not for science and reason.

Religion and Politics

The incompatibility between faith and reason come into full glory in the political arena. And nowhere is that made more clear than the rush toward willful ignorance in the field of Republican presidential candidates. A potential candidate cannot be taken seriously by the right unless one questions evolution, denounces the idea that climate change is human-induced and attacks the protection of our natural resources as a liberal conspiracy. The fight against evolution is just the modern-day version of the Church's attacks on Galileo. We can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is "more than just a hypothesis."

With faith, unconstrained by reason, we have Michele Bachmann claiming, and her followers believing, that Obama is responsible for the swine flu, that Obama might not be a citizen, and that liberals want to kill senior citizens, to name just three Looney Tunes. In the absence of reason and with ignorance of history we get her calls to do "a penetrating exposé" on members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-American or anti-American." Rick Perry, confused about his own state, believes creationism is taught in schools, questions evolution and denies the reality of climate change. This is faith, unshackled from the inconvenience of reality. This is belief, and belief cannot be challenged — if I believe it, it is true, no matter how much contrary evidence is presented. That is incompatible with reason.

So, you still want to try to reconcile faith and reason? We are all atheists, even Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann — or the Pope himself. Yes, the one uniting factor is that we all do not believe in god. Like all believers today, the Pope rejects the existences of Zeus, Cronus, Jupiter and all the other Greek and Roman gods. The Pope and I agree completely that those gods don't exist; he and I only differ by one god. He rejects 100 gods, I reject 101 gods. Using his exact logic to deny the existence of Zeus, I apply to his one remaining god. We're just quibbling about numbers.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of "A New Moral Code" (Jacquie Jordan, Inc). Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook. To learn more, visit Jeff's website.

We Are Not All True Believers

This week in the New York Times author Frank Bruni claims the following: "We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion runs deep, as they do now."

This is deeply wrong at many levels, and is nothing more than an elaboration of the silly myth that there are no atheists in foxholes. The offensive idea is that atheists are just joshing around, and when death nears, they see the light, rejecting a lifetime of rational thought. Hey god, just kidding; I knew you were here all along. I was just messing with you. C'mon, let me in.

That scenario is no more plausible than claiming a pious person will reject god on her deathbed because she finally has an epiphany of rational thinking.

The author digs a deeper hole when he adds that "…there is magical thinking in secular life."

The idea we all have religion reiterates a classic mistake made in theological arguments that secularism or humanism is a form of religion. Or that tenacious belief based on reproducible evidence is equivalent to faith. The absence of dogma is not itself dogma. Just because I do not accept as true my colleague's claim there is an invisible pink elephant in the room does not make me as equally dogmatic as the person making the claim. That idea creates a false equivalency. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (from Carl Sagan); the burden of proof is not on me to disprove the existence of the pink elephant. Rejecting the claim in the absence of any corroborative evidence does not make me a zealot.

In spite of the author's claim, I have no religion. Science and rationalism do not fit the bill. My views can be modified when presented with contrary evidence; belief in a higher power cannot. That fundamental difference is an impassable abyss between religion and rationalism.

Magical thinking in secular life is an oxymoron. As soon as we slip into magical thinking we slip out of secularism. True secularists do not draw conclusions in the absence of convincing evidence, and magic plays no role in that equation. Secularists come to provisional conclusions open to modification in the presence of new information or data.

The author calls for a nimbleness of mind and open-mindedness to solve contemporary crises. I agree, but these can only be attained when our brains are free of religious clutter. Faith in the absence of evidence is the ultimate form of closed-mindedness, and remains an obstacle to finding good solutions to the problems we face today.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of, A New Moral Code (Jacquie Jordan, Inc Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook. To learn more, visit Jeff's website.

Governing Like a Frog

The debt ceiling impasse in Washington is an inevitable consequence of a deeper problem: we govern like frogs.

Students of introductory biology learn a basic lesson about sensory perception in a quirky behavior found in certain amphibians that has become common lore. By now we all know that if a frog is placed in hot water he will immediately jump out to safety. However, if the frog is placed in cool water that is gently heated to boiling, the frog does not perceive the gradual rise in temperature or the impending danger. Likewise, when our leaders are faced with a problem or emergency that is an obvious attention-getter, they will react quickly to solve the immediate threat — a frog leaping from scalding water. But like the doomed frog sitting patiently in water growing imperceptibly ever warmer, we often miss the cues to the more insidious danger of a mortal threat that results from an accumulation of smaller less noticeable problems. That is exactly what has happened over the past decade.

Washington collectively suffers from what is known in the manufacturing world as "process drift" as our democracy ages. Process drift for our politicians is analogous to that water coming to a slow boil for our hapless frog, now dead and boiled. In the comfort of our global dominance our attention wanes, we become complacent and ignore what truly threatens us. Our human nature focuses our attention on novelty; we lose interest in the familiar, making it ever more difficult to take on systemic and chronic problems of national security and economics.

Our politicians have become like experienced pilots who fly a perfectly good airplane into the ground because they are so focused on a trivial problem, losing sight of the big picture. Probably the first classic case of this phenomena in modern aviation is the 1972 crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in which the pilots allowed the jumbo L-1011 Tristar to plow into the Florida Everglades while fiddling with a landing gear light. They killed 101 people and lost a multimillion dollar airplane because of a $2 light bulb. Aviation has learned much since then, but our politicians have not. They in fact are about to drive a perfectly good economy into the ground on the basis of petty partisanship.

Manufacturers address the issue of process drift by looking for "root causes." In understanding why processes are drifting, procedures can be implemented to prevent such drift. We need to do the same in the world of politics. In Washington we see at least four root causes of process drift and its multiple consequences: complacency, false confidence, arrogance, and tunnel vision. Let's look quickly at each.

Complacency arises from the inertia of past success and from fortuitously positive results from previous indiscretions. "I've done this a hundred times before." With each successful outcome we become ever more insensitive to any brewing dangers, willingly dismissing warming signs upon the weighty evidence of favorable outcomes. The problem of ignoring the consequences of and becoming complacent about debt began with Ronald Reagan. During his eight years in office, Ronald Reagan (1981-89) ran up more debt than all 39 of his predecessors combined, from George Washington through Jimmy Carter. Reagan tripled the national debt. And no, that is not the fault of a Democratic congress: the budget as submitted by Reagan actually included more debt than what was eventually passed. This is easily enough verified by a quick Google search, but I know this from personal experience too — I was at the State Department at the time and saw the annual budgets submitted to the Congress by the Executive Branch. During his eight years, George W. Bush ran up more debt than all 42 of his predecessors combined. Bush doubled the national debt . Under Bush the Republicans voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling, from $5.7 trillion in January 2001 to $10.7 in December 2008. The water was getting hotter but nobody noticed or more accurately, pretended not to as everyone began to perspire. And as a result we now find ourselves near the fatal boiling point.

False confidence results from our inability to distinguish between dumb luck and skill, usually dismissing the former and claiming the latter. "I've gone through tough economic times before and came out just fine. I don't see what the big deal is. I know what I'm doing." Such false confidence leads to a form of amnesia and blindness, so we quickly forget that much of the current debt crises originates in George Bush's tax cuts. If we are filled with confidence that our views are correct, how could we possibly entertain the notion that we need to change course?

Arrogance is a relative of false confidence, but has different consequences. The most recent incarnation of this arrogance is the revived and heavily modified idea of "American Exceptionalism." The modern version ignores or offers lame excuses for all the ugly aspects of our history, including slavery and the near destruction of native Americans, while implying America has a god-given mandate to save humanity. With god on our side we can't be wrong, and therefore we become immune to reason and logic. By definition all that America does is right — because America did it. So with that tortured logic torture is accepted for a greater good; individual rights are encroached in the name of security (illegal wire tapping, suspension of habeas corpus). Foreign policy is reduced to "you are with us or against us."

Tunnel vision compels us to see only that which supports our conclusions and to ignore all else. We invaded Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein was developing and would use weapons of mass destruction. Bush, Cheney and team saw in the evidence only what they wanted to see. Yet we know now that the intelligence community repeatedly warned the administration that the case for WMDs was weak at best. With tunnel vision Bush supporters made the odd argument that he was best suited to keep us safe because no terrorist attacks had occurred on his watch (9/11 of course did; but that was Clinton's fault). Yet we hear no such argument to support Obama, when in fact there really have been no terrorist attacks under his watch (and if one did no Republican would claim it was Bush's fault). With tunnel vision we filter out any data that does not support our conclusion.

Process drift is seen in how we elect our representatives. With the exception of just a few years between 1964 and 2010, we reelected incumbents to the House more than 90 percent of the time, and in many years, like 1998, 2000 and 2004, the number is an astonishing 98 percent. In most years the number of incumbent Senators reelected is well above 90 percent. These numbers alone indicate a system in which elections can hardly be called a fair referendum, but they become surreal when we understand that a majority of Americans "disapprove of the way the U.S. Congress is doing its job." A majority of us reelect virtually the same Congress (98% the same) of which we strongly disapprove. Process drift.

The best cure for process drift is to acknowledge the phenomenon. We cannot fight complacency if we are unaware of being complacent. We will not be motivated to address the consequence of false confidence if we do not recognize the process of slow degradation in our objective analysis. We cannot break free from our tunnel vision if we believe our sight to be wide field.

So what can we do to get to prevent process drift and tackle the root causes of Washington's ills? Jeffrey Liker, a former executive at Toyota, explained that the auto manufacturer bore down to their problems' root causes with "a very 'sophisticated' technique; it is called five-why. We ask why five times." What that means is that few problems are more than five degrees of separation from the problem initially discovered and that problem's ultimate cause. This principle of five-whys can be broadly applied to discover root causes in almost any circumstance in virtually any field, including politics.

Let's first look at how the principle is applied outside of politics to get a sense of its utility. Take an alternator failure in an airplane. Why did it fail? The belt came loose. Why? The mounting bracket broke. Why? Too much engine vibration. Why? The mounting bracket pads are worn and need to be replaced. Why? Because the maintenance program was not designed to catch wear of the mounting pads.

Now to politics. Why do we have mounting debt? Expenses exceed revenues. Why? A combination of tax cuts, a slowing economy, rapidly expanding entitlement programs, and the cost of two wars. Why? Political leaders in both parties have failed to lead, and instead have pandered to voter whims and succumbed to the growing influence of lobbyists pursuing narrow rather than national interests. Why? Voters have not demanded better; we are ultimately responsible. Why? American voters want benefits without paying for them, or want others to pay for them, and have not sacrificed to pay for the on-going conflicts in the Middle East; we want something for nothing, and that leads to crisis.

By being vigilant against the insidious drift that robs us of reason, we can mitigate danger, manage risk properly and be better citizens and voters. We do so by making a concerted and conscious effort to avoid a fate similar to that poor clueless boiled frog. Beware of slow creep.



Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of Calorie Wars (July 2011) and A New Moral Code (2010). Learn more about Jeff at http://jeffschweitzer.com.