Daniel Webster Council, Boy Scouts of America, wants you

September 21, 2009

Interesting recruiting film for the Daniel Webster Council, BSA (New Hampshire).

More councils should spend a little more effort filming the reasons to join, I think — and put the films on YouTube.

Do you know of other good Scout recruiting videos — Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts or Campfire?

1 Comment | Adventure, Boy Scouts of America, Girl Scouts, Leadership, Video and film | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Boy Scouts of Harlem, Troop 759

September 20, 2009

First I’ve heard of this film:  “759:  Boy Scouts of Harlem,” a film by Jake Boritt and Justin Szlasa.

Have you seen it?

2010 is the 100th anniversary of Scouting in the U.S.  This film is not officially a part of that celebration — but expect to see more like it.  This film was produced independently, with approval from one Scout council, but entirely independent from Scouting otherwise.

Would this make a good recruiting device for your troop?  Why or why not?

Perhaps one of the Scouts in your troop, working on the cinematography merit badge, might be inspired to make a film like this about your troop.

Resources:

3 Comments | Boy Scouts of America, Ethics, Leadership, Learning, Life, Outdoor Recreation, Urbanization, Video and film | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

New junk science movie: “Not evil, just wrong”

August 16, 2009

I warned you about it earlier.  Crank science sites across the internet feature news of another cheap hit on Rachel Carson and science in movie form.

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is slated for release on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington — Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.

The film is both evil and wrong.

Errors just in the trailer:

  1. Claims that Al Gore said sea levels will rise catastrophically, “in the very near future.”  Not in his movie, not in his writings or speeches.  Not true.  That’s a simple misstatement of what Gore said, and Gore had the science right.
  2. ” . . . [I]t wouldn’t be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up.  In fact, ice is the enemy of life.”  “Bad” in this case is a value judgment — global warming isn’t bad if you’re a weed, a zebra mussel, one of the malaria parasites, a pine bark beetle, any other tropical disease, or a sadist.  But significant warming as climatologists, physicists and others project, would be disastrous to agriculture, major cities in many parts of the world, sea coasts, and most people who don’t live in the Taklamakan or Sahara, and much of the life in the ocean.  Annual weather cycles within long-established ranges, is required for life much as we know it.  “No ice” is also an enemy of life.
  3. “They want to raise our taxes.”  No, that’s pure, uncomposted bovine excrement.
  4. “They want to close our factories.”  That’s more effluent from the anus of male bovines.
  5. The trailer notes the usual claim made by Gore opponents that industry cannot exist if it is clean, that industry requires that we poison the planet.  Were that true, we’d have a need to halt industry now, lest we become like the yeast in the beer vat, or the champagne bottle, manufacturing alcohol until the alcohol kills the yeast.  Our experience with Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, the Clean Air Acts and the Clean Water Act is that cleaning the environment produces economic growth, not the other way around.  A city choked in pollution dies.  Los Angeles didn’t suffer when the air got cleaner.  Pittsburgh’s clean air became a way to attract new industries to the city, before the steel industry there collapsed.  Cleaning Lake Erie didn’t hurt industry.  The claim made by the film is fatuous, alarmist, and morally corrupt.

    When the human health, human welfare, and environmental effects which could be expressed in dollar terms were added up for the entire 20-year period, the total benefits of Clean Air Act programs were estimated to range from about $6 trillion to about $50 trillion, with a mean estimate of about $22 trillion. These estimated benefits represent the estimated value Americans place on avoiding the dire air quality conditions and dramatic increases in illness and premature death which would have prevailed without the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Act and its associated state and local programs. By comparison, the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits.

  6. “Some of the environmental activists have not come to accept that the human is also part of the environment.”  Fatuous claim.  Environmentalists note that humans uniquely possess the ability to change climate on a global scale, intentionally, for the good or bad; environmentalists choose to advocate for actions that reduce diseases like malaria, cholera and asthma.  We don’t have to sacrifice a million people a year to malaria, in order to be industrial and productive.  We don’t have to kill 700,000 kids with malaria every year just to keep cars.
  7. “They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.”  No, that would be the film makers.  Environmentalists advocate reducing filth and ignorance both.  Ignorance and lack of ability to read, coupled with religious fanaticism, caused the strife known as “the Dark Ages.”  It’s not environmentalists who advocate an end to cheap public schools.
  8. The trailer shows a kid playing in the surf on a beach.  Of course, without the Clean Water Act and other attempts to keep the oceans clean, such play would be impossible.  That we can play again on American beaches is a tribute to the environmental movement, and reason enough to grant credence to claims of smart people like Al Gore and the scientists whose work he promotes.
  9. “I cannot believe that Al Gore has great regard for people, real people.”  So, this is a film promoting the views of crabby, misanthropic anal orifices who don’t know Al Gore at all?  Shame on them.  And, why should anyone want to see such a film?  If I want to see senseless acts of stupidity, I can rent a film by Quentin Tarantino and get some art with the stupidity.  [Update, November 23, 2009: This may be one of the most egregiously false charges of the film.  Gore, you recall, is the guy who put his political career and presidential ambitions on hold indefinitely when his son was seriously injured in an auto-pedestrian accident; Gore was willing to sacrifice all his political capital in order to get his son healed.  My first dealings directly with Gore came on the Organ Transplant bill.  Gore didn’t need a transplant, didn’t have need for one in his family, and had absolutely nothing to gain from advocacy for the life-saving procedure.  It was opposed by the chairman of his committee, by a majority of members of his own party in both Houses of Congress, by many in the medical establishment, by many in the pharmaceutical industry, and by President Reagan, who didn’t drop his threat to veto the bill until he signed it, as I recall.   Gore is a man of deep, human-centered principles.  Saying “I can’t believe Al Gore has great regard for real people” only demonstrates the vast ignorance and perhaps crippling animus of the speaker.]

