Literally Dying Off

There have been plenty of posts and comments on this blog by both Nikto and me about how the GOP base is literally dying off. Daniel McGraw over at Politico has finally put some numbers to it and the prognosis isn't good.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats. 

How did he do this?

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

The math is pretty straight forward and so is the message.

“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”

So far, the current crop of GOP candidates doesn't appear willing to do that. Look at what happens.

But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.  

Yep.

Even Ted Cruz Is Saying It

So, now that Ted Cruz has said it, will those last, little stragglers final admit that Saddam didn't have WMDs? Or will cognitive dissonance continue to rule the day?

The United States Of America: 2015

When you foam at the mouth about infringement, so much so that you allow people like this to own guns, this is exactly what you get.

And YOU are responsible.

No One Wants Remmington

It looks like no one wants to buy Remington Outdoor. Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that they are the company that made the weapon used by Adam Lanza to slaughter innocent children at Sandy Hook?

What's also interesting to note from the article is this:

The tide has turned against Cerberus and the gun industry, at least for now. Gun sales began slowing last year. Remington reported a nearly 28 percent drop in sales from 2013, to $939.3 million. And it swung to a $68.2 million loss from a $57.7 million profit. (The company also cited a recall of millions of triggers for its Remington Model 700, which has been reported to fire without the trigger’s being pulled, as weighing on its results.) 

A chief rival, Smith & Wesson, said that its sales for the 12 months ended Jan. 31 fell about 15 percent, to $541.6 million. Over all, the number of background checks processed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a rough indicator of interest in gun sales, declined slightly in 2014, to just under 21 million.

Wait...what? The Gun Cult has assured me many, many times that guns sales are always high, because guns are awesome and stuff, forever and ever, AMEN!!! It could possibly be that there is a glut in the amount of guns out there, can it?

Sales of firearms surged in 2013 in the face of fears of tougher ownership laws. The worst of those fears have since subsided, but that stockpiling has led to a glut of guns in the United States.

My oh my!

Perhaps the solution to permanently turning off America from guns is twofold. First, have so many around that no one really gives a shit anymore. After all, it's human nature that when something is easily available, no one gives a shit about it. The cassette tape analogy still applies here. You can't even give those fucking things away.

Second, and more importantly, make the companies that make guns very unappealing to own and, thus, drive down the value in the private capital market. This could hit them where they really hurt. If it costs too much to make guns and no one is making any money on them, well...:)

Take The Climate Change Quiz!

Think you know the odd effects of global climate change? Take our quiz.

Growing Economies Without Growing Emissions

The world economy grew last year without carbon emissions.

Still, evidence of cleaner economic growth is exciting for those who work on a challenge as immense and protracted as global climate change. The news is well timed, too: Nations are developing their climate plans ahead of international negotiations in Paris this December. Progress on emissions – however slight – shows world leaders that “this is a doable thing that the world can work on together,” says Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a climate research organization based in Washington. “This should give them confidence that they can meet their emissions targets and still grow their economies,” Ms. Morgan says.

This is most welcome news considering that naysayers on all sides said it wasn't possible. The people who continue to deny that man made climate change is real and that the renewable energy market isn't feasible look pretty silly right now. Equally as silly are those who think that we aren't doing enough. Stories like this:

Georgetown Goes All In on Renewable Energy

make them look even more silly. We can add Georgetown, Texas to Burlington, Vermont as cities that have gone 100 percent renewable.

By the mid part of this century, the manufactured debate about climate change will be moot.

A Primary Source on Benghazi

The CIA is talking about Benghazi and it's very, very interesting. Given that Morrell is a primary source, his words should obviously be given a good deal of weight although I have no doubt that it will bounce directly off the right wing bubble.

We all know their faith will not be shaken:)

The GOP Clown Car

I've become very amused at imagining exactly how the Republican Party is going to handle primary debates with 15-20 candidates. How can they NOT look like the fucking clown car just dropped them off?

This recent piece from the Times presents a few of the conundrums.

But by trying to impose order through party-sanctioned debates and limiting the number of forums, the party may have begotten an equally messy problem: who to include on stage for a 90-minute debate from a field of nearly 20 potential candidates.

Right. Who are they are going to say isn't a "serious" candidate? What are the metrics? Polls?

