Followups on 2010
* The Under-appreciated Heroes of 2010 Johann Hari, The Independent
Under-Appreciated Person Two: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The only African leader who appears with any regularity on our TV screens is the snarling psychopath Robert Mugabe, spreading his message of dysfunction and despair. We rarely hear about his polar opposite. In 2005, the women of Liberia strapped their babies to their backs and moved en masse to elect Africa’s first ever elected female President. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was a 62-year-old grandmother who had been thrown in prison by the country’s dictators simply for demanding democracy. She emerged blinking into a country trashed by 14 years of civil war and pillaged by dictators – but she said she would, at last, ensure that the Liberian state obeyed the will of its people.
In the face of a chorus of cynics, she did it. She restored electricity for the first time since 1992. She got the number of children in school up by 40 per cent. She introduced prison terms for rapists for the first time. Now she is running for re-election in a fully open and contested ballot. I look at her and I think of all the women I have seen by the roadsides of Africa, carrying impossibly heavy loads on hunched backs – and I know what they will achieve when they are finally allowed to.
* Bad Science in 2010 Ben Goldacre The Guardian
It’s been a marvellous year for bullshit. We saw quantitative evidence showing that drug adverts aimed at doctors are routinely factually inaccurate, while pharmaceutical company ghostwriters were the secret hands behind letters to the Times, and a whole series of academic papers. We saw more drug companies and even regulators withholding evidence from doctors and patients that a drug was dangerous – the most important and neglected ethical issue in modern medicine — and that whistleblowers have a rubbish life.
Bias is everywhere. Academic papers from people who get money from tobacco companies are vastly more likely to say that cigarettes prevent Alzheimer’s, and we saw the first good quantitative evidence describing how academics routinely mislead readers about their negative results in academic papers, by spinning them as positive. Dodgy facts aren’t the only reason clever people believe stupid things, as demonstrated by a gale of research on irrationality. Superstitious rituals really do improve performance.
* Top 25 Censored Stories in 2010 (with lots of followup on each, of course….)
1. Global Plans to Replace the Dollar
2. US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet
3. Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk
4. ICE Operates Secret Detention and Courts
5. Blackwater (Xe): The Secret US War in Pakistan
6. Health Care Restrictions Cost Thousands of Lives in US
7. External Capitalist Forces Wreak Havoc in Africa
8. Massacre in Peruvian Amazon over US Free Trade Agreement
9. Human Rights Abuses Continue in Palestine
10. US Funds and Supports the Taliban
* A Firesign Chat About 2010 Youtube 5 minutes
Yes, they’re still here! Thom Hartmann (who’s the leading left-wing radio personality in the US, which is why you may not know him) interviews the classic Firesign Theatre, who have some of their iconic figures (George Tirebiter, Lt. Bradshaw, etc) commenting on the current political malaise.
