Alaska’s lone congressman cosponsored a bill last week to provide help to the states to inspect hotels and motels for bed bugs. Chief sponsor is Rep. G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina. H.R. 6068 was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The title: The Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008.
Okay, we can’t say we’re “Fisking” stuff anymore, since Fisk turned out to be mostly right. And now, we may have to retire all of our clever epithets about tinfoil hats. It’s pretty close to “Tin Hats,” and that tends to especially insult Tin Hats, and especially-especially insult the Memorable Order of the Tin Hats (MOTH).
DDT denialists like Steven Milloy like to paint Rachel Carson as a lone, cranky and crackpot voice in the wilderness against DDT (never mind how that makes the DDT industry look, unable to use facts and the $500,000 public relations campaign to get their message out).
It’s not so. As Carson noted, concerns about DDT were raised early, and often.
The Dallas Public Library makes available much of the news from the Dallas Morning News of the last century. On my way to find something else, I plugged in “DDT” as a search term. Among other articles that popped up was a May 9, 1951 story of Texas scientists warning a Congressional committee of the harms of DDT.
“Hazard to health,” was the flying head, “Renner Scientist Cites DDT Harm.” The story, by the News’ Washington Bureau reporter Ruth Schumm, covered a hearing before an unnamed committee of the House, “investigating the use of chemicals in foods.” (Where was the copy editor on that one?)
John M. Dendy of the Texas Research Foundation delivered the testimony. Dendy worked out of the Foundation’s laboratory in Renner. Renner was an independent community then, located south of Renner, west of Coit, and north of Campbell Roads (no, it’s not there today).
Studies in the foundation’s laboratories at Renner, Dallas County, have proved that DDT and other chemicals are now causing mass contamination of milk, meat and other foods, Dendy said.
Dendy said that crops absorb the DDT sprayed on them — still true, and more problematic since it’s been discovered that DDT is also damaging to some plants — and animals that graze the crops get that dosage. Dairy cows, beef cattle and sheep were the chief animals mentioned.
Even though the Texas State Health Department has ruled that no DDT should be present in milk comsumed by human beings, DDT is showing up in the Dallas milk supply even in December, long past the usual season for spraying with insecticides. About half of the Dallas milk supply is imported from Oklahoma, Missouri and Wisconsin, he said.
* * * * *
In the Texas Research Foundation tests, the degree of contamination ranged from 3.10 parts per million in lean meat to 68.55 parts per million in fat meat, Dendy testified.
In milk, the DDT conamination ranged from less than .5 parts per million to 13.83 parts per million.
Dendy testified that so far as he knew, the exact effects of such poisoning on human beings has not yet been established.
Dendy warned in his testimony that DDT builds up over time in “human and animal fat tissue,” so the dangers to human health become greater as the exposure grows over time.
The worried Congressmen wanted to know if there is a substitute for DDT.
Dendy said he was not working on that problem, but he knew others were.
Notably absent from the hearing was the committee chairman, Rep. James J. Delaney, D-NY, according to the list offered by the DMN. That’s right: Delaney was the one who, in 1957, got his amendment passed to the Safe Food and Drug Act, the organic act for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) making it illegal to use anything known to be carcinogenic as a food additive (DDT doesn’t count, because it’s not a food additive, but a food contaminant, which is regulated not by the FDA, but by the Department of Agriculture).
So, in 1951, before Rachel Carson had left the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 11 years prior to the publication of her book Silent Spring, 21 years before the EPA banned use of DDT on crops, conservative scientists from Texas were alerting Congress to the dangers of DDT.
Government teachers, can you find this in the textbooks you use in your classes?
Nat Hentoff reports:
The Bush administration believes, he said, “that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.”
I noted before, these are exciting times to be teaching, with all these examples of Constitutional law, and Constitution abuses, and President Bush’s War on the Constitution in the headlines, or buried on page 14, every day.
The official spokesman for the many faces of Harun Yahya (Oktar’s pen name) says that the charges are unrelated to the creationism shtick. The Spanish version says Oktar was running a cult that involved recruiting young men by enticing them with young women.