It is not entirely clear who will be in charge of devising or enforcing the debate criteria — that is, if there are criteria. One member of the national committee panel charged with overseeing the debates said its members had discussed ceding the decision entirely to Fox News.

Wow. At least they are admitted something the rest of the country already knew.

The party has little appetite for a forum so thick with candidates that it allows for not much more than an extended “lightning round” of questions. One Republican involved in the process said a 90-minute forum with 10 candidates would offer each candidate only four to five minutes, after subtracting commercials and moderator time.

How on earth will they handle 20?

Of course, this piece doesn't even get into the issue of how it's going to look to the rest of the country gets to see a mob of conservatives who all want to be president falling all over themselves to show much they hate science, the gays, immigrants, and women. What a chorus that will be!

The ad pretty much writes itself:)

The (Still) Facts of the Electorate

It looks like I'm not the only one pointing out electoral vote reality regarding the election next year. Byers points out a few key points that folks seem to be missing.

Here's the problem with Silver's piece: It's 1,500 words long, and not one of those words is "economy."

Silver's article also didn't include the words "Ross Perot." While Perot took votes from both Bush and Clinton, he likely delivered additional anti-Bush voters to Clinton after he dropped out of the race. No, Perot didn't cost Bush the election, but he did shake up the popular vote.

It's odd that Silver is going against his own models. Look for him to instantly put that 247 on the board right when the general starts next year.

Neither Byers or Silver note that all of the states in the 247 base have gone Democrat in the last six elections. The only exception was New Hampshire in 2000 went for Bush but New Mexico went for Gore so it was more or less a wash. Add in that the Republicans are bound and determined to nominate a "real" conservative this time around and even Bernie Sanders might have a shot at getting to 270. Now if they decided to nominate a moderate like Jon Huntsman, things would obviously change.

So, the next time you are engaging someone who think Republicans have a chance at winning in 2016, have them explain to you how a Marco Rubio or a Scott Walker wins California, Illinois and New York.

Because that's 104 electoral votes right there.

A Big Thank You!

I wanted to send out a big thank you to readers new and old for somehow managing to double our site traffic in the last couple of weeks. Wow! A big part of this has been my co-blogger Nikto's last few pieces which have been truly stellar but I also know, via emails, that some of you have been promoting it so thanks!! It's also been nice to see some new (and returning) commenters back. I know that we've picked up a few Quorans which is cool.

Many of the new hits are coming from different places around the US and seem to be returning to read so that makes us here at Markadelphia very happy indeed!

Declining American Religiosity and Politics

A Pew Survey indicates that the Christian share of the United States population fell from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014.

All major Christian denominations declined, some more than others, and in some states more than others. For example, the percentage of Minnesotans identifying themselves as Catholic declined from 28% to 22%, or a drop of one-fifth in the total number of Catholics.

Non-Christian religions increased their share of the population by 1.2%.

But the largest increase was in the number of unaffiliated -- people who belong to no religion, a group which increased by 6.7%. Interestingly, the increase in unaffiliated Americans increased in all age brackets, not just the young.

Being unaffiliated doesn't mean they don't believe in a god -- though the number of atheists and agnostics went up 3.1% -- it just means that they claim no membership in an organized religion.

The question is, why?

Religiosity declines in wealthy, modern societies. People turn to religion because they need moral and spiritual support; inequality, poverty and desperation drive religious belief. This survey backs that up: the number of black Protestants remained stable. In fact, in the United States the most religious people are black women, who as a group are probably the worst off in this country.

A cynic might say that this is the real reason conservatives don't want government to help people: they don't want to lose control over the general populace that religion gives them. The more miserable people are, the more they turn to religion for solace, and the more power they give the conservatives. Of course, some branches of Islam are far more conservative than the most conservative American religions, but American conservatives hate it because it's a competitor. Basically, for political reasons.

Another factor is the betrayal and hypocrisy among the clergy. For example, in Minnesota, like many states, the Catholic Church has been mired in scandal after scandal with pedophile priests, archbishops turning a blind eye, paying them off, not calling the cops and covering it all up. Across the country numerous evangelical preachers have been caught having affairs with women, engaging in homosexual trysts and doing drugs.

Another factor is social change. Young Americans are turned off by the generally intolerant and specifically anti-gay agenda of conservative religions. They think the churches' stances against birth control and sex education are foolish and counterproductive.

