That kid in New Jersey whose town turned on him, on the town’s internet bulletin board, after he ratted out the history teacher who was preaching instead of teaching? He’s still under attack.
The teacher took some time out to defend his odd views in the local paper. His letter is several weeks old, and it’s been fisked by others, but I want my licks. I fisk the letter below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
12 Comments | 
Adam Smith, America's founding, Bad Quotes, Ben Franklin, Bogus history, First Amendment, George Washington, Public education, Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson | Tagged: Adam Smith, Ben Franklin, Constitution, Education, First Amendment, George Washington, Kearney, New Jersey, Religion, Separation of church and state | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Do I correctly recall that President Bush suggested Republicans and Democrats can work together?
How long ago was that?
Already the right-wing hoax machine is out in force (Swift Boat Veterans again?). A couple of people sent me the latest hoax against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, claiming she was advocating a 100% tax on incomes of the rich. To be really fair and accurate, we need to note the hoax has been circulating since at least October.
Pelosi didn’t say she favors a 100% tax. The e-mail circulating is a hoax.
Snopes.com, that grand internet ally for getting the story straight, has a debunking post up.
Here are a few of the victims of the hoax:
It’s almost painful to watch how quickly some people succumb to hoaxes like these. One hopes the perpetrators of the hoaxes get the same twinge of regret that Mencken got from the Fillmore bathtub hoax — but one may be hoping against experience.
So far as I can tell, no one who posted the hoax has yet corrected the post, or noted the error (in a few places, others have written in to note the hoax).
5 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Current History, H. L. Mencken, Hoaxes, Politics, Quotes, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Do we want to prevent future genocides?
Then we need to study history.
I came across this article from the Azeri Press Agency, noting the death of historian Eric Feigl, who “disproved” the story of the Armenian genocide.
Amazing. Is there an official association of voodoo and bogus historians?
(Here’s a collection of Los Angeles Times pieces about the Armenian genocide and current events around it, including the murder of a reporter who argued for Turkey’s recognizing the events.)
1 Comment | Accuracy, Armenian genocide, Bogus history, History, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Kentucky is shopping for a new state commissioner of education. The outgoing commissioner, cognizant of the legal failures of education agencies to insert ID into curricula during the past year, advised that the new person should not be an ID advocate.
Members of the Kentucky State School Board say it is not an issue. The story is here, in the Kentucky version of the Cincinatti Post.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and faith, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The good news is that Russian high school biology textbooks talk about Darwin, at long last, after the 74-year rule of the Communists decimated the corps of teachers who taught Darwinian evolution, partly because Darwin was ‘too bourgeois.’
The bad news is that Russian creationists, with what appears to be the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, are suing to bring back the old Stalinist views that Darwin was wrong. The case is loaded with irony, not the least that Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous biologist who noted that biology is only clear under the light of evolution theory, was devoutly Russian Orthodox.
This case appears to have gone on for some time, but details are only now coming to these shores. The Baltimore Sun had a story on the case today. And, as if one would not guess, it appears the case is brought by a public relations company — perhaps the Moscow branch of the Swift Boat Veterans?
Tip of the scrub brush to Panda’s Thumb, where there is guaranteed to be more discussion of the issue.
Leave a Comment » | Bogus history, Cold War, Creationism, Darwin, Evolution, History, Religious Freedom, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
At Boston 1775, J. L. Bell discusses what is known about the accuracy of reports that Gen. George Washington had a vision of an angel while the Continental Army camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I cannot improve on Mr. Bell’s telling of the story, so go read it there.
7 Comments | 1776, Accuracy, America's founding, Bogus history, George Washington, History, History blogs, History Revisionism, Hoaxes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Actions convey messages. Actions communicate. How one acts in regarding the U.S. flag, at different times when action is required, tells something about character — whether one was even paying attention when respect for the flag, and the ideals it portrays, was explained.
President Ford’s casket lies in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. New York Times photo by Todd Heisler.
Here are a few things you may observe during the services for President Ford: Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Flag etiquette, Gerald Ford, Presidents | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
A brave kid in Kearny, New Jersey, recorded his high school history teacher doing what can be fairly described as preaching religion instead of teaching history. That should be good enough warning to good and careful history teachers to keep doing their jobs right.