How will the Discovery Institute spin this one?
With Turkey’s odd laws on press freedom and libel and slander, how can we really figure out what’s going on?
Raw Google translation of the Spanish version below the fold
It’s spring. It’s not a silent spring here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Carson and others more than 40 years ago.
It’s spring, and the efforts to smear Carson and all people who work for clean air and water and good wildlife habitat ramp up again. Articles accusing Carson of genocide are on the upswing. Iain Murray has a book out on the disreputable Regnery label, so desperate to smear that he names this author, and so morally vacuous he includes a chapter complaining about “endocrine disruptors” without acknowledging that one of the chief endocrine disruptors is DDT and its byproducts.
Take a deep breath. If your air is clean, you’re lucky. Now let’s go to work to make sure others can safely take a deep breath, too.
Tip of the old scrub brush to reader Bernarda.
More about Rachel Carson at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:
I think it was Euripides who said, “Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad.” Evidence of the madness sometimes is small compensation for bearing the burden of having to deal with the madness of others.
Iaian Murray’s book is getting accolades from some of the odd sources you’d expect to rave over the book without ever having seen it or giving it a moment’s analysis as to accuracy, relevancy, or morality. I stumbled into a bunch of such sites looking to see why Murray took after me, and what I had said that he quoted, to earn me a place in his index.
Humorously, there is an ill-informed discussion of fascism vs. socialism as communism in the thread — the discussants blithely unaware that totalitarian censorship is a sin under any fair government scheme.
Was it just that they don’t want to discuss the science of DDT? I’ve corrected a minor error in history, too, in a later comment; will that comment hold up? You might want to check out the comments. Do you think the existence of public lands encourages their abuse? It seemed to me the discussants didn’t understand at all that much of our environmental trouble has occurred on private land, often problems of toxic pollution created by the owners of the land.
Ardent and loud “capitalists” often are the first to sell out. They fall for censorship, they fall for hucksterism — just so long as they still get to wave their flag, insult the academy, and a promise they can make some money doing it. Businesses didn’t stand up to fascism in the early 20th century — nor much of any other time business was promised a license to continue operations.
The issues are not simple. If we insist FedEx not do business in China, do we miss a great opportunity to insinuate a capitalist enterprise as a wedge into a crumbling structure of oppressive politics? If we allow China to host Olympic games, do we strengthen their oppressive structure, or weaken it?
Should we stand idly by while the Chinese government censors the internet (and this blog) to its own people? Should I not kick a little when Bloodhoundblog censors my comments?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Do you think the sign maker was jesting? Or do you think the sign maker genuinely didn’t know? (See: 1936 Olympics in Berlin)
While we wait to see whether someone will confess to PhotoShopping this picture, we teachers might consider using this photo as a hook for a lesson on the differences between the rising totalitarian state of Nazi Germany in 1936, and the rising, increasingly economically free state of the People’s Democratic Republic of China today.
One more lesson plan for this year — it’s reusable next fall, with the added bonus then that by then you’ll have the headlines of the actual Olympics to add to the discussion.
Update: The photo is said to have been was taken by Rowan Benum at a California site (see Mr. Benum’s comment). Since it’s all the rage on conservative sites, where the history ignorance is condemned but the conservative bloggers can’t quite bring themselves to endorse the Communist Chinese, I strongly suspect wondered about a PhotoShop origin. The torch was run through San Francisco; there are few palms in San Francisco (Californians: Can you identify the location?).
Update 5-13-2008: The photographer kindly dropped by comments to note the authenticity of the photo. I agree, the Tibetan prayer flags suggest authenticity; would a hoaxer think of such details?
“Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”
Olympic Charter, Fundamental principles, paragraph 2
Since the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is an avowedly non-political international agency, is it fair or rational to protest the siting of an Olympics on political grounds?
What do the protesters ask the IOC to do? What do the protesters ask others to do?
Under international law, what are the rights and duties of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC)?
Did the IOC ask anything of the government of the Peoples Republic of China of a political nature? Would such requests be fair, or rational?
