A "hacker" obtained a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and posted them to some website, and for some reason Matt Drudge and the right-wing media have decided that these emails are proof of a massive conspiracy to make up global warming, for fun. The emails are mostly scientists complaining about political pressures and people they dislike and things that make their job—and their job is attempting to reconstruct climates of hundreds or millions of years ago based on fucking ice floes and tree rings—harder.

There are precisely two emails that even sound scandalous: one in which a scientist refers to borrowing another scientist's "trick"—which skeptics interpret as falsifying data and which actual legitimate scientists say means "a clever way of doing something"—to "hide the decline," which is a poor way of saying he is attempting to correct for the fact that tree rings don't reflect modern warming trends that are well-documented by actual thermometers.

The other email that is terribly scandalous is even better. As George Monbiot explains:

One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief.

So the scandal is that a researcher thought a paper was flawed and said he would do anything to keep it from being published, not because it said something dangerous that he is trying to keep hidden, but because he thought it was bad science. And then it turned out to be bad science.

Ahem:

Half of the journal's editorial board, including editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, resigned from the journal's editorial board because they felt that publication of the paper in question represented a breakdown in the peer-review process. The publisher had refused to allow von Storch to publish an editorial on the topic, but later the president of the journal's parent company stated that the paper's major findings could not "be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. [Climate Research] should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."

So. The scandal, again, for those keeping score at home, is that academics are bitching to each other about papers they think are bad, written by people they dislike, that are being published in journals they dislike.

Also the scandal is that someone made Andrea Peyser's child sing a song about global warming!

The Post's resident sex goddess and outrage factory reports from the front lines of the Obama/Soros/Polar Bear Indoctrination Campaign:

My daughter came home from school recently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing — or time to call an exorcist — out came this chilling refrain:

"...You can hear the warning — GLOBAL WARMING... "

By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:

A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called "The Warming Song," at a concert for parents.

B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.

C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.

Well, we're sorry you weren't allowed to "argue" with a school assembly, Andrea. That must've been hard for you! Also we're sorry that someone is scolding grown-ups for polluting the planet, but, you know, it really can't be argued that that is anyone else's fault.

Last month, NASA slammed a satellite into the moon at a high speed so that they could study what sort of stuff came up in the impact. While those who watched the bombing live saw nothing, NASA says that they totally found water! On the moon! Water on the moon!

Moon water, guys! We were totally wrong about space. Obviously this means we should go back to the moon as soon as possible, in order to bottle its water and sell it to celebrities.

According to TPM, Carville's Democracy Corps polling group conducted a focus group study of "conservative Republicans" and "conservative-leaning independents." And basically conservative-leaning independents are worried about the deficit and quibble with the particulars of congress' health care reform plans, while base Republicans live in a scary alternate reality where Obama has this little goatee thing, see, and health care reform is literally a secret plot to bankrupt the nation so that he can enslave us.

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

They also view themselves as a minority under attack from liberal elites, and, obviously, Glenn Beck's martyr schtick plays really well. Especially with the ladies!

"Two aspects of the discussion on Beck among conservative Republicans were particularly noteworthy. One was a common fear among the women for his personal safety, a belief that his willingness to stand up to powerful liberal interests was putting his life, as well as the lives of those working with him, in danger. Of course, his willingness to face this danger head on only adds to his legend."

Carville is also trying to get everyone to shut up about race, and he insists that race has nothing to do with their fears of a black planet.

Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters' beliefs - but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson's incendiary comments at the president's joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion - but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

Right. Carville gave them "full opportunity" to make White House watermelon patch jokes, but, weirdly, in front of focus group researchers, they declined to shout racial slurs, and in fact announced that their hatred of the president had nothing to do with his Blackness!

We cannot ever know how much of a role race plays in making a bunch of white dudes scared of a black man. But race informs it. That's patently obvious, and to declare that it's a non-factor because calling attention to it doesn't "play" well politically (because America is incapable of talking about race without people screaming "DON'T CALL ME A RACIST YOU'RE THE REAL RACIST YOU RACIST") is dumb. Yes, obviously any Democratic president was going to have to deal with crackers hating him or her, but that is because any Democratic president would've represented an America of black folk, gays, and uppity ladies that these people don't recognize as legitimately American. So, there is your race card.

In conclusion: there's no "reasoning" with these people and honestly the best we could possibly hope for is that the people lying to them constantly come up with slightly less deranged and dangerous lies.

The science is clear: a new meta-study shows that in places where smoking's banned in public places, heart disease and cardiovascular problems drop off noticeably and rapidly. Which makes sense! More suckily, the smokers among us—and the obese—are about to screwed, by the law:

By more than doubling the maximum penalties that companies can apply to employees who flunk medical evaluations, the legislation could put workers under intense financial pressure to lose weight, stop smoking or even lower their cholesterol.

Being a fat unhealthy smoker already means that you're probably a poor miserable bastard who's going to die young. Must we penalize America's poor miserable bastards even more? If so, start with this guy.
[Pic via]

Coburn, like some socially awkward but self-aggrandizing engineering major, just seems to be upset that political science calls itself "science."

According to Coburn, the NSF gave out $91.3 million in grant money to political science projects over the last ten years. Yes, million and over the last ten years. The NSF budget for the 2008 fiscal year was $6.43 billion. They can toss a couple bucks to the social sciences without hurting the "real" science that Coburn loves so much as of yesterday.

And why does Coburn hate political science? He doesn't really explain. But he is pretty sure that the free market should be in charge of figuring out why voters and politicians do the things they do.

The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Yes, and why fund nanotechnology when we have the screenwriters of Transformers 2?

His list of terrible wasteful money spent on poli sci also includes "research conducted by Paul Krugman," and we all know Krugman is a shrill communist liberal. Except he got the NSF grant in 1991 and it was on the subject of economic geography," because Krugman is an economist.

If Tom Coburn—the fiscal conservative OB/GYN who speaks in violent, tortured metaphors and advises paying off his friend's mistresses and who once warned of lesbianism so rampant in Oklahoma that only one school girl at a time is allowed to use the bathroom—isn't a complete idiot, he should probably fire his barber. But this is an odd one.

A researcher named Shigeru Watanabe taught pigeons to call paintings good or bad by feeding them treats when they made the right choice. The paintings were by children, and had been rated by a panel of human nonprofessional art assessors. Then he showed the pigeons new paintings that they'd never seen before, and their assessments matched up with the panel's.

The birds' critical faculties weakened significantly when Watanabe showed them the same paintings without color, leading to the conclusion that they took color composition into account in their decisions.

We think Damien Hirst's work would make them pretty uncomfortable.

[Via 3 Quarks Daily.]

A study at the University of Iowa examined two related emotions: self-control and guilt. Children were given an "irreplaceable" toy that was actually set to break. Once it did, the children were asked to describe their emotions, one of which was the dreaded guilt. And it's that feeling, say researchers, that helps keep the little rug rats in line:

[Researcher Grazyna Kochanska] and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years.
...
"If you have high guilt," Dr. Kochanska said, "it's such a rapid response system, and the sensation is so incredibly unpleasant, that effortful control doesn't much matter."

But, in the end, self-control does matter, because it can compensate for a lack of guilt. If you have neither? Well, you're probably just a lost cause.

Image via BritneyBush's flickr

South Carolina State University researchers burned candles in a lab and found that "paraffin wax candles gave off harmful fumes linked to lung cancer and asthma."

Lead researcher Amid Hamidi said people who frequently used candles, for instance to help them relax in the bath or provide the right ambience for dinner, were most at risk.

How many more people must die before Michael Bloomberg does something about candles? Children can buy them and everything! We must sue Big Candle.

The scientists found that heroin addicts who were given free heroin, in a clinic, "did better" than addicts given methadone. What the fuck does "did better" mean, in a scientific sense? The LAT reports:

After one year, 88% of those in the [free heroin] group were still in treatment, compared with 54% in the methadone group.

"In treatment" they get free heroin!

They were also more likely to curb their illegal behavior – including use of illicit drugs – by a margin of 67% to 48%.

Except for the free heroin!

Related.

But this is scarier than you think, secretly-desperate-drunk-joke-maker, because it proves that alcoholics who don't even drink any more have already ruined their ability to tell whether that look on your face is one of muted appreciation or one of mocking me for something, you dirty lying whore. Abstinent alcoholics "register less intensity in the amygdala and hippocampus" when trying to read facial expressions than nonalcoholics do. Although scientists admit that they're not sure whether drinking makes you a flinty, suspicious bastard, or whether being a bastard drives you to drink!

Related: Old people are mad drunk.

Time's John Cloud spoke to a group of researchers at Louisiana State University (Geaux Tigers!) who claim that regular exercise may actually make it harder for people to lose weight. How? Because gym exercise makes us hungrier, which often leads to an increase in the consumption of food, much of which is not of the healthy variety by mere virtue of the era in which we live, as many of our foods are processed and filled with all sorts of things the human body has difficulty breaking down.

The researchers at LSU also found that exercising in a gym often also leads to increased levels of inactivity during the periods of time when we aren't at the gym. For instance, someone who spent an hour on the stairmaster is more inclined to take an elevator over the stairs, or take a cab instead of walking to a destination, either out of fatigue or an "I worked out today so I deserve this" sense of entitlement.

Dr. Timothy Church, LSU's "chair in health wisdom," and his team came to their conclusions after conducting an extensive study:

Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

Unfortunately, the Time piece doesn't disclose what types exercise (Weights? Running? Yoga?) the women in the three active groups participated regularly in, nor does it go into detail about the specifics of their diets (Carb-heavy? Lean proteins?), but really, doesn't this all just confirm something we all already know, that the key to losing weight is to burn more calories than you consume? Is it really all that complicated?

Nevertheless, if the results of this study have got you down, fear not — it's a virtual guarantee that another study will come along in the next few months to directly contradict all of the findings in this one. It's just the way things go.

Photo via Scoutj's Flickr

As reported by CNN, the American Psychological Association conducted an extensive study on gay conversions and came up with some truly shocking findings. Excerpted below is the crux of the report, but just please be sure to sit down before you read any of this.

Contrary to claims of sexual orientation change advocates and practitioners, there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation," said Judith M. Glassgold, chairwoman of the task force that presented the report at the group's annual meeting in Toronto, Canada.

In addition, the report cited evidence that efforts to switch a person's sexual orientation through aversive treatments might cause harm, including loss of sexual feeling, suicidality, depression and anxiety.

Many who tried to change and failed "described their experiences as a significant cause of emotional and spiritual distress and negative self-image," it said.

Gee, thanks for the enlightenment APA. However, we doubt that The Manifested Glory Ministries Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut will be swayed one iota by your little report.

The Rorschach Test is a series of standard inkblots that crazy people are supposed to look at. When they describe what they see to a trained specialist, the answers will reveal the secret to their malady, which usually involves a wartime experience where some lady had to smother her crying baby to prevent the North Koreans from finding them, but the crazy person remembers it as a chicken because it was just too painful and no it wasn't a chicken it was a baby! A baby!

For many years, psychiatrists kept a tight lid on the "correct" answers to the Rorschach Test—that is, the answers that most sane people tend to give—because crafty people can game the system and slip by the rigorous diagnostic standards that psychiatrists who rely on inkblots have established. But now that someone has posted the ten inkblots and the most commonly given answers on Wikipedia, the whole Rorschach regime is threatened, and psychiatrists who rely on the process fear that they may have to resort to methods that involve science. From the New York Times:

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather "render the results meaningless."

Because the inkblots were created nearly 90 years ago, they're no longer copyrighted, so the Rorschach community can't do much about the leak. Here's the standard test, with commonly given answers as reported in Wikipedia, in gallery form. We don't really get what the big deal is: They all look like vaginas with teeth to us.

Bat, butterfly, moth

Two humans

Two humans

Animal skin, massive animal

Bat, butterfly, moth

Animal hide, skin, rug

Human heads, faces

Animal (pink portion)

Human (orange portion)

Crab, lobster, spider (blue portion)

The newest reason to chew gum? It makes you healthy, allegedly! Also chewing gum can be an economical way to curb your hunger when you are so broke you cannot afford food because of this horrible recession. Gum companies have graciously dug into their own pockets to explore the frontiers of chewing science, coming up with stunning conclusions such as "Research conducted in the area of chewing gum and cognitive performance is complex." Gum freshens breath and whitens teeth!

Everyone chew more gum!

On the other hand: chewing does have a dark side.

A crisis in obesity is placing a heavy burden on the nation's health costs, with annual medical spending on an obese person $1,400 higher than on someone of normal weight, according to a new study published in Health Affairs.

Science has conclusively proven that obesity is caused by chewing, of bacon. To sum up: If you must chew bacon, make sure that it's bacon-flavored gum. This is quite literally America's only hope.

These scientist-sadists had monkeys eat 30% fewer calories than normal for twenty fucking years, and found that "37 percent of the comparison monkeys have so far died in ways judged to be due to old age, compared with 13 percent of the dieting group." So you're three times less likely to die quite so soon, in exchange for a lifetime of hunger. Great.

Scientists know that actual humans won't stick to a diet like this so they're trying to find some chemicals that might mimic the effect of the diet, and the closest they've come so far is red wine. Yea, that's more our speed.

Meanwhile, in the mightiest city in the mightiest country on earth: Dunkin Donuts is taking on Tim Hortons Donuts in a Donut War so consequential it is covered in our city's largest newspapers, complete with analysis of Munchkins vs. Timbits, and which type of fried ball we, as New Yorkers, prefer to wrap our mouths around.

That's why America rules the world and monkeys live in cages being tortured by scientists, who are probably fat American blubbermonsters. Besides, maximum caloric intake is a key factor in total domination:

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