Evolution teacher expelled from creationist movie

March 20, 2008

First the producers lied when they interviewed him for the film, claiming to be doing a different movie, a documentary. Then they refused to let him see anything that might reveal what of his own words they were using in the movie.

And now, the producers of Ben Stein’s great turkey of a movie, “Expelled!,” have booted the evolution teacher out of a viewing of the movie of which he is a star they promoted.

[Spew alert! Put the coffee/coke/beer down, and swallow before clicking on the link and reading the story linked to below.]

But having expelled the evolution teacher P. Z. Myers from the movie “Expelled!” and ironically making the point that the pretense of the movie only a pretense, the producer missed Dr. Myers much more famous guest.

Go, see, and laugh.

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7 Comments | A Good Story, Creationism, Evolution, Humor, Intelligent Design, Rampant stupidity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

More DDT poisoning

December 13, 2007

[Time passes and internet links die, expire, or otherwise fall into the black hole of irrelevancy. Alas. Rachel Carson is still right.]

Sometimes, when people make gross errors, they get caught. They apologize, or they mumble, and they move on.

A few times, when people make gross errors, they revel in it. Rather than admit the error, they make it again. They say it wasn’t an error. They repeat it, time and again, as if two wrongs make a right, or as if 126 wrongs make a right.

We caught Caosblog repeating some bad stuff about Rachel Carson, and false, good stuff about DDT, and false claims that eagles were not endangered by DDT. We called ’em on it. [But the blogger appears to have deleted the response. It was that good.]

Whoooee! This is the result.  Note the list of unquestioning links to other stuff on the web.  (Yeah. “Milton Fillmore.”  Probably not reading comprehension error so much as rant-blindness.)

If there is anything crazy and mean about Rachel Carson, it’s probably in that list. If there is any wild and insane claim about the safety of DDT, it’s in that list. If there were any accurate information, it would be a miracle. (Well, actually there’s some good information in the National Geographic story about malaria, but I doubt the blog writer bothered to read it.) The blog links to all the Lyndon Larouche crazies, all the tobacco lobbyist crazies, and acts as if such manure is golden.

Very little of it is accurate. Most of the material so far out to lunch, it’s not even wrong. The person who runs the blog sent me an e-mail saying my comments are no longer welcome there, because of the tone of my remarks. Too many links to too much refutation of blog’s points, I gather — too much real information!

DDT poisoning clearly is damaging, with effects far beyond anything Rachel Carson ever predicted.

This is the venal, vicious spirit that Sen. Tom Coburn defends with his hold in the U.S. Senate on honors for Mrs. Carson. This is the spirit with which the anti-Rachel Carson movement rails at environmentalists about malaria in Africa, while holding back funding for anti-malaria projects in Africa.

Woody Allen had a line in Annie Hall that may be appropriate: “There’s nothing wrong with you that couldn’t be cured with Prozac and a polo mallet.”

Reason and evidence won’t do it now. When someone starts out arguing that eagles were not threatened with extinction by the poison that a thousand studies verified was doing them in, you can’t reason them back to reality.

Below the fold: At the second outlet of that blog, conversation carried for a while, though not necessarily so for enlightenment. In 2015, I thought it a good idea to capture some of that.

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28 Comments | DDT, Malaria, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

DDT’s disruption of hormone activities

August 12, 2007

Critics of Rachel Carson and sponsors of the anti-science, anti-environmentalist campaign to bring back DDT as a major killer, frequently misinform in very selective ways. For example, they like to mention DDT’s role in causing human cancers, because, they claim Rachel Carson was dead wrong about that link. Therefore, they say, DDT is a nice chemical and bans should be lifted.

In reality, carcinogenicity played a very small role in banning DDT. DDT was banned because it kills indiscriminately, killing beneficial insects along with the bad, killing untargeted species, like songbirds, along with the insect targets; and DDT was banned because once released into the wild, it is very long-lived, and its ultimate destructive effects cannot be known or controlled — though some harms, such as the devestation of America’s birds of prey, are extremely well documented.

Similarly, the anti-science crowd doesn’t like to talk about the third big area where DDT produces harms: Hormone disruption. In fact, Steven Milloy’s “100 things you should know about DDT” at the site that peddles junk science, JunkScience.com, does not even contain the word “hormone.”

They play down the fact that DDT and its by-products disrupt reproductive processes, and sometimes disrupt and deform reproductive organs, of nearly every animal it touches. They don’t want you to know about the hormonal effects of DDT and its breakdown products.

So, they never mention books like the National Academy of Sciences’ compilation of the harms of such chemicals, Hormonally Active Agents in the Environment.

Milloy will misquote the NAS when NAS mentions slightly the benefits of DDT; Milloy will not quote NAS when they cite the dangers of DDT. So this book on hormonally active agents, which mentions DDT specifically in 16 chapters for a total of 309 times, will never be mentioned in a discussion of DDT’s dangers — unless you bring it up.

Go see what the book says in the Executive Summary. If you debate the anti-Rachel Carson crowd, use this book frequently — they will have no answers.

And, Sen. Tom Coburn, are you listening? Since when do your constituents want you to defend a chemical which will ruin their farm animals, and especially the ducks they want to hunt? It’s time to quit trying to tarnish the memory of Rachel Carson, Sen. Coburn, and let that post office in Pennsylvania be named after her.

2 Comments | DDT, Environmental protection, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

GOP war on science victim: Rachel Carson

May 14, 2007

Some people do things that are so stupid that one wonders how they manage to shave or put make-up on the next morning, having to look at their own face.

Mugshot of Utah Rep. Rob Bishop

Mugshot of Utah Rep. Rob Bishop

53 Republican representatives voted against naming the post office in Springdale, Pennsylvania, after Rachel Carson, the scientist who wrote Silent Spring, generally considered one of the most important or most influential scientists of the 20th century. No kidding. Springdale is Carson’s hometown.

2007 is the centennial of Carson’s birth — her birthday was May 27. (The bill, H.R. 1434, passed, 334-53.)

Why did the Wacky 53 vote against the honor for Carson, who got the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980? In an earnest ritual of voodoo science, they claim that bans on DDT kill millions, and that DDT is harmless. No, I’m not making this up — here’s the story from the Salt Lake Tribune, which covers territory represented by Rep. Rob Bishop and Rep. Chris Cannon, both R-Utah:

They contend that Carson’s actions – which led to a ban on the chemical DDT used to kill pests – actually has caused more deaths because of malaria and other diseases spread by insects. DDT, Carson wrote, was detrimental to the environment and to humans. Some scientists say DDT led to the California condor’s near-extinction.

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15 Comments | Accuracy, Citizenship, DDT, Environmental protection, Ethics, Malaria, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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