Other international organizations function in other nations where governments do not have good records on human rights, such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Scouting, UNICEF, and others (can you add to this list?). What considerations must such organizations give to local politics where human rights are at issue?
Look at other protests involving the Olympics, especially in 1980 and 1984. Did those protests achieve what the protesters had hoped? Does the success or failure of past protests augur well for current protests?
The creator of the protest sign in the photograph appears to have not known about the 1936 Olympics, which were hosted in Berlin, then under the control of the Nazi government of Germany. The Olympics were sited in Berlin prior to the rise of the Nazi government. Does the protester’s ignorance of history affect the message of the sign? Does it reflect well on the cause the protester advocates?
What other famous or notorious examples of ignorance of history can you find?
Do you ever get embarrassed for the people captured in Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments?
Georges Santayana (1863-1952) famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Do you find that statement to be true? Does this affect the course of history? (Students may want to explore the history of invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, or the history of invasions of Afghanistan by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Richard Weikart is an arm of the Discovery Institute’s disinformation brigade. A couple of years ago he published a book attempting to link Darwin to the Holocaust in a blame-sharing arrangement. This book and some of its arguments appear to be the foundation of the text used to write the script for the mockumentary movie “Expelled!” featuring Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein.
Which is to say, the basis for the movie is dubious. Weikart’s scholarship creating links between Darwin, science and Hitler is quite creative. It is also based on arguments created from Darwin’s writings that mislead the innocent about evolution, science and history, or which get Darwin and evolution exactly wrong.
Michael Ruse published an op-ed in a Florida paper in February — a piece which is no longer available there (anybody got a copy?Nebraska Citizens for Science preserved a copy) — and Weikart responded, restating his creative claims. Alas for the truth, Weikart’s canards are still available at the Discovery Institute website, putting an interesting twist on Twain’s old line: The truth will go to bed at night while a falsehood will travel twice around the world as the truth kicks off its slippers.
Looking for Ruse’s piece, I found Weikart’s response here and here. I composed a quick response pointing out the problems, which I would like to posit here for the record — partly because I doubt Darwiniana gets much traffic, partly because the censor-happy folks at Discovery Institute don’t allow free discussion at their site, and partly so I can control it to make sure it’s not butchered as Weikart butchers Darwin’s text.
Weikart’s strip quoting of Darwin is most disappointing. [Weikart wrote:]
Darwin claimed in chapter two of The Descent of Man that there were great differences in moral disposition and intellect between the “highest races” and the “lowest savages.” Later in Descent he declared, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Racial inegalitarianism was built into Darwin’s analysis from the start.
Darwin argued the differences in intellect and manners between the “highest” of men and the “lowest” of men did NOT change the fact that we are are all related — legally, Darwin’s argument would evidence a claim absolutely the opposite of what Weikart claims. Here are Darwin’s words from Chapter II of Descent of Man, as Darwin wrote them, without Weikart’s creative editing:
Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other. [emphasis added]
That’s not inegalitarianism at all — Darwin’s saying they are the same species, related closer than the poets allow. If we stick to the evidence, and [do] not wander off into poetic philosophy, we must acknowledge that Darwin’s own egalitarian spirit shows here in the science, too. It would be an odd kettle of fish indeed that a crabby guy like Hitler, who shared the antiscience bias of Weikart’s organization, would suddenly accept the science of a hated Englishman that ran contrary to his other philosophies. Who makes the error here, Hitler or Weikart? If they both think Darwin endorsed racism, they both do — but there is not an iota of evidence that Hitler based his patent racism on science, let alone the science of an Englishman.
As to the second quote, Weikart leaves the context out, and the context is everything. Darwin is not arguing that “savages” (the 19th century word for “aboriginals”) were less human, nor that they are a different species. He was arguing that in some future time there would appear creationists like Dr. Weikart’s colleagues at the Discovery Institute who will deny evolution because, once Europeans and others with guns conduct an unholy genocide (which Darwin writes against in the next chapter), and once humans wipe out chimpanzees, orangs and gorillas, the other great apes, the creationists can [then] dishonestly look around, blink their eyes and say, “Where are the links? There cannot be evolution between (Animal X) and humans!”
