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And now a musical interlude …

Have a nice day.

Here is a letter from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the President of Delta Airlines:

Dear Mr. Anderson,

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) objects to the paid advertisement/public service message from the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) being shown throughout the month of November on Delta’s in-flight programming. The ad urges viewers to become informed about influenza and how to stay well during the flu season without resorting to the influenza vaccine.

While hand washing and covering sneezes are parts of a larger strategy to prevent the spread of influenza, influenza vaccine continues to be the best way to protect against the disease. It is especially important in enclosed settings where disease droplets can easily spread to passengers sitting in close quarters, especially infants and children and those with special health care needs.

The AAP and many other child health organizations have worked hard to protect children and their families from unfounded and unscientific misinformation regarding vaccine safety. The influenza vaccine is safe and effective.

By providing advertising space to an organization like the NVIC, which opposes the nation’s recommended childhood immunization schedule and promotes the unscientific practice of delaying or skipping vaccines altogether, you are putting the lives of children at risk, leaving them unprotected from vaccine-preventable diseases. Diseases like influenza can have serious consequences. From September 2010 to August 2011, 115 children died from influenza disease, most of whom were unvaccinated.

The AAP’s 60,000 member pediatricians urge you to remove these harmful messages, which fail to inform the public about the safety and efficacy of influenza vaccine. Please do your part to help reassure parents that vaccinating their children is the best way to protect them from influenza disease, particularly during this busy travel season.

Please sign this petition.

Before answering that question, I’d like to remind you that you need to go here and donate ten or twenty bucks to the Donors Choose program. Then, when you come back, you can read the rest of this post.

The answer: They’re all the same. In each case, you’re dead (or somebody’s dead). All of these are also very newsworthy, but had I included on this list driving your car into a ditch and rolling it, having a heart attack, or just fading away from respiratory failure (all three fatal in my thought experiment) they would be less newsworthy but you would still be just as dead.

Lately, I’ve been discussing the idea that there should be laws that require that gun owners keep their guns properly secured, and that these laws hold firearms owners responsible when the guns are acquired and used in a way that causes injury or fatality. For instance, when a teenager gets dad’s gun and accidentally shoots little sister (or self). There are several arguments against such laws. One is that such laws already exist, even if in a different form. That is a bad argument because they don’t or are not enforced, so any existing laws are ineffective. Laws can be written and implemented in different ways that more or less require their enforcement. Another argument is that it can’t be done. That is, of course, wrong. It can be done. Another argument is the particularistic scenario of innocence argument; Some contrived sequence of events by which a person really really locks up the gun really really good but somehow the gun ends up in the wrong person’s hand and … bam. That is no a valid counter argument because the same argument can be made against ALL laws. We have the system we have in part to account for real life. If such an unlikely scenario occurred, the courts would handle it properly, as long as the defendant was middle class and white. Like all laws.

One of the arguments that is often made is that something worse can happen. The fact is that very few teenagers are actually killed becuase of an accidental discharge of a gun that should have been locked up. But a LOT of teenagers are killed because of a purposeful discharge to cause a self inflicted wound, often using a gun that should have been locked up. So, if we include suicide, there are actually quite a few cases of guns that should have been locked up but were not. But still, more people die in car accidents and more teenagers are shot by each other in a criminal setting (gang fighting, etc.). Therefore, the argument goes, these guns-not-locked-up scenarios are not important.

And that argument, of course, is wrong. Because in the end, you’re still dead and somebody is still (at least partly) responsible.

The argument is a fallacy, because if it was true, we would be able to identify one problem and declare that that is the only problem and all other problems are not really problems (at least, until we solve the One Problem). Medical research on all forms of cancer should stop because heart disease kills more people. Airline safety is not important because relatively few people die in plane crashes. In fact, homicide should not really be illegal until we’ve solved this whole natural death problem.

The argument is a fallacy and we almost always hear it from people who have run out of other ways to argue their case.

Now, getting back for a moment to Donors Chooose. There are schools in the United States that need your help, because they are underfunded. A few dollars here and there can make a big difference, as exemplified by the projects I chose for you to consider for the Donors Choose campaign. But, the same amount of money donated to a school in the Southern Sudan could hire a teacher for a month or pay for life saving vaccines for 50 children or fund the construction of new and clean bathroom facilities. Or whatever. Therefore, you should not donate to Donors Choose, but rather, to the Sudan.

Right?

Maybe. But I don’t actually see you donating any money to schools in the Sudan at the moment, do I? Click here, dog. Just do it.

An individual named Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues in his recent commentary in your paper.

It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary. Mr. Hertzberg uses libelous language in characterizing the so-called “hockey stick” — work of my own published more than a decade ago showing that recent warming is unusual over at least the past 1,000 years — as “fraudulent,” and claiming that it “it was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.”

These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.

There is much more to the letter, click here to read it. Oh, and while you are there don’t forget to click the “Recommend” button at the top of the post (below the title).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Climate researchers are in need of immediate legal assistance to prevent their private correspondence from being exposed to Chris Horner and the American Tradition Institute who are using Freedom of Information (FOI) to harass researchers. (For context please see: http://wapo.st/pQg0JC and http://wapo.st/oiua7V) The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has recently stated: “the sharing of research data is vastly different from unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists.” The complete AAAS statement is available at http://bit.ly/p04sIq

Please visit the site Scott A. Mandia has set up and donate a few bucks after you read his post.

I’ve written it up here. Deltoid has this covered as well.

In addition, there is some interesting reading here, here, here, and here.

Enjoy.

CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake

Please go have a look and leave any questions you have. If I can’t help you with the questions, I’ll find someone who can.

Meanwhile, this latest event, which involves the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief of a peer reviewed scientific journal, has created a lot of discussion in a very short period of time. Thus, the link farm to help you keep track:

The Original Paper is here.

Wolfgang Wagner’s resignation … is here (pdf).

Blog posts and press reports about the resignation:

• Remote Sensing Editor Resigns Over Spencer/Braswell Paper
• The Guardian: Journal editor resignes
• Climate Progress: Science Stuner: Editor of Journal … Resigns, Slams Spencer …
• BBC: Journal editor resigns ofer “problematic” climate paper
• Another one bites the dust… Editor of Remote Sensing Resigns Over Spencer-Braswell Pal Review