John Abraham’s work ended up giving Christopher Monckton a bumpy ride into New Zealand, according to Country 99 News:
Monckton was lucky the news channel labeled him “Climate Skeptic” and not “Barking Mad.”
More:
11 Comments | 
Accuracy, Climate change, climate_change, Politics, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Accuracy, Christopher Monckton, Climate change, Global warming, John Abraham, New Zealand, Politics, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Talking about Tea Party and Republican economics in the next few months? You’ll need to have Wolfgang Pauli’s wisdom at your fingertips:
Wolfgang Pauli, circa 1945 – Nobel Foundation photo
That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), as quoted by R. Peierls
From Wikipedia:
Peierls (1960) writes of Pauli, “… a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘That’s not right. It’s not even wrong'”. (Peierls R (1960). “Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900-1958”. Biographical memoirs of fellows of the Royal Society 5: 174-92. Royal Society (Great Britain))
Pauli won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945: ” At this stage of the development of atomic theory, Wolfgang Pauli made a decisive contribution through his discovery in 1925 of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle. The 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pauli for this discovery.”
3 Comments | Accuracy, Famous quotes, History, Physics, Quotes, Science | Tagged: Accuracy, Famous quotes, History, Physics, Quotes, Science, Wolfgang Pauli | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
First: American Elephant, a blog that insults pachyderms with its mendacious ways, stretches for ways to complain about President Obama. In a recent post, the author tried to poke ill-humored fun at Obama and companies he’s visited over the past couple of years. It’s the headline that caught my attention:
“President Obama has never held a private job, but picks the winners and losers for the economy”
The premise is false, of course — it’s based on that Republican smear meme that Obama and his cabinet lack experience in the private sector, a smear that breaks down quickly if anyone looks at the biographies of the cabinet. Obama also comes from the private sector, though when confronted with the facts the meme spreaders tend to make rash and foolish claims like “the Catholic church is public sector” and “lawyers all work for the government.”
Cartoon by Chris Madden, via TV Tropes
I left a response there, but don’t expect the blog owner to show the decency of allowing it through moderation:
President Obama worked for a private group providing services to people below the poverty line, and then he worked for a very large private law firm, while teaching at the privately-run University of Chicago. He had never worked for government until his election to the Illinois State Senate (is that salaried?).
You should probably correct the headline.
As if. Not only is the headline wrong, but the evidence doesn’t support the second premise, and there are other serious problems with the claims and arguments advanced there. True American elephants probably take to drink to try to forget what’s being done under their name.
Second, and probably third: There is the minor kerfuffle of the hoax report out of Pakistan that nuclear power plants in Nebraska are either near meltdown, or already melted down, and you don’t know about it because President Obama ordered a news blackout to avoid panic but at the same time condemning hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners to radiation poisoning deaths. It’s an absurd story on several fronts and several levels — news of the flood plight of the power plants has been reported around the world, for example — but those bent on being suckered by every conspiracy claim to come down the pike, or bent on criticizing President Obama no matter how much they must twist the fact to do it, cannot be dissuaded.
Take for example this odd blog: A discussion of the imagined meltdown quickly disintegrates into defense of holding on to birther views despite Obama’s release of his “long form” birth certificate (no good information goes un-urinated upon). Then discussion veers off into all sorts of paranoia — UN “control” of U.S. lands, occupation of several states by rogue Transportation Security Agents (you didn’t hear about it due to the news blackout, most likely), Obama’s being controlled by or controlling GE (‘didn’t GE have something to do with the design of those nuclear reactors?’), Army Corps of Engineers plots to flood the Midwest (????), Obama’s overturning the Constitution through the use of executive orders (which no one there can find at the moment, but they’re sure they exist, somewhere . . . gee, did we misplace it?) including a wholly imaginary order to take over all rural lands in the U.S. (why?), and complaints that the U.S. is not deporting U.S. soldiers or their families quickly enough.
Such a ball of delusional paranoia and errors of history, law, and other facts! One might imagine these people so involved in tracking down misinformation and distorting real information that they forget to kick their dogs. (Seriously, I’d tend to think these people could be helped by having a dog or a cat, except for the very real fear I have they’d forget to feed the creatures; like a drowning person, fighting all efforts to save them.)
