Basic climate skeptic’s pseudoscience

March 7, 2009

Anthony Watts want to make a case that rising ocean levels aren’t connected to human activities, there’s nothing we can do about it, there’s nothing we should do about it, or something.  Looking for a touchstone in history, Watts said:

In 2002, the BBC reported that a submerged city was found off the coast of India, 36 meters below sea level.  This was long before the Hummer or coal fired power plant was invented.  It is quite likely that low lying coastal areas will continue to get submerged, just as they have been for the last 20,000 years.

Submerged city?  Hmm.  Not in the textbooks published since 2002.  What’s up with that?

NASA Earth Observatory photo of the Gujarat Gulfs, including the Gulf of Cambay (Khambhat), where a lost city was thought to have been found in 2001; later research indicates no city underwater.

NASA Earth Observatory photo of the Gujarat Gulfs, including the Gulf of Cambay (Khambhat), where a "lost city" was thought to have been found in 2001; later research indicates no city underwater.

Oh, this is what’s up:  Watts links to a BBC news story, not a science journal — one of the warning signs of Bogus Science and Bogus History, both.   The news story talks about preliminary findings in 2002 that did not hold up to scrutiny.  Measurement error was part of the problem — the pattern of the scanning radar sweep was mistaken for structures found on the sea floor.  Natural formations were mistaken for artificial formations.  When the news announcement was made, archaeologists and other experts in dating such things had not be consulted (and it’s unclear when or whether they were ever brought in).  The follow-up didn’t support the story, notes Bad Archaeology.  Terrible archaeology to support pseudo climate science?  Why not?

This doesn’t deny Watts’ general claims in his post, but it is too indicative of the type of “find anything to support the favored claim of denial” mindset that goes on among denialists.  (There is evidence of a much lower waterline in the area during the last ice age; water levels have risen, according to physical evidence, but probably not inundating the what would be the oldest civilization on Earth.)

It will be interesting to watch what happens.  Will Watts note an oopsie and apologize, or will the entire group circle their Radio Super wagons around the issue and call it a mainstream science plot against them?  Will Watts correct his citation, or will they move on to cite the disappearance of Atlantis as evidence that warming can’t be stopped?

Anybody want to wager?

What sort of irony is there in a guy’s complaining about a scientific consensus held by thousands of scientists with hundreds of publications supporting their claims, and his using one news report almost totally without any scientific corroboration in rebuttal?

Resources:

1 Comment | Ancient history, Archaeology, Bogus history, Climate change, Global warming, History, Prehistory, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Misquoting Jefferson?

February 1, 2009

Statue of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial - Mr. Lant's HIstory page

Statue of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial, Rudulph Evans, sculptor – Library of Congress photo by Carol Highsmith, who graciously puts her photos in the public domain

A commentary from Cal Thomas caught my eye — little more than a few quotes from Thomas Jefferson strung together.  Jefferson seems oddly prescient in these quotes, and, also oddly, rather endorsing the views of the right wing.

From the way the text is laid out, and the brevity of the piece, I’m guessing it’s a radio commentary.

I read Jefferson often.  I’ve read Jefferson a lot.  I don’t recognize any of the quotes.

So I plugged them into the Jefferson collection at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, which has a lot of Jefferson ready for full-text searching.

Oops.  None of the quotes scored a hit.

Couldn’t find them in the Library of Congress’s on-line list of quotes, either.

It looks as though Jefferson didn’t say these things that are being attributed to him.

Cal, is that you?

Cal, can you give us citations on these quotes?

How about you, Dear Reader?  Can you save Cal Thomas’s bacon by providing a citation for any of the quotes below, alleged to be from Thomas Jefferson?

AS WE LISTEN TO TALK OF BAILOUTS AND ENDLESS DEBT, THINK ON THESE THOUGHTS FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON:

“THE DEMOCRACY WILL CEASE TO EXIST WHEN YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THOSE WHO ARE WILLING TO WORK AND GIVE TO THOSE WHO WOULD NOT.”

HERE’S ANOTHER: “IT IS INCUMBENT ON EVERY GENERATION TO PAY ITS OWN DEBTS AS IT GOES. A PRINCIPLE WHICH IF ACTED ON WOULD SAVE ONE-HALF THE WARS OF THE WORLD.”

AND ANOTHER: “I PREDICT FUTURE HAPPINESS FOR AMERICANS IF THEY CAN PREVENT THE GOVERNMENT FROM WASTING THE LABORS OF THE PEOPLE UNDER THE PRETENSE OF TAKING CARE OF THEM.”