That’s a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer — the film itself may make heads spin if it comes close to that pace of error.

Where have we seen this before?  Producers of the film claim as “contributors” some of the people they try to lampoon — people like Ed Begley, Jr., and NASA’s James E. Hansen, people who don’t agree in any way with the hysterical claims of the film, and people who, I wager, would be surprised to be listed as “contributors.”

It’s easy to suppose these producers used the same ambush-the-scientist technique used earlier by the producers of the anti-science, anti-Darwin film “Expelled!“

Here, see the hysteria, error and alarmism for yourself:

Ann McElhinney is one of the film’s producers.  Her past work includes other films against protecting environment and films for mining companies.  She appears to be affiliated with junk science purveyors at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an astro-turf organization in Washington, D.C., for whom she flacked earlier this year (video from Desmogblog):

Remember, too, that this film is already known to have gross inaccuracies about Rachel Carson and DDT, stuff that high school kids could get right easily.

Anyone have details on McElhinney and her colleague, Phelim McAlee?

More:

Related posts, at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

Please spread the word:

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522 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Cost of Green, DDT, Environmental protection, Global warming, Green Politics, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Rachel Carson’s critics: No shame, no morals, no brains

April 18, 2009

So, Friday night in Seattle (April 22) the anti-science, anti-environmental wackos will premiere a film.  Among other things, the film claims Rachel Carson was wrong about DDT, but her Svengali-fu was so great that she persuaded John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Idi Amin, the National Academy of Sciences and a host of others to ban DDT needlessly, and that millions of people died from diseases the DDT could prevent at low cost and no harm.

The film premieres at an elementary school:  Rachel Carson Elementary.

Get it?  See the joke?

These wackos, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, have no shame about mocking the kids in second and third grade at that school who rightly look on Carson as a heroine and great human.  Is it possible to be more cynical than that?  Would it be possible for them to be bigger jerks about it?

The screening is sponsored by the right wing, and now clearly anti-science, Washington Policy Center.

McAleer and McElhinney are poster children for the decline of morality in America.  They have no shame about bullying elementary school kids in their efforts to sully the good reputation of a great scientist and writer.   Judging by their unfair and inaccurate screed against Carson and Al Gore, it appears they lack the moral sense to feel the shame.   I can see their next film project now:  They’ll do an exposé of how the brutal bank examiners forced bankers to live on only their salaries, foregoing the multi-million-dollar bonuses they deserved — and noting that malaria in Uganda now is worse because U.S. bankers are not compensated highly enough.

John Fund’s blog at the Wall Street Journal site has details.

Irish documentary filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have stirred up trouble before by debunking smug liberal hypocrisy. Their latest film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” takes on the hysteria over global warming and warns that rushing to judgment in combating climate change would threaten the world’s poor.

[Al Gore]

The film reminds us that environmentalists have been wrong in the past, as when they convinced the world to ban the pesticide DDT, costing the lives of countless malaria victims. The ban was finally reversed by the World Health Organization only after decades of debate. The two Irish filmmakers argue that if Al Gore’s advice to radically reduce carbon emissions is followed, it would condemn to poverty two billion people in the world who have yet to turn on their first light switch.

*    *    *    *    *    *

The two filmmakers are skilled at using provocative publicity tactics. On April 22, they will hold a public showing of their film at the Rachel Carson Elementary School in the suburbs of Seattle. “Since it was Rachel Carson who touched off the campaign to ban DDT, we thought showing ‘Not Evil, Just Wrong’ there would be appropriate,” says Mr. McAleer.

Local environmentalists will probably not appreciate the gesture and will be appalled that the school agreed to rent out its auditorium to the renegade skeptics. But somebody might point out that it’s not evil, just appropriate, to hold a debate about the real-world consequences of acting on global warming fears.

The little Seattle Weekly has the good sense to call it for what it is.

As you may already know, April 22 is Earth Day. At noon, inside City Hall, the Seattle City Council will be showing a movie about Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book, Silent Spring, is frequently credited with spurring the modern environmental movement.