Our nation has a collective inability to deal with the facts of too many situations, because too many people simply deny the facts in front of our collective national face. Jonathan Kay’s recent book, Among the Truthers, gets at the problem — you can imagine how strongly any of these bloggers and commenters would resist even reading Kay’s book. It’s not that they seek information to make good decisions on policy, but that they seek the misinformation to justify their paranoid claims that “we are all really, really screwed!”
As with the blogs noted above, we witness the birth of voodoo history, bogus history, and intentional ignorance.
There is a great danger from these cesspools of willful ignorance. As more people refuse to grant credence to facts, to reality, it becomes more difficult to muster a consensus on what to do about any particular problem. Wildfires and drought in Texas this year already wiped out more than three-fifths of the state’s wheat harvest; floods in the upper Midwest will surely do serious damage to wheat crops there. We face a shortage of the surpluses of wheat the nation has used to bring peace and vanquish hunger around the world for the past 60 years — think of our “sale” of wheat to the old Soviet Union, stopping the starvation death toll under 10 million and indebting the USSR to the U.S. and the non-communist West — a debt the USSR never could pay off, and a debt which was the hammer to start the crumbling of the foundations of Soviet Communism. In short, we have a wheat supply problem, caused in no small part by weather extremes that are, mostly likely, aggravated by global warming.
Can we agree to take action? Probably not, not so long as so many people deny that warming is happening and throw every roadblock in the path of action, in the name of “preventing government takeover.”
As a nation, we have problems with flood control, and emergency preparedness, and the management of undeveloped lands and farm lands — not to mention the many urban problems we face. What are the odds we can get a consensus on any of those problems, at least enough of a consensus to take constructive action?
For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, begins the old saw. We can’t even get agreement that horseshoes should be nailed to a horse’s hoof — how can we get the consensus to make sure there are enough nails to do the job?
43 Comments | Accuracy, Barack Obama, Birth Certificate, Bogus history, Climate change, climate_change, Conspiracies, History, Paranoia, President Obama, Rampant stupidity, Voodoo history | Tagged: Accuracy, Birthers, Bogus history, Climate change, Conspiracies, Global warming, History, Law, Paranoia, President Obama, Rampant stupidity, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 23, 1926, H. L. Mencken’s newspaper column confessed his hoax of nine years earlier — he had made up whole cloth the story of Millard Fillmore’s only accomplishment being the installation of a plumbed bathtub in the White House (in the 1850s known as the Executive Mansion).
Alas, the hoax cat was out of the bag, and the hoax information still pollutes the pool of history today.
Text of the confession, from the Museum of Hoaxes:
Melancholy Reflections
On Dec. 28, 1917, I printed in the New York Evening Mail, a paper now extinct, an article purporting to give the history of the bathtub. This article, I may say at once, was a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious…
This article, as I say, was planned as a piece of spoofing to relieve the strain of war days, and I confess that I regarded it, when it came out, with considerable satisfaction. It was reprinted by various great organs of the enlightenment, and after a while the usual letters began to reach me from readers. Then, suddenly, my satisfaction turned to consternation. For these readers, it appeared, all took my idle jocosities with complete seriousness. Some of them, of antiquarian tastes, asked for further light on this or that phase of the subject. Others actually offered me corroboration!
But the worst was to come. Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous “facts” in the writings of other men. They began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of congress. They crossed the ocean, and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference. Today, I believe, they are accepted as gospel everywhere on earth. To question them becomes as hazardous as to question the Norman invasion.
* * *
And as rare. This is the first time, indeed, that they have ever been questioned, and I confess at once that even I myself, their author, feel a certain hesitancy about doing it. Once more, I suppose, I’ll be accused of taking the wrong side for the mere pleasure of standing in opposition. The Cincinnati boomers, who have made much of the boast that the bathtub industry, now running to $200,000,000 a year, was started in their town, will charge me with spreading lies against them. The chiropractors will damn me for blowing up their ammunition. The medical gents, having swallowed my quackery, will now denounce me as a quack for exposing them. And in the end, no doubt, the thing will simmer down to a general feeling that I have once more committed some vague and sinister crime against the United States, and there will be a renewal of the demand that I be deported to Russia.