Some citizens of Kearny, however, take a different view: On a city-run internet bulletin board the student gets little support, and his father gets threatened. Jim Lippard at the Lippard Blog has a summary of key details.
And you thought your class a tough room to work?
And a tip of the old scrub brush for tracking the story to Pharyngula.
Postscript: Does anyone know how to pronounce the name of that town? Like Kearns, Utah, or is it like Kearny, Nebraska?
5 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Civil Rights, Curricula, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
While denying that they have any racist or other xenophobic intent, critics of Minnesota’s U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison, like the abominable Dennis Prager, continue to try to gin up reasons why he cannot carry his own scriptures to Congress, why he cannot have the rights that every school child in America has, because the scriptures Ellison carries are Islamic.
Except for Roy Moore, the Xian Nationalist, unreconstructed Christian Reconstructionist, and Christian Dominionist who probably got the memorandum about how they aren’t supposed to talk about it in public, but who lets it fly anyway.
Representing the Great Booboisie, Roy Moore says Ellison should not be seated in Congress at all.
Alabama’s voters were wise to reject Roy Moore as governor, after Moore burned the people so badly when they trusted him to be chief justice of the state’s supreme court, and he instead turned the court into a circus of religious pomposity and disregard for the laws of religious freedom. Another History Blog Fisks the manifold, manifest errors Moore makes.
I cannot escape the feeling that Moore is speaking for most Reconstructionists and Dominionists, Read the rest of this entry »
9 Comments | Accuracy, America's founding, Bad Quotes, Bill of Rights, Bogus history, Civil Rights, First Amendment, Freedom - Political, Good Quotes, History Revisionism, Patriotism, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It was just sad when Dennis Prager prostituted U.S. history to rant at Minnesota’s U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison, for Ellison’s having said he’d use his faith’s scriptures for a staged photograph commemorating his being sworn in as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Ignorance can be so ugly.
It was jarring when so many others demonstrated their ignorance of the First Amendment and Constitutional history by repeating Prager’s concerns. Ignorance is contagious.
It was tragic when a few people, after having had a chance to repent of their ignorance, then mounted an assault on the Constitution by continuing to demand something was wrong with the situation, even calling for Ellison to give up his faith for the ceremony. Ignorance can be cured, why would anyone reject the cure?
It’s time to stop piling stupidity on stupidity: Rep. Virgil Goode (ironically named, no doubt), a Republican representing much of southern Virginia in the U.S. House (5th District) took aim at Ellison’s election itself, calling for “immigration reform” to prevent a Muslim takeover of Congress.
Goode’s comments are insensitive, xenophobic, insulting, demonstrative of ignorance, and just wrong on so many counts it is hard to determine which rebuttal is more important. So, random rebuttals follow. [I’ve come back to this four times today. It makes me amazingly angry, and I have to take a break.] Read the rest of this entry »
6 Comments | Bogus history, Education, First Amendment, Holocaust, Patriotism, Politics, Religious Freedom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I’m a day behind — but, that just makes it more like real history, no?
Carl Sagan and the Mars “Viking” Lander, NASA/JPL photo
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. Several bloggers are blogging to commemorate his memory.
I’ll borrow wholesale; John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack pulled out a passage from Sagan’s book, Demon-Haunted World, that has rung true for me. Here it is:
Pieret wrote: For this passage (pp. 414-15), Sagan begins by discussing George Orwell’s 1984 and its roots in Stalinism:
Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky — a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions–began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten stories high, in museums, on postage stamps.
New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older generations began to feel that they remembered something of the sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made the accommodation between their real memories and what the leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell described as “doublethink.” Those who did,not, those old Bolsheviks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or unreconstructed bourgeoisie or “Trotskyites” or “Trotsky-fascists,” and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in public, and then executed. …
In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.
We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-1991, when Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally — granted commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence data — to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not myself an admirer of Mr. Hussein, but it was striking how quickly he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?
Good things for historians to ponder.
3 Comments | Bogus history, History, Science, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
In a post I missed back then, science writer Chet Raymo sets a standard for how science can leave the “bogus” category: He says intelligent design can start to be called “science” when the first paper is published retracting another, previous paper, that was since found to be in error. Raymo wrote:
Here is my litmus test for science.