Related to this is politics. Some believe that the right-wing political stances that some churches espouse are turning off young people.

“Traditionally, we thought religion was the mover and politics were the consequence," Michael Hout, a sociologist and demographer at New York University, told the Religion News Service. The opposite appears the case today, he said, as some have left evangelical denominations and the Catholic faith because “they saw them align with a conservative political agenda and they don't want to be identified with that.” Last year, Mr. Hout cowrote the paper “Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2012,” which studied the trend.

Some might contest this, saying that conservative evangelicals have declined less than more moderate religious groups (the share of evangelicals declined by 0.9% and Catholics and mainline Protestants declined by 3.1% and 3.4% respectively). But since we can't see exactly who is moving where in these broad statistics, it's completely possible that conservative Catholics and Protestants are changing their religions to align with their politics, joining evangelical churches where their Republican buddies hang out.

For example, except for women's issues (the position of women in the clergy, abortion and birth control), the Catholic Church is quite moderate and reasoned. The Church opposes the death penalty, endorses gun control, favors social policies that help the poor, and stopping climate change. Other churches favor these stands, allowing birth control and limited abortion, and some even allow women and gay priests.

How many Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian Republicans and have abandoned their more moderate churches for conservative evangelical denominations that favor their own political stances?

Mr. Hout is being naive when he says religion is the mover and politics are the consequence. Because politics has always been the mover. Organized religion is politics.

The first organized religions were state-sponsored, monarchies where the pharaoh or king was a self-declared god. Judaism started as a tribal religion with Moses as the king. Christianity was a fringe sect until Constantine made it the official state religion. Christianity formed the basis of the feudal system in Europe, whose kings ruled by divine right. The Church in the Middle Ages was essentially its own country and the pope a king. The Anglican Church was formed when Henry VIII couldn't get what he wanted from the pope. The Reformation was all about internal Church politics, money, land and power. Mohammed was a warlord who spent the last 10 years of his life fighting battle after battle. Communist China and the Soviet Union embraced atheism to strip political power from religious leaders; Marx knew how much political power religions held. Scientology was formed because L. Ron Hubbard didn't want to pay taxes, and he needed foot soldiers to create the illusion of a religion.

The purpose of religion is to control behavior by promising spiritual rewards if you obey their laws, and if you disobey, death and eternal torment -- at least according to the conservative religions.

The purpose of politics is also to control behavior, but by establishing laws.

This country was founded on the principle that politics and religion should be separate, to avoid repeating the innumerable wars in Europe and the abuses of power that resulted from the marriage of politics and religion. In the eyes of the Founders, religion should be a moral philosophy, not a prescription for running a country.

That separation of church and state was perhaps the most revolutionary idea the Founders had. And it was for that reason they wrote a Constitution that mentions god nowhere, and starts with:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

America: 2015

Jeb Declares Himself Unfit to Be President

Despite sounding somewhat reasonable on a number of issues, Jeb Bush has now made it abundantly clear that he is not fit to be president:

After telling a group of fundraisers behind closed doors that former President George W. Bush was one of his advisers on the Middle East, the likely 2016 GOP hopeful followed that up telling Fox News' Megyn Kelly that he would have authorized the Iraq War — even knowing what we know now.

Yes, Jeb would repeat perhaps the biggest blunder in American foreign policy history: invading Iraq (a close second was Johnson's invasion of Vietnam, so I'm not being partisan here).

Why was invading Iraq so spectacularly stupid? Let us count the ways:

• The war was based on two lies: that Saddam was developing WMDs and was involved in 9/11.
• Bush was either duped into going to war by the Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi and "Curveball," or else he knowingly repeated their lies.
• The war drastically increased the strength of Iran's hand, toppling the Iraqi bulwark against Iran, and turning Iran's greatest enemy into Iran's puppet.
• The war created thousands of Islamic terrorists when it became obvious the war was based on a lie.
• The Iraq war turned the focus away from the war in Afghanistan, preventing a quick resolution and withdrawal there, and getting us mired in the longest war the American military has ever fought.
• The Iraq war turned Muslim opinion against the United States when the torture at Abu Ghraib was revealed, creating more terrorists.
• The wars inflamed Muslim opinion in the United States, leading to terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, etc.
• The war created ISIS when Paul Bremer threw all the Sunnis in the Iraqi army to the wolves of Shia-led government.
• The war wasted a trillion dollars of American taxpayer money, some of it in cash sent to Iraq by the planeload where it was doled out to Iraqi warlords and stolen by mercenaries.
• The war was never put on the budget, creating the huge debt that Republicans are always complaining about.
• The war killed 5,000 American military service members, killed thousands more "contractors," and injured and maimed 32,000 service members.
• IEDs used in the war inflicted traumatic brain injuries and PTSD on hundreds of thousands of American vets.
• Thousands of vets sustained injuries that will require medical treatment for the rest of the lives, which will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next several decades ($1.3 trillion for both Iraq and Afghanistan).
• Extended deployments destroyed tens of thousands of marriages of American service members.
• The war convinced North Korea that it had to build nuclear weapons to ensure their survival, which the DPRK first tested in 2006. Of course, since he was totally wrapped up with two other wars, Bush could do absolutely nothing to deal with North Korea.
• The war convinced Iran that it too needed nukes.
• The war led to instability in other countries around the Middle East, including Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc.
• Oh, and the war killed hundreds of thousands totally innocent Iraqi civilians.

And what did we get out of the Iraq war?

• We killed a toothless dictator who was too proud to admit that he was no longer a threat to anyone.

The after-the-invasion goal Bush cooked up after his lies about WMDs and 9/11 were exposed -- bringing democracy to Iraq -- hasn't worked out very well at all, considering how the ayatollahs in Iran now run Iraq.

It's clear that Bush's family issues and his inability to acknowledge obvious truths disqualify him from being president. He would make exactly the same mistakes W did, and would never admit it.

Of course, that disqualifies just about every other Republican candidate as well, save perhaps Rand Paul. But he has other fantasies that disqualify him.

Zimmerman Dodges a Bullet

George Zimmerman is in the news again:

George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin in 2012, was injured on Monday during a confrontation in Central Florida with a man who had previously accused him of making threats and stalking, according to local authorities.

The shooter claimed Zimmerman pulled a gun on him, so he took his best shot.

Mr. Apperson was questioned at the Lake Mary Police Station, where he was released without charges. After his release, he appeared with his attorney, Mark E. NeJame, who said his client holds a concealed-carry permit, perceived a threat and acted in self-defense.

The police in Lake Mary told reporters that Mr. Apperson called 911 and that Mr. Zimmerman was not the shooter.

This guy put a bullet hole in Zimmerman's car window, damaging Zimmerman's property, and injured Zimmerman when flying glass cut his face. Apperson endangered other drivers by firing a pistol on a public street. He freely admits he committed assault with a deadly weapon. Yet no charges were filed?

Of course, they couldn't file charges based on what Zimmerman got away with.

This incident just goes to show how idiotic the gun laws in Florida are. Why is no one held responsible for cowardly and irresponsible acts of gun play that endanger the public at large?

It must be hell being George Zimmerman. Since everyone knows that he's a child-murdering, speeding, road-raging, gun-toting, wife- and father-in-law beating hot-head, no prosecutor will ever be able to bring charges against anyone who shoots him.

Sadly, one day I expect that someone will justify killing a bearded Hispanic-looking man by saying, "I thought he was George Zimmerman!" And they'll get off.

I don't think things are going to end well for George Zimmerman. He gives the phrase "Dead Man Walking" a whole new meaning.

Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us

Welcome to the 21st century of the civil rights movement...

More Reasons to Get Vaccinated

There's a good article in the Daily Beast about vaccinations. It contains part of a public service announcement from 1986 written by children's book author Road Dahl:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old [in 1962]. As the illness took its usual course, I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Another article unveils a mystery that had been baffling scientists for years:

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

What caused this?

[Measles] erases immune protection to other diseases, [study coauthor Michael] Mina says.

So what does that mean? Well, say you get the chicken pox when you're 4 years old. Your immune system figures out how to fight it. So you don't get it again. But if you get measles when you're 5 years old, it could wipe out the memory of how to beat back the chicken pox. It's like the immune system has amnesia, Mina says.

"The immune system kind of comes back. The only problem is that it has forgotten what it once knew," he says.

So after an infection, a child's immune system has to almost start over, rebuilding its immune protection against diseases it has already seen before.