Darwin wrote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. ‘Anthropological Review,’ April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, [emphasis added] and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
In the end, Darwin wrote against genocide, against racism, and in favor of the higher thinking abilities of all dark-skinned people. He wrote in favor of Christian morality. Darwin himself remained a faithful, tithing Christian to the end of his life.
Such a man, and such amazing science, deserve accurate history, not the fantastic, cowardly and scurrilous inventions Dr. Weikart has given them. We should rise to be “man in a more civilized state” as Darwin had hoped.
Just over two weeks to graduation, son James is concerned about global competitiveness. He’s off to study physics at Lawrence University in the fall; he is insistent I note the news in the paper this week. I still have an active stake in public schools, after all — good call, James. Here’s his concern, below.
Each child has two million minutes of life over the four years of high school. Whether the U.S. can remain competitive in the global economy depends more than ever on how each child allocates those two million minutes.
A new film raises concerns that U.S. children are losing out against students from India and China.
Science and mathematics education gets the major attention in the film. One wishes this film could compete with the anti-science film “Expelled!” which still lingers malodrously in a few theatres across the nation.
Landers wrote:
2 Million Minutes argues that “the battle for America’s economic future isn’t being fought by our government. It’s being fought by our kids.”
And in a series of international comparisons, the U.S. kids are not doing so well. The one area where they score better than the rest is self-confidence.
Once they leave the eighth grade, students have a little more than 2 million minutes to get ready for work or college and the transition to being an adult. This documentary, made by high-tech entrepreneur Robert Compton, follows two high school seniors in Carmel, Ind., two in Bangalore, India, and two in Shanghai, China, to see how they use their time.
All six are bright, accomplished, college-bound individuals.
Our students spend a lot of time watching TV, working part-time jobs, playing sports and video games, but not so much on homework. The Chinese kids spend an extra month in school each year, more hours at school each day and more hours doing homework. By the time they graduate, Chinese students have spent more than twice as much time studying as their U.S. counterparts.
While one may hope kids will pay attention, one may be unhappy to recall the topic, and many of the same or similar numbers, were published nationally in the 1980s by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) at the U.S. Department of Education. I remember it well, since I was publisher for some of the work.
The website for the movie offers more details, including a calendar of screenings. DVDs are available, but at very high prices — $25 for home use, $100 for school or non-profit use. I’d love to show it to students; I can get a couple of much-needed PBS videos for that same price. I hope producers will work to arrange distribution competitive with opposition movies like Stein’s. I’ll wager “Expelled!” will hit the DVD market at about $10.00, with thousands of DVDs available for free to churches and anti-science organizations.
Landers chalks up some of the stakes, and we should all pay attention:
Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.
The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.
In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.
For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.
The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.
SOURCE: “Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?” by Norman R. Augustine, chairman, National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Real science is almost so much more interesting than faux science. #39 features the discussions about the claims that the Hobbits had dental fillings. While such a claim is damaging either to the claims of the age of Homo floresiensis or to the claims about the age of the specimens and, perhaps, human evolution, no creationist has yet showed his head in the discussion. When real science needs doing, creationists prefer to go to the movies. There is even a serious discussion of culture, and what it means to leadership of certain human tribes, with nary a creationist in sight.
#40 at Remote Central is every bit as good. World history and European history teachers will want to pay attention to the posts on extinctions on the islands of the Mediterranean. Any one of the posts probably has more science in it in ten minutes’ reading than all of Ben Stein’s mockumentary movie, “Expelled!” That’s true especially when science is used to skewer the claims of the movie, or when discussion turns to the real problems the mockumentary ignores.
Enjoy the cotton candy.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Tom Gilson is a muck-a-muck with Campus Crusade for Christ, and though claiming he is Christian he has no compunction calling Charles Darwin an accessory to murder and otherwise promoting the canard that evolution caused Hitler to go nuts and murder millions.
Making the link to Hitler in an era when Godwin’s Law has a well-visited entry on Wikipedia imposes on one a duty to check the facts. Doesn’t faze Gilson: Damn the facts, full calumny ahead.