In the October 7 issue of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Robin Allshire, of the prestigious Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, offers a retraction for a paper previously published in the journal, titled “Hairpin RNAs and retrotransponson LTRs effect RNAi and chromatin-based gene silencing.” He admits that his laboratory and others have been unable to reproduce the results reported in the paper.
When we see the first peer-reviewed experimental data supporting intelligent design or astrology that is reproducible in other laboratories by skeptics and believers alike, then these hypotheses can make a legitimate claim to being sciences.
When we see the first published retraction, we will know that intelligent design or astrology has reached maturity as a science.
Of course, the same is true for bogus history. Corrections made when error is found suggest that there is care for accuracy, and that the author has no great stake in the story other than getting the facts right to get the correct understanding.
I’ll have to revise the list, here, and here.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Catholic Sensibility.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History, Hoaxes, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Former historian David Irving was released from jail in Austria early, on December 21. Irving claims that he no longer denies the Holocaust.
Details are in the Daily Telegraph from England.
In several European nations, including Austria, denial of the Holocaust not only is historical error, it’s also against criminal law.
He was arrested in November 2005 on charges related to two speeches and a newspaper interview he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he called the gas chambers a “fairy tale” and claimed that Hitler had no role in the Holocaust, even “offering his hand to protect the Jews”.
The charges covered statements he had made, such as questioning the accepted version of the Holocaust. He argued that “millions of people were led to believe” an “absolute absurdity”. A jury found him guilty of denying the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.
Irving had appealed his 3-year sentence as too long. He serves the rest on probation.
Irving earlier sued U.S. historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel, in London, after she had called him a Holocaust denier. In a long and famous trial, she was found not to have libeled Irving, though under British law, truth is not a defense as it is in the U.S.
While it offends my First Amendment sensibilities to criminalize the making of such claims, one wonders about the intelligence or goals of people who deny the Holocaust.
Under California law, judicial note has been taken that the Holocaust occurred. It is a fact of history. U.S. law allows more robust, and offensive, discussion of the topic.
But in the end, the Holocaust is a fact. It’s an ugly, brutal and regrettable fact. Denying it occurred at all, or to the scope and degree it occurred, is only an odd form of denial of reality.
3 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
History education is dead in England. British kids don’t know enough history, so the makers of the board game, Trivial Pursuit, have modified the history questions, dumbing them down to meet the lowered expectations of failed history teaching.
The Sunday Telegraph’s on-line edition has the story.
Where once there were puzzles to stretch most players’ general knowledge across a range of subjects, now they appear to have come straight out of the pages of Heat or Hello! magazines.
Questions such as, “Who heckled Madonna at an awards ceremony for miming in her concerts?” and “What is Prince Charles’s nickname for Camilla?” are no longer confined to the entertainment category, but now count as history. (The answers are “Elton John” and “Gladys” respectively.)
Questions that tested the knowledge of players in science and history, especially, have been downgraded.
The Sunday Telegraph analysis of a random 100 question cards from the latest box of Trivial Pursuit revealed that one in 10 of the science and nature category were celebrity or popular culture-based, compared to one in a whole box of question cards from 1992.
In the history category, 62 questions in the latest version of the board game related to events in the past 10 years, compared to only 30 questions in the earlier edition.
In times gone by, in the U.S. people would work to gain the sort of knowledge that would allow them to answer the tougher questions in the old “College Bowl” quiz program. Now we lower the bar, and make the questions more trivial.
Would that explain why the U.S. and Britain both have such difficulty applying the lessons of Vietnam, or Korea, or even Gulf War I? People simply don’t know the lessons. And so it is that our education systems condemn us to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, Korea, and Gulf War I.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Current History, Education, Education reform, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I noted yesterday that the Discovery Institute was banking on ignorance in a recent press release. Such banking can be dangerous — it appears they were overdrawn.
Ed Brayton at Dispatches on the Culture Wars has a thorough Fisking of the Discovery Institute claims today. Also be sure to see this article by Timothy Sandefur, at Panda’s Thumb.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Jurisprudence, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 