If the results of this study are verified, it will mean getting vaccinated for measles will protect you from a whole host of other diseases you already had.

Murca

A Puzzling Conundrum For Christian Conservatives

Most religious conservatives have a disdain for the federal government that, these days, blows up into outright pathological hatred. They really do seem to have a problem with authority, don't they? Of course, I've always noted that conservatives in general (and especially libertarians) are actually closet authoritarians and when they're in power, then absolute rule is just dandy.

This ties in to their belief in the higher power of God who, of course, is the ultimate authority on all things here, above, and beyond. What both amazes and puzzles me is their willingness to submit to such an authority given their problems of inadequacy and jealousy with authority here on Earth. Aren't they the least bit concerned that their ever lasting soul will be under the yoke of a supreme ruler? I mean...if they hate Obama so much for helping them out with a few earthly endeavors, imagine what they could potentially feel when God helps them out! Think of having to do so many things without question until the end of time!!

'Tis very puzzling indeed...

Religious Freedom Coming to Cuba?

Conservatives have offered nothing but withering criticism for President Obama's opening of relations with Cuba. However, the overtures to Cuba may already be paying off.

Raul Castro just concluded a visit to the Vatican, where he met with the pope. The meeting had an unexpected result:

"I will resume praying and turn to the Church again if the Pope continues in this vein," Castro, the 83-year-old younger brother of Fidel, told reporters, adding "I mean what I say."

"The pontiff is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too. I studied at Jesuit schools," he said.

The Catholic Church's activities were suppressed after the revolution. If the thaw in relations between Washington and Havana means greater religious freedom for the Cuban people, it would be a significant step forward.

However, just because a former Communist government endorses religion doesn't mean it will become any more enlightened. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian Orthodox Church has become the de-facto state religion.

Gays and lesbians are harassed by the government and church officials alike, and as the Orthodox Church has lined up behind Putin on every issue, political assassinations of reporters and opposition figures such as Boris Nemtsov have become almost commonplace.

Cuba may be different, though: the Russian Orthodox Church is a nationalistic religion and Putin has the Russian patriarch under his thumb. The Vatican is independent of all nations and draws its leadership from across the world.

If allowed to flower in Cuba, where Pope Francis will visit this September, the Catholic Church under his leadership should be a force for good.

Again with the False Equivalence

In an attempt to sound moderate and reasonable, Mark has once again fallen for the false equivalence that -- because some Democrats don't like nuclear power, vaccines and genetically modified organisms -- it means that they are just as anti-science as Republicans.

That's a load of crap.

Huge segments of the Republican base deny the very science of evolution (the basis of all biology) and large numbers of them deny the basic science of climate change. Their know-nothing bona fides are well-established.

Democrats don't oppose nuclear power because they don't believe in nuclear physics, but because they believe we don't have a handle on the technology.

The Democrats who oppose nuclear power do so not because they don't believe that fissioning atoms produces energy, but because they believe it's an inappropriate use of a technology that has a large number of extremely dangerous problems.

First, nuclear power plants have already had numerous accidents that have released serious amounts of radiation (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island), plus a number of other incidents that the American and Soviet military won't own up to publicly.

On-site accidents, earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks could breach the reactor's core or break open the dry casks, releasing large quantities of radiation. The Fukushima reactors are still leaking radiation into the sea; the only way they have to slow this down is to build a giant freezer around the whole reactor and turn the leaking radioactive water to ice. And still radioactive water is getting to the Pacific.

A Fukushima-like meltdown at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota could poison the Mississippi for centuries.

Second, and this is the real problem, we have nowhere to store the nuclear waste. Currently nuclear power plants across the country are just storing the waste in their reactors, or in dry casks on site, often on the banks of rivers that serve as water supplies for large metropolitan areas downstream. This is extremely dangerous. As we saw at Fukushima, storing the waste in the reactor is idiotic, because if the waste is exposed to air it will melt down and potentially cause a catastrophic explosion.

In the USA no state will allow a nuclear waste repository on their land because they don't want to be stuck with everyone else's waste. Furthermore, even if some state did allow storing it there, transporting all that waste to one location allows terrorists to know where it is and attack it anywhere along the route. Given how frequently oil trains keep derailing and exploding, how smart is it, really, to ship tons of radioactive waste around the country?