AND ONE MORE:  “MY READING OF HISTORY CONVINCES ME THAT MOST BAD GOVERNMENT RESULTS FROM TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT.”

There you have ’em, Dear Readers.  Did somebody hoodwink Cal Thomas into thinking these are Jefferson’s bon mots, when they are not?

Shake of the wet scrub brush to Truthseeker.

Below the fold, the complete Cal Thomas commentary.
Read the rest of this entry »

28 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History, Quotes, Thomas Jefferson, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hallucinating George Washington, the Birth Certificate Obsessed

January 20, 2009

Some of the Birth Certificate Obsessed (BCOs) are seeing things (that’s Obama’s birth certificate that they are obsessed with).  They claim to see a vision that is attributed to George Washington in a hoax. It’s voodoo history, stuff that never was.

Hallucinations would be bad enough, but what do you have to smoke to see hallucinations other people were supposed to have had, but didn’t?

Looking at the docket of the Supreme Court, I don’t see that any of the anti-Obama suits got an order for certiorari. Will the dismissal of the wingnut lawsuits make the wingnuts go away?

4 Comments | Barack Obama, Citizenship, George Washington, History, Hoaxes, Jurisprudence, Law, Natural Born, Politics, President Obama, Presidential Eligibility, Rampant stupidity, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hoaxes on hoaxes: Bathtub hoax debunkers start a new hoax?

January 4, 2009

[If you’re interested in the hoax aspect, see this update post.]

Is this just an error, or a new hoax on the way to debunking an old one?  This is a story of an insider’s hoax, or an interesting error.

It’s from the Museum of Hoaxes.  Surely they would be careful about such matters, no?

The Museum of Hoaxes’ History of the Bathtub is largely a history of H. L. Mencken’s famous 1917 hoax history of the bathtub, in which he claimed Millard Fillmore had bravely led America to indoor bathing by installing a bathtub in the White House in 1853.

Readers of this blog well know this story.  Fillmore wasn’t the first to put a bathtub in the White House.  He wasn’t the first to put plumbing in the White House.  He wasn’t the first to put a plumbed bathtub in the White House, nor the first to run hot water to it. Anything in Mencken’s column that squares with history did so accidentally.  Mencken was making a big joke.

And one of the little delights of reading history is finding people who should know better, who have been suckered in by Mencken’s hoax.

So of course I read the piece at the Hoax Museum.

What ho!  Here is a section that discusses how the hoax refuses to die:

Curtis MacDougall, writing in 1958, reported finding fifty-five different instances since 1926 of Mencken’s bathtub history being presented to audiences as fact. Some of the examples that MacDougall collected follow:

October, 1926: Scribner’s included an article, “Bathtubs, Early Americans,“ by Fairfax Downey, based almost entirely on Mencken’s story.

March 16, 1929: In “Baltimore Day by Day,“ by Carroll Dulaney, in Mencken’s own newspaper, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the story is told under the heading, “Painting the Lily.“

September 26, 1929: The Paris, France, edition of the New York Herald rewrites an article by Ruth Wakeman in the New York Sun entitled, “Americans Once Frowned on Bathtubs, Condemning Them for Fancied Hazards.“

December 1, 1931: The Tucson, Arizona, Daily Star interviews C.R. King, manager of the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company branch in Tucson, on the imminent birthday of the bathtub. Mr. King, who according to the Star “had apparently studied the matter considerably,“ hands out the same old facts, which are printed under a two-column head, “Bathtub Will Have Birthday in America During December.“

April 27, 1933: A United Features Syndicate feature, “How It Began,“ by Russ Murphy and Ray Nenuskay includes an illustration of Adam Thompson in his first bathtub.

1935: Dr. Hans Zinsser, professor in the Medical School of Harvard University, says on page 285 of his best-selling Rats, Lice and History: “The first bathtub didn’t reach America, we believe, until about 1840.”

November 15, 1935: R.J. Scott’s “Scott’s Scrapbook,“ syndicated by the Central Press Asociation, includes a sketch of a policeman chasing a bather away from his bath, together with the caption: As late as 1842 some American cities prohibited the use of bathtubs.”

May 27, 1936: Dr. Shirley W. Wynne, former commissioner of health for New York City, uses the “facts” in a radio address, “What Is Public Health?“ over WEAF.

February, 1937: The United Press Red Letter includes a story from Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Dr. Cecil K. Drinker, dean and professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, has discovered that his great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Drinker of Philadelphia, had a bathtub in her home as early as 1803, thus disputing Cincinnati’s claim to fame for having the first American bathtub. (The Chicago Daily News used the story March 27, 1937.)