I recite this history, not because it is singular, but because it is typical. It is out of just such frauds, I believe, that most of the so-called knowledge of humanity flows. What begins as a guess — or, perhaps, not infrequently, as a downright and deliberate lie — ends as a fact and is embalmed in the history books. One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not 1 per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions. But every one of these fictions retains full faith and credit today. To question even the most palpably absurd of them, in most parts of the United States, is to invite denunciation as a bolshevik.
So with all other wars. For example, the revolution. For years past American historians have been investigating the orthodox legends. Almost all of them turn out to be blowsy nonsense. Yet they remain in the school history books and every effort to get them out causes a dreadful row, and those who make it are accused of all sorts of treasons and spoils. The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
* * *
As a practicing journalist for many years, I have often had close contact with history in the making. I can recall no time or place when what actually occurred was afterward generally known and believed. Sometimes a part of the truth got out, but never all. And what actually got out was seldom clearly understood. Consider, for example, the legends that follow every national convention. A thousand newspaper correspondents are on the scene, all of them theoretically competent to see accurately and report honestly, but it is seldom that two of them agree perfectly, and after a month after the convention adjourns the accepted version of what occurred usually differs from the accounts of all of them.
I point to the Republican convention of 1920, which nominated the eminent and lamented Harding. A week after the delegates adjourned the whole country believed that Harding had been put through by Col. George Harvey: Harvey himself admitted it. Then other claimants to the honor arose, and after a year or two it was generally held that the trick had been turned by the distinguished Harry M. Daugherty, by that time a salient light of the Harding cabinet. The story began to acquire corroborative detail. Delegates and correspondents began to remember things that they had not noticed on the spot. What the orthodox tale is today with Daugherty in eclipse, I don’t know, but you may be sure that it is full of mysterious intrigue and bold adventure.
What are the facts? The facts are that Harvey had little more to do with the nomination of Harding than I did, and that Daugherty was immensely surprised when good Warren won. The nomination was really due to the intense heat, and to that alone. The delegates, torn by the savage three cornered fight between Lowden, Johnson, and Wood, came to Saturday morning in despair. The temperature in the convention hall was at least 120 degrees. They were eager to get home. When it became apparent that the leaders could not break the deadlock they ran amuck and nominated Harding, as the one aspirant who had no enemies. If any individual managed the business it was not Harvey or Daugherty, but Myron T. Herrick. But so far as I know Herrick’s hand in it has never been mentioned.
* * *
I turn to a more pleasant field — that of sport in the grand manner. On July 2, 1921, in the great bowl at Jersey City, the Hon. Jack Dempsey met M. Carpentier, the gallant frog. The sympathy of the crowd was overwhelmingly with M. Carpentier and every time he struck a blow he got a round of applause, even if it didn’t land. I had an excellent seat, very near the ring, and saw every move of the two men. From the first moment Dr. Dempsey had it all his own way. He could have knocked out M. Carpentier in the first half of the first round. After that first half he simply waited his chance to do it politely and humanely.
Yet certain great newspapers reported the next morning that M. Carpentier had delivered an appalling wallop in the second round and that Dr. Dempsey had narrowly escaped going out. Others told the truth, but what chance had the truth against that romantic lie? It is believed in to this day by at least 99.99 per cent of all the boxing fans in Christendom. Carpentier himself, when he recovered from his beating, admitted categorically that it was nonsense, but even Carpentier could make no headway against the almost universal human tendency to cherish what is not true. A thousand years hence schoolboys will be taught that the frog had Dempsey going. It may become in time a religious dogma, like the doctrine that Jonah swallowed the whale. Scoffers who doubt it will be damned to hell.
The moral, if any, I leave to psycho-pathologists, if competent ones can be found. All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub, printed on Dec. 28, 1917, was pure buncombe. If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer, is bunk.
2 Comments | Accuracy, History, Hoaxes, Millard Fillmore | Tagged: Accuracy, H. L. Mencken, History, Hoaxes, How do we know what we know, Millard Fillmore, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Newspapers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Oh, the eternal crabbiness of the conservative, striving-to-be intellectual mind.