As one who does a lot of web-based debating against naturalistic (atheistic) evolution, I know I wouldn’t stand a chance if I weren’t studying what the best atheists and evolutionists have written, or without reading the most thoughtful Christian or ID-based responses.
The second protection against such an error is to know what we don’t know, and be willing to admit it. Evolution and ID involve specialized studies in paleontology, radiometric dating, geology, biochemistry, genetics, and more. Does ID challenge some of the prevailing wisdom in these fields? Yes. Can we read about these challenges on the web, or find a good, trustworthy book about them? Certainly! Will that make us qualified to “pronounce” on them? Well, no.
But that’s okay. We don’t all have to be experts. It will take many years (at least) for those who are to work out their differences. We can still know what we do know. We know that God created the heavens and the earth and all that lives in them. The details and the debates go far deeper than that. We should dive into these discussions only as deep as we’re prepared to swim—while at the same time always equipping ourselves to go to greater depths.
Excuse me, but I’d just come from another site that had the works of Hitler, discussing his own struggle — “mein kampf” in German. I noticed a few parallels, and I called attention to them, sorta hoping Gilson would blush and back away from the claims. Gilson’s stuff is mild, really. He’s got a tin ear for science and a very narrow view of history, it appears to me. Were he not so earnest in impugning others, I’d have just laughed it off completely. That’s what I expected him to do.
But no. He got huffy and banned me. Censorship, refusing to discuss with critics, are just tools Gilson has to use in his struggle against evolution. Only Tom Gilson can make wholly unsubstantiated claims in error against great men — no one else is allowed to question the Man Behind the Curtain.
If irony killed, there’d be no creationist left on Earth. If irony were science, creationism would win several Nobels a year. If irony were worth a pitcher of warm [spit], creationism would have a permanent hold on the vice presidency.
But irony is not a response. Ain’t it odd to hear these guys go on about their struggles, all the while they impugn the reputation of a good man like Charles Darwin, and all the time they have not got an iota of science to back up their position?
If this completely unsupportable claim is the best we can expect from creationists, isn’t it frightening that anyone gives them credence?
Gilson will see the links. Tom, if you come here, you’ll find someone who is willing to discuss with you your errors and why you should repent. Bet you won’t. Bet you can’t.
All Ben Stein would have had to say to support the Nazis back then is what he’s saying right now.
Shut up, Godwin.
Just because George W. Bush won’t be in office next year doesn’t mean we’ve dodged the bullet of a white Christian supremacist dictatorship. We are not out of the woods yet, my darlings. That a man, let alone a Jew, could, without shame, walk on the graves of Holocaust victims and claim the theory of evolution was at fault, let alone a man whose nationalism, social darwinism (which is not Darwinism, by the way), anti-intellectualism, and disregard for the truth are beyond doubt – it’s like some ghastly executioner’s joke. If the message of Expelled weren’t being taken seriously by a religio-political movement that has already caused two presidential elections to end in disaster, it would be merely obnoxious. Instead, it’s chilling.
Can he sink any lower? Never underestimate the depths of degradation a Ben Stein might sound. My money’s on Ben Stein to be the first human being to reach the Earth’s core.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2007 was the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision in which she played a key role, Loving vs. Virginia. In that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws against interracial marriage are unconstitutional.
The romance and marriage of Mildred and Richard Loving demonstrate the real human reasons behind advances in civil rights laws. They left Virginia to avoid facing prosecution for having gotten married; but when they wanted to be closer to family, they wrote to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He referred them to the American Civil Liberties Union, who financed the case to get the law changed.
Richard and Mildred Loving, screen capture photo from HBO documentary, “The Loving Story.”
Peggy Fortune [daughter] said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.
“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”
Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004 book, “Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers.”
Richard died in 1975.
History loses another hero.
Update: Just as one more showing of how things have changed, this is the headline of the story of Mrs. Loving’s death in the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Free Lance-Star, the local newspaper in Mrs. Loving’s home county, Caroline County: “CAROLINE HEROINE DIES”
I’ll wager the Virginia headlines were quite not so glowing in 1967.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 