Meanwhile that same evening, at Rachel Carson Elementary School in Sammamish, conservative think tank the Washington Policy Center will be showing Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria. (Tagline: “This is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don’t want you to see.”) It’s by the same folks who brought you that mining industry–funded classic, Mine Your Own Business. We know you’re in your grave. But you can roll over now, Ms. Carson.

That’s good news:  The film showing at the Seattle City Council chamber is “A Sense of Wonder,” which will get more viewers in Seattle than the other film will get nationwide. (Presented by the Seattle City Council; 600 Fourth Street, Seattle; contact Phyllis Shulman, 206-684-8816; or see the council’s website; film shows at noon to 1:00 p.m., free admission.)

Of course, there is a little joke on these evil film makers McAleer and McIlhenny:  The school isn’t just named after Rachel Carson, by popular vote of the children, it’s also green.

A total of 75 names were submitted by students. Nominees had to meet the district’s requirement of “deceased persons famous for their work in science, the humanities, letters, or education.” This list was narrowed to those that had more than one nomination, which left eight finalists. Those eight finalists were put on a ballot with a description of each nominee. Ballots were mailed to the families of children who will attend the new school next year.

A total of 320 students voted. The top three choices were Carson, Clara Barton and Amelia Earhart. The Lake Washington School District Board of Directors approved the use of any of those top three choices at its May 5 meeting. Shortly thereafter, Principal Mary Cronin received word that permission was granted to use the name of Rachel Carson. Frances Collin, literary agent for her estate, wrote that she believed Miss Carson would have been pleased.

In her writings, Carson encouraged people to discover and help children discover the wonder of the natural world. After earning a master’s degree in zoology, Carson spent 15 years working for the U.S. Government as a scientist and editor. She rose to Editor in Chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her writing in her free time included many essays on the ocean. These essays led to three books about the ocean and a career as a science writer who shared her knowledge as well as her love of nature. One of those books, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award.

Carson’s concerns about the misuse of synthetic pesticides led to her book, Silent Spring, which sounded the alarm about the environmental impact of indiscriminate use of such powerful chemicals on nature. First serialized in the New Yorker magazine, it became a runaway best seller. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson asked for policies that that would protect against irreversible damage to humans and nature alike, urging study and consideration of safer alternatives.

Carson’s work led to the ban on most uses of DDT in the U.S. and a subsequent worldwide ban on DDT for agricultural use. The DDT ban has been cited as a major factor in the comeback of the bald eagle in the U.S. In 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The new Rachel Carson Elementary will feature such environmentally friendly features as a green roof, extensive use of daylight and a geothermal heat pump. It is located at 1035 244th Ave. NE in Sammamish.

The school’s good practices contradict the preachings of the film makers.  The elementary school kids have more sense than the climate change deniers and DDT-poisoned anti-environmentalists.

Oh.  The anti-environmental film is named “Not Evil, Just Wrong.”  When the film is done on its producers, it will carry an even shorter title:  “Evil and Wrong.”

What would the film makers do if a bunch of 3rd graders from the school showed up at the screening, and in the Q&A after, asked, “Why are you telling such lies about Rachel Carson and Vice President Gore?”

3 Comments | Climate change, DDT, Environmental protection, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Flash media, animation and movies for your classroom

January 28, 2009

I’m struggling.  I’m looking for software that will allow me to make animations and movies for classroom use.  I know very little about it, though, and I’m not sure where to look.

I stumbled on this site, from the University of Houston, Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling.

Do me a favor:  Social studies teachers, especially hop over there and look at the video/animation/presentations they offer — on the Dustbowl, on human rights and Nobel winner Aung San Suu Kyi, on Hiroshima, the race to the Moon, and other stuff.  Look at the presentations:  Can you use them?  Do you have better stuff to use?

Other examples include mathematics, art (some of which might also be good for history), English as a Second Language (ESL), language arts, and other subjects.

Do you make movies or animations for your classroom?  What do you use?

What does a teacher need to get started in digital story telling?

The UH site offers a free download of Microsoft Photo Story 3 — have you used it?  Good stuff?  What’s your experience?

3 Comments | Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Education quality, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Million Dollar Monarch, a glorious film

December 21, 2007

Robert J. Sadler photo of the Million Dollar Monarch of Highland Park, Texas, lighted for Christmas
Robert J. Sadler photo of the Million Dollar Monarch of Highland Park, Texas, lighted for Christmas

Spectacular blend of history, botany and story.

One of a series of short films produced by KERA Television in Dallas over the past few years, this one by veteran filmmaker Rob Tranchin. A lot more details here — and frankly, the video quality is vastly superior at KERA’s site — go view the film there.

I hope it’s available on DVD for classroom use, especially around Dallas, soon.

Hundreds of historic trees grace America’s cities and countryside. We could use a dozen more films this good to tell their stories.

6 Comments | Biology, History, Science, Texas, trees, Video and film | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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