Time cover, Is God Dead? -- April 8, 1966
At one of those hangouts for conservatives with more education and degrees than brains and sense — for example, friends and sympathizers with Francis “I am not an ID advocate” Beckwith — forgetting the trouble Time got into with the cover story asking “Is God dead?” I nearly twisted my ankle on a rhetorical hole that opened with this:
But more importantly, America has a problem: the Constitution is dead. Now what?
Assuming that statement to be a fact rather than a radical, perhaps hallucinatory claim, comments proceeded to denigrate the New Deal as completely unconstitutional and therefore worthy of complete rollback, in that future when these people take over and replace the Constitution.
Can you imagine what they would say if they stumbled into a leftist, pro-communist site making the same claims?
So, I questioned their judgment that the New Deal was unconstitutional, bad, and unjustified. No nibbles on the invite to make a case they might be right, so I noted the thread earlier.
Those who think they are He-and-She-Who-Must-Be Obeyed* took great exception to my posts, said I had “one more chance.”
Skroom, you know?
Dear Readers: Is the Constitution dead? What evidence do you see?
Was the New Deal complete, unvarnished hoakum, or do you see value in any of the vestiges and legacy of the New Deal?
It could be an interesting discussion, if the Bathtub had any influence and a bunch of readers who would chime in.
Is the U.S. Constitution dead? Libertarians, Conservatives, and other ne'er-get-wells can't tell. So they use it as cover for raucous behavior, What's Wrong With the World, May 5, 2011.
_____________
* Apologies to John Mortimer and Horace Rumpole.
14 Comments | Accuracy, History, Politics, Progressive Era, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: Accuracy, Constitution, History, New Deal, Politics, Progressive Era, Progressives | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Walter Williams wrote a column a dozen years ago in which he made some wild claims about Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich.
What did he really say? Stanford University Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich – L A Cicero image
Williams wrote:
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, widely read on college campuses during the late sixties. Ehrlich predicted that there’d be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were worse: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Recently Williams revived that claim for another column, and the revived claim is all over conservative sites.
Steven Goddard, who appears to be making a living on screwing up references to the work of others, though had restricted most of his error to sciency issues like climate change denial, put up a post repeating Williams’ claim.
I imagined Ehrlich might have said something like that, but most likely in one of his “scenarios” like the three much different disaster scenarios he proposed in his 1968 book Population Bomb. So I asked Goddard for a reference (pollution and economic scarcity, disease, and food shortages, were the three apocalyptic horsemen Ehrlich wrote about then).
It didn’t occur to me that the quote attributed to Ehrlich was wholly fictitious, but in more than a week of searching, neither Goddard nor Maurizio Moribito commenting at Goddard’s site can find anything even close to what Williams claimed. I’ve pored through my old copy of Population Bomb, and it’s not there that I can find, not without a much more thorough reading I don’t have time for right now. (My copy of Ehrlich’s Population, Resources and Environment is buried somewhere here in my bookshelves — that was the textbook Ehrlich wrote, a book used in a population and ecology course I took in the Biology Department at the University of Utah way back when. It’s also a favorite book for conservatives to quote mine, wringing fantastic mischaracterizations from the early edition or a later one where Ehrlich and his wife were joined by John Holdren, now an adviser to President Obama.)
Dear Readers, help me out: Did Ehrlich say anything like what Williams via Goddard claims he said, or did Williams pluck this smear from a some unlighted private library? Was Williams just playing fast and loose with the truth (again)?
Did Ehrlich ever “predict” 65 million deaths from starvation in America in the 1980s? Can anyone source the quote?
More, strings to follow:
Even more stuff on the topic:
60 Comments | Accuracy, Economics, Environmental protection, Political Smear, Politics | Tagged: Accuracy, Economics, Environmental protection, Food Shortages, Paul Ehrlich, Political Smear, Politics, predictions, Resource Scarcity, Starvation, Steve Goddard, Walter Williams | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
No, it’s not particularly important, especially since we knew from so many other sources that Obama was, indeed, Honolulu born.
The White House pried the old birth certificate out of the records of the State of Hawaii, and released copies to the world today.