It would be a mistake to build new nuclear plants without any plan for dealing with the waste.

Now, I'm not in favor of shutting down every nuclear power plant at once. But it's clearly a dangerous technology that we don't really have a handle on, because we have no solution for disposing of the waste. Waste that will be dangerous for centuries. It would be a mistake to compound our problems and build new nuclear plants without any plan for dealing with the waste.

That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats: Democrats don't deny the science of nuclear power, they just don't trust that big businesses focused exclusively on jacking up profits can be trusted to guarantee our safety with an extremely dangerous waste product that will be around long after they have declared bankruptcy. It's basically the same reason environmentalists don't like coal and oil or Republicans don't like big government: they don't like the waste.

GMO foods are much the same. Democrats don't deny that we can insert certain genes into plants to alter their biology. The question is whether using that technology is wise.

The most common GMO crops are "Round Up-ready" corn and soybeans. These plants can be soaked in herbicides (glyphosate) that kill weeds. The problem is that herbicides and pesticides are poisons. Scientific research has shown links between these toxins and Parkinson's, birth defects, autism, and other developmental effects in fetuses. They also cause deformities in amphibians and play a role in Colony Collapse Disorder among bees.

GMO crops encourage overuse of toxic chemicals, create monocultures and make farmers completely dependent on big agro.

Then there's the economics: GMO crops are a bad deal for farmers. In the olden days, farmers could save some of the seed from their harvest to plant their next crop. The agro giants have sued farmers to prevent this practice with GMO seeds. Farmers can be sued even if they replant seed from their own plants, which accidentally bred with GMO plants from neighboring farmers fields.

The problem with agriculture being dependent on herbicides and pesticides is that weeds and pests develop immunities to these poisons, making them ineffective (due to that pesky evolution). These superweeds require farmers to use ever more toxic herbicides, poisons that the companies say are completely safe, but they never have to prove their safety. These products can only be forced off the market if someone else proves they are harmful, and that can take decades.

Finally, use of GMO crops promotes monocultures. Across the country there are only a few different kinds of corn and soybeans. If some new pest or rust shows up that these crops aren't protected from, we could lose the entire year's crop

Scientifically speaking, it is safer in the long term for the food supply to have more genetic diversity, and to use farming techniques that reduce the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and irrigation required. Arguments to the contrary are not based in science, but in business, finance and population control.

Nuclear power and GMO organisms are not "science," they are just technologies. They are tools we use to produce energy and food.

As for vaccines, I have heard just as many conservative nut jobs who believe vaccines and fluoridated water are communist conspiracies as liberals who think that they cause autism. At one time there was a valid concern about vaccines: they contained the preservative thimerosal, an organic mercury compound that causes neurological damage. Thimerosal has since been removed from childhood vaccines, but is still present in some adult vaccines and other products like contact lens solution. But since we know mercury causes neurological damage (see: mad as a hatter), why are we still using it?

Furthermore, even if you ignore the whole autism scare, the science says that some small number of people will have negative reactions to vaccinations (even including death), and it is possible (though unlikely) to contract a disease from a live-virus vaccine.

Any medical procedure poses a risk of injury or death, including vaccination.

The fact is, any time you have any medical procedure there's a chance something bad will happen. You run the risk of getting any number of diseases just going to the doctor to get vaccinated if some sick person coughs on you.

Statistically speaking, however, we are safer as a society and as individuals if everyone is vaccinated. But it's also true that some small number of kids will get sick and some will die as a result of a vaccination. That number is much smaller than the number of kids who will get sick and die from the measles, but it's still a risk that scientists have to acknowledge.

But that argument is hard to make to a mother whose child is screaming bloody murder because he got poked by that scary needle. Individual moms don't care about statistics and herd immunity, they only care about their kids. Yes, it's foolish, but can you blame them?

Questioning whether a technology should be used is not a statement against science.

Questioning whether a technology should be used is not a statement against science. The question is whether the benefits of the technology outweigh the risks. The answer is based on statistical analysis, and how much personal risk we want to take in order to benefit all society.

For vaccines it's clear that personal risks are worth the benefit to society. But for nuclear power and GMO crops in particular, all of society is being made to take potentially large risks so that a very small number of corporations can generate vast profits with their proprietary products.