September 28, 1938: Hearst’s American Weekly includes an article, “There’s a Lot of History Behind Your Bathtub,“ by Virginia S. Eiffert, research expert and contributor to Natural History, official magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and other publications. Miss Eiffert’s research has uncovered the old stand-by.

Sept. 20, 1942: Julia Spiegelman retold the entire Adam Thompson tale as fact in an article, “Bathtub’s United States Centennial” in the Baltimore Sun, Mencken’s own newspaper.

April 28, 1951: In this day’s issue of The New Yorker John Hersey revealed, in a profile on Harry S. Truman, that “the president seemed reluctant to let go of his belief” in the fact that Millard Fillmore introduced the first bathtub into the White House in 1850. President Truman was known to include the spurious facts in the “lecture” he gave visitors to the renovated executive mansion.

Sept. 16, 1952: In a speech in Philadelphia, President Truman told the story to illustrate what great progress has occurred in public health.

I noted the Tucson Daily Star mention — I spent a year in Tucson at the University of Arizona, and on a couple of projects spent hours poring through old copies of the Star and it’s competitor, The Tucson Daily Citizen, but never getting close to any story on Fillmore, bathtubs, or Mencken.  Interesting.

And did you see?  There’s a reference to Zinsser’s great book, Rats, Lice and History.   One of my favorite books of all time. Other suggested it should be included in the small, essential library of any historian or teacher of history, when I was working on assembling a list of necessary books (a project I really should get back to one day).

Zinsser was the guy who isolated the pathogen that causes typhus, and developed a vaccine against the disease.  More importantly, he was a bit of a rake and an excellent, and funny, writer.  The book is a breezy read,  packed with enlightening discussions of history, wars, economic booms and busts, sieges of great cities, and how disease stalks the pages of history much more than merely during the outbreaks of the plague in the middle of the second millennium.

I read the book the year I graduated from high school, though now I don’t remember whether it was during the school year or after.  It was recommended to me by a college English professor, Kirk Rasmussen (the Utah guy), whose wife was my last high school debate coach.  Kirk laughed all the way through the book.  I borrowed his paperback copy and finished it off in a week or two.

You can learn a lot about ecology studying how a disease is spread.  A disease like typhus, which involves insect, louse, rodent and human carriers, exposes the links that, however improbable or preposterous, are necessary to keep a pathogen going.  Zinsser gives a great rundown of the history of rats, the history of fleas, the history of lice (which are not insects, if you wish to be carefully accurate, which you do, of course).

So his book is useful in literature classes.  It’s a good source of history.  Plus, it’s a good meta source for biologists and medical researchers.

In fact I have a copy here on this desk — I was trying to find a short excerpt that I could use in my world history classes, something to intrigue students and give them fodder for an exercise or project.

So, I looked at that listing, and thought I should check it out:

1935: Dr. Hans Zinsser, professor in the Medical School of Harvard University, says on page 285 of his best-selling Rats, Lice and History: “The first bathtub didn’t reach America, we believe, until about 1840.”

You can see this one coming, can’t you?

Rats, Lice and History has only 228 pages, in all three editions I have here at the house.

So of course I checked pages 185, 85, and 28.  Nothing.

Then I looked at the table of contents (there is no index), to see in what chapter such a comment might find a home.  Zinsser wrote in the U.S., was born in the U.S., so it wouldn’t be wholly out of his character to note some little item of public health at the White House.  But I’ll be doggoned if I can figure out where such a comment would fit in the book.

Is this just a miscitation by Museum of Hoaxes?  Or is it a new hoax altogether?  Is it a hoax the Museum of Hoaxes has fallen victim to, or is it of their invention?

Now I wonder about all the other mentions there.  Are they accurate?  Are they whole cloth fiction, voodoo history?  Did the Tucson Daily Star even exist in 1931?

We never solve one mystery that we don’t open up a dozen more.

Readers, can you shed light?

I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation.

2 Comments | Biology, Books, History, Hoaxes, Public health, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

FAIL repeated: Challenges to Obama’s eligibility

December 26, 2008

Some weeks ago we visited six hurdles that the case against Barack Obama’s eligibility for the presidency would have to overcome to disqualify him.

All six hurdles still remain.  No one has made any serious response to any of the six.

Above the West Entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court is engraved Equal Justice Under Law

Above the West Entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court is engraved "Equal Justice Under Law"

But the Birth