The White House video:
ABC Television’s report:
View a .pdf of the form here: President Obama\’s original Hawaiian birth certificate
I predict Orly Taitz, Donald Trump, and all the other sideshow freaks and carnival barkers, will continue to bark away. Remember, when P. T. Barnum made a copy of the hoax “Cardiff Giant,” people paid a premium to see the fake of the hoax. P. T. Barnum’s ghost stalks and stomps on Republican and birther grounds now.
More:
_____________
Boy, looking at this, you gotta know that Obama planned this all out, as Morgan claimed in comments below — just so he could get this story from Juan Williams and Shepard Smith at Fox News:
Oh, For Goodness Sake posted that video, without any other comment, as “National Mirror Moment.” Birthers, Palinistas and Republicans must be choking on their dinners from that report. Has the Fox turned on ’em?
Always a good site to expose the inanity and insanity of Obama’s critics, especially on the issues of Obama’s history, Oh, For Goodness Sake has a particular bead on the hypocrisy of those same critics:
How many times have you heard the promise: The president could end this today if he’d just release his long form birth certificate? So now they’ve got the f—ing long form birth certificate, is it done for the Birthers?
Bigots. Probably no small amount of racism in there, too. Plus, they’ve exposed themselves as genuinely opposed to America’s good health. David Gardner and Milton Goldstein pegged it, even if we have to paraphrase them a bit: Had a foreign government tried to do what the birthers are doing, we’d have considered it an act of war. History is not kind to idlers, those who fail to call out injustice, nor idiots.
11 Comments | Accuracy, Barack Obama, Birth Certificate, History, Hoaxes, Political Smear, Politics | Tagged: Accuracy, Birth Certificate, History, Hoaxes, Obama, Political Smears, Politics, President Obama | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
No, they are not trying to get rid of unions, just trying to balance their budgets. Right?
Other than Rand Paul, Republicans don’t need low-flow toilets, because when it comes to conservation, climate change and the facts, Republicans just don’t give a s—.
Oooh. Signs from the teacher protests of budget cuts in Austin, Texas!
Protester in Austin, Texas, March 2011
Peace Corps celebrates 50 years this year. Steve Mott tells of his first year as a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote corner of Nepal. (From the Norwell (Massachusetts) Mariner Wicked Local online.) (Suitable for a warm-up at least, teachers — maybe good for your unit on the 1960s and the Kennedy administration. “In 1966 it was the Beach Boys and when I got back in ’68 it was Janis Joplin,” he said. “A lot of social changes had taken place in two years.”
Oh, those jocular Tea Partiers! Now they want to bring back child labor, in Maine, and in Missouri. They’re serious when they say they oppose all the “progressive agenda” from the Progressive Era. Look out Women’s Christian Temperance Union and anti-child abuse laws. (Tea Partiers get all get their marching orders from Tea Bag Central — surely other states will follow; let us know if similar bills are in the hopper in your state legislature, eh?)
I keep finding good and interesting stuff in the Imperial War Museum. Have you ever been there? I wish they would do more online. “War Shapes Lives,” a motto on their website. An understatement of history. This painting hangs in the museum, John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed.” At the museum, you may view it in its majesty, 20 feet along the wall, 7½ feet high.
Gassed, by John Singer Sargent. Imperial War Museum
1 Comment | Accuracy, children, Climate change, climate_change, Labor and unions, Museums, Teachers, World War I | Tagged: Accuracy, Child Labor, Climate change, Museums, Peace Corps, Tea Party, Teachers, unions, World War I | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Propagandists against Rachel Carson and — inexplicably — for DDT awoke a few weeks ago. We’re seeing a flurry of op-eds, opinion pieces and other editorial placements making false claims for DDT, and against Rachel Carson, one of the science heroes of the 20th century.
The campaign of hoaxes, urging more and heavier use of DDT, and falsely impugning environmentalists, continues. Alas.
Jay Ambrose of Scripps Howard News Service, still wrong about DDT
Jay Ambrose used to be a full-time editor for the Scripps Howard newspapers. Since he retired he writes occasional opinion pieces. In the past three years or so he’s mentioned his desire to bring back the poison DDT, to poison Africa in the hope it might also get malaria, for example.
A few weeks ago he went after global warming with the same alacrity and lack of accurate information.
