Just before New Years, I began writing an ‘end of the decade’ piece chronicling my frustration with the general lack of trustworthy sources of legitimate and reliable information in this digital age.

I researched carefully, in order to accurately present both sides of conflicting arguments championed by intelligent and convincing spokespersons. I sweated the details so that my dilemma would be clear. Both sides can not be right, and finding the truth of a thing seems to be growing harder and harder as more and more information becomes available.

I wrote the post using a beautiful and innovative new word processor that fills the computer screen with a peaceful white snowscape, eliminating all distractions. It truly seemed to help me focus exclusively on the writing. The essay grew long, but I was happy with the way it was coming along.

On New Years day, I opened the file to finish it up.

The serene white winter scene filled the screen, the program’s pleasantly unobtrusive music began to play quietly and my story appeared before me. In Chinese.

Or Mandarin. Or Chinese (Simplified) or Chinese (Traditional) – other options I learned about from Google Translator where I later vainly attempted to return my writing to my mother tongue.

The software’s website did have a reference to this problem. “If you get gibberish (oops)” they offered glibly, you could “try” their “workaround”. It didn’t work. I’ve contacted tech support but I am not hopeful.

In the last few weeks, friends, fans and a couple of people on the street have brought up the ‘Raise a Little Hell’ Cracker commercial. Some have congratulated me. Others have joked about lifetime supplies of saltines. Others, knowing that I don’t watch TV, simply wanted to be sure that I’d heard about it.

As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup.
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From the Amy Wallace story:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

UPDATE: FactCheck.org article: “Inoculation Misinformation - Claims that the “swine flu” vaccine is dangerous range from seriously overblown to flat-out false.”

I’ve just received an email warning about the dangers of the H1N1 Vaccine. You may have received it too. That’s why I’m writing this.

I urge you all to take the time to read this story in the current Wired Magazine called “ An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”

It’s a well-reasoned and heavily researched story about vaccines in general and the H1N1 vaccine in particular. Usually I’d say that folks should make their own choices and not care what those choices are  -  but this story has convinced me that in this case it really can’t work that way. If enough people refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine – it will put everyone else in their community at risk.

Here’s one of many key quotes from the Wired article:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

By contrast, here’s the Wiki page on Russell Blaylock, who wrote the H1N1 email that was forwarded to me. And here’s an excerpt from that page:

Blaylock has asserted, among other things, that behind the US drug problem was a “nefarious program created in the former Soviet Union that exceeds even the far-reaching imaginations of Hollywood writers”. The drug problem, he writes, would weaken the resistance of Western Society to Soviet invasion, undermine religion (which he calls ‘the foundation of Western stability and morality’), target schools, harm the work force and work ethic, make the youth “unable to resist collectivism”, and create a “totalitarian mindset within the United States government”. He implicates Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, organized crime syndicates, and their American “leftist accomplices” in the formation of US drug culture.

Blaylock implies that the Soviet program was linked to crack-cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and methamphetamine, and that it was responsible for “an epidemic of hepatitis, AIDS, venereal diseases and highly resistant tuberculosis”. He accuses the US media and the US government of knowing about the Soviet plot, but failing to expose it. As part of his evidence, he quotes from the “Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare”, purportedly by Lavrenti Beria. However, many people have doubted the authenticity and authorship of the work, including the FBI.

The Wired story is not as short and exciting as the anti-vaccine email that I received tonight, but it should be required reading for us all.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”

~ Marcello Truzzi