Let’s review a few facts about the history of DDT:
Few of these facts are acknowledged by Jay Ambrose, who wrongly claims that DDT had alone been the great vanquisher of malaria, and who claims that Africans, unduly swayed by a long-dead Rachel Carson, had failed to use DDT though they knew in their hearts it would save their children.
About once a year Ambrose trots out his misunderstandings of history, law and science, and slams Rachel Carson and those who banned DDT from cotton crops in Texas, falsely blaming them for malaria deaths in Africa. His article of the past few weeks was picked up by the Detroit News. Warning that our fight against global warming is as wrong-headed as saving the bald eagle from DDT, he wrote:
The main thing is to avoid what happened with DDT. Because of a ban to protect wildlife from the pesticide in this country, it became more scarce, and a consequence was its being employed sparingly if at all in wildlife-safe, indoor spraying to combat malaria in Africa. Though not always, DDT can be enormously effective in stopping the disease while posing minimal threats.
The estimate is that millions of African children died because of misplaced values and overreactions.
That’s worse than heartbreaking.
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110221/OPINION01/102210305/Don’t-overreact-to-possible-global-warming#ixzz1FDv1ZhkY
When I chided Ambrose for getting the facts wrong many months ago, he angrily promised to come back to this blog and provide evidence to make his case. Of course, he never did. There is no such evidence.
Then why does he continue to falsely indict Rachel Carson, William Ruckelshaus and EPA, and “environmentalists,” and wrongly urge the poisoning of Africa with DDT?
I do not know.
Are his views on global warming similarly in error? If history shows a trend, yes.
66 Comments | DDT, History, Hoaxes, News, Newspapers, Rachel Carson, Science | Tagged: Accuracy, DDT, History, Hoaxes, Jay Ambrose, Newspapers, Rachel Carson, Scripps Howard News | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
When I wrote about George Santayana’s observation that, “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” I didn’t realize it was a quote with controversy over the attribution.
He said it: Spanish-American philosopher and writer George Santayana, early in his career (Photo: Wikipedia)
Ridley Scott‘s outstanding 2001 movie, “Blackhawk Down,” opened with the quote, but attributing it to Plato, according to Plato expert Bernard Suzanne in Paris. One philosopher is as good as another, you might say, so it’s understandable that a good line from a modern philosopher like Santayana might be attributed to one of the most famous philosophers of all time (“they all look alike,” I hear someone saying). Or, the cynics might say, perhaps Santayana lifted it from Plato — after all, who but another philosopher would actually read the stuff? Who would know?
Suzanne’s sleuthing is impressive if only because it shows the murkiness of the issue. According to Suzanne:
Who put it on the wall of the Imperial War Museum, and why did they misattribute it, just a dozen years after Santayana wrote it?
More:
Quote from George Santayana misattributed to Plato, on a coffee mug from Zazzle
21 Comments | Accuracy, Famous quotes, History, Quotes, Santayana's ghost, War | Tagged: Accuracy, Famous quotes, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, George Santayana, History, Quotes, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Another in a continuing series, showing the errors in JunkScience.com’s list of “100 things you should know about DDT.” (No, these are not in order.) In the summer of 2009, the denialists have trotted this error out again.
At the astonishingly truthfully-named site “Junk Science,” Steven Milloy creates a series of hoaxes with a page titled “100 things you should know about DDT.” It is loaded with hoaxes about DDT, urging its use, and about Rachel Carson, and about EPA and the federal regulation of DDT, and about malaria and DDT’s role in the ambitious but ill-fated campaign to eradicate malaria operated by the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1955, officially until 1969. Milloy knows junk science, and he dishes it out with large ladles.
Among what must be 100 errors, Milloy makes this claim, I suppose to suggest that William Ruckelshaus was biased when Rickelshaus headed the Environmental Protection Agency:
14. William Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who made the ultimate decision to ban DDT in 1972, was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund. Ruckelshaus solicited donations for EDF on his personal stationery that read “EDF’s scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won.”
This is a false statement on Milloy’s site. After finding no credible source for the claim that Ruckelshaus was ever affiliated with EDF in any way, I contacted Ruckelshaus’s office, and got confirmation that Ruckelshaus was not and never has been affiliated with EDF. It should be a clue that this claim appears only at sites who impugn Ruckelshaus for his action in banning DDT use in U.S. agriculture.
Hiding the truth in plain view: Junk Science is a site that promotes junk science, an unintended flash of honesty at a site that otherwise promotes hoaxes about science. Note the slogan. Does this site cover its hoaxes by stating plainly that it promotes “all the junk science that’s fit to debunk?”
It is also highly unlikely that he ever wrote a fund-raising letter for the group, certainly not while he was a public official. The implicit claim of Junk Science.com, that William Ruckelshaus was not a fair referee in the DDT case, is a false claim.
I asked Milloy to correct errors at his site, and he has steadfastly refused.
Here is what Milloy’s point #14 would say, with the falsehoods removed:
14. William Ruckelshaus [was] the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who made the ultimate decision to ban DDT in 1972[.],
was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund. Ruckelshaus solicited donations for EDF on his personal stationery that read “EDF’s scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won.”
Below the fold: William D. Ruckelshaus’s “official” biography, if you call him today, February 17, 2011. You should note, there is no mention of any work with EDF.
9 Comments | Accuracy, Atomic Bomb, DDT, endangered species, Environmental protection, History, Junk science, Malaria, Rachel Carson, Science | Tagged: Accuracy, DDT, Environmental Defense Fund, EPA, History, Hoaxes, Junk science, Malaria, Rachel Carson, Science, Steven Milloy, William Ruckelshaus | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Monticello, from the former header of A Summary View
That wonderful blog, “A Summary View,” which so often worked on misquotes from Jefferson? Moribund at the old WordPress site.
But arisen anew, in a grander cover, and keeping up the spirit of learning about Thomas Jefferson, here: A Summary View, at Monticello’s site.
Great history, like:
Anna Berkes continues to enlighten and brighten the study of history.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Political activists who oppose working to stop or slow greenhouse gas emissions in order to slow global warming find themselves in awkward positions recently.
Before, during and after the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009 they predicted that warming had stopped, and that we are entering a period of global cooling. Alas for their claim, the planet refuses to cool. The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest in human history; 2010 itself turned out to be one of the warmest years in history, worldwide.
Somebody stole hundreds of e-mails from one of the climate research clusters in England, and the anti-action activists claimed that the messages would reveal wrong-doing on the part of scientists, perhaps even criminal action. Instead, five separate investigations discovered no wrong-doing on the parts of scientists, but a lot of hard work gone for too little action because of the anti-science shenanigans of the anti-action crew. The science showing global warming remains untouched, with no significant body of research showing contrary.
One of the loudest voices against claims of global warming, Christopher Monckton, was unmasked as a blowhard and a fraud. Scientists organized to refute the hoax claims of the anti-action activists.
So, the anti-action activists are sore. They don’t take criticism well, and they especially don’t like anyone who points out their errors.
Sadly, they didn’t learn from the their past hoaxes. So if even a lowly high school teacher should point out an error of history, they resort to making false claims and censorship against the teacher. They have no data to back their case, nothing but invective to rebut with.
And so it was that a rather new site, hauntingthelibrary, took my comment noting where they could find the data to disabuse their wild claims, stripped it out, and substituted words I did not and would not write.
Fraud again, this time from hauntingthelibrary. Hoax. Fraud even in small things.
The movement against the science of global warming is rotten to its core. (Seriously — most sites would be happy to note the pingback from this blog; the blogger had to act to block the pingback from showing up. What are they so afraid of?)
Legend says that Galileo, backing out of the audience with the Pope in which he was put under house arrest after having “recanted” any claim that the Earth orbits the Sun, said quietly, “Still, it moves.” Even the Pope’s powers through the Inquisition could not stop the Earth orbiting the Sun. No matter how powerful the denial propaganda machines, no matter how many anti-science bloggers they recruit, the Earth keeps on stubbornly warming up.
Or, as Galileo might have said, “Eppure, lei si scalda!”
_____________
Update: Then there is Anti-Gore Effect Sillies Syndrome — claiming Gore erred, when he didn’t. It’s demonstrated with the infection fully affecting the judgment of its victims at this odd place, XD Talk Forums.
More:
Earlier at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:
Photo by W. W. MacFarlane – NPR caption: “Many dead trees appear gray and red on the high-mountain slopes of Union Pass Bridger in Teton National Forest in Wyoming”
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Could I get a longer title? Here is our annual tribute to the hoax that gave its name and much inspiration to this blog.
Otherwise occupied — Kenny’s due to board an airplane in Beijing soon; tires for the cars; papers to correct, curriculum to correct; our wedding anniversary I cannot forget pending — I nearly forgot: 93 years ago yesterday, on December 28, 1917, this column by H. L. Mencken was published in The New York Evening Mail:
A Neglected Anniversary
H. L. Mencken at approximately 12:30 a.m., April 7, 1933, at the Rennert Hotel, corner of Saratoga and Liberty Streets, 17 years later, not neglecting a sudsy anniversary – Baltimore Sun photo
On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.
True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before the plan was perfected Washington went dry (This was war-time Prohibition, preliminary to the main catastrophe. — HLM), and so the banquet had to be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the capital of the nation.
Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly everyone in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may still be in existence and in use.
Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his grain by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the ’30s, he acquired the habit of bathing.
The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance — little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan — and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every day.
Thompson, who was of inventive fancy — he later devised the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon — conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home — a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Orleans streets.
There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to the house. This pump, which was operated by six Negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.
The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all the bathtubs of today. Thompson had it made by James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.
In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20, 1842 — a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all Cincinnati — then a town of about 100,000 people — had heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns to violent discussions of it.
The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there was bitter and double- headed opposition to the new invention, which had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians. On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases.” (I quote from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)
The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.
This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save the wealthy; indeed, the common price for installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady progress.
The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a writer in the Christian Register for July 17, 1857, the first one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.
After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston. The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.
But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentlemen who had bought his house from the estate. Fillmore was entertained in this house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to the Presidency at Taylor’s death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the White House.
This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York Herald, charged that Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper & Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.
This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the Army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.
So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.
(Text courtesy of Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k))
The entire history was a hoax composed by Mencken.
Even conservative wackoes appreciate the column.
Content with his private joke, Mencken remained silent about the hoax until a follow-up article, “Melancholy Reflections,” appeared in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926, some eight years later. This was Mencken’s confession. It was also an appeal for reason to the American public.
His hoax was a joke gone bad. “A Neglected Anniversary” had been printed and reprinted hundreds of times in the intervening years. Mencken had been receiving letters of corroboration from some readers and requests for more details from others. His history of the bathtub had been cited repeatedly by other writers and was starting to find its way into reference works. As Mencken noted in “Melancholy Reflections,” his “facts” “began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene.” And, because Fillmore’s presidency had been so uneventful, on the date of his birthday calendars often included the only interesting tidbit of information they could find: Fillmore had introduced the bathtub into the White House. (Even the later scholarly disclosure that Andrew Jackson had a bathtub installed there in 1834—years before Mencken claimed it was even invented—did not diminish America’s conviction that Fillmore was responsible.)
(No, dear reader, probably not correct; surely John Adams brought a bathtub with him when he moved into the White House, then called the President’s Mansion. Plumbing, hot water, and finally hot water to a bathtub in the president’s residence, were installed between 1830 and 1853, as best I can determine.)
Mencken wrote an introduction to the piece in a later book, A Mencken Chrestomathy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949):
The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity . . . Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.
There’s a moral to the story: Strive for accuracy!
So, Dear Reader, check for accuracy, and question authority.
Fact checks — what else might need to be corrected in this story?
This nineteenth-century tub was one a fixture in the basement of Williamsburg’s St. George Tucker House, the first home in town known to have a bath with running water. –Colonial Williamsburg (tub was installed by 1796, contrasting sharply with dates Mencken offered)
Resources:
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Posted by Ed Darrell
When you’re fed up with the hysteria that Glenn Beck offers instead of true history, when your neighbor complains about how government regulation should “get off my lawn,” point them to this story.
It’s truer than Beck, righter than Limbaugh, and it deserves a wider audience:
[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdhTumEUBN8&feature=player_embedded]
Tip of the old scrub brush to Crooks & Liars Video Cafe, John Gray in Cincinnati, Ohio (whoever he is), and to Thom Hartmann, the performer of the piece, who seems like a regular Joe on the level.
A transcript, below the fold:
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Posted by Ed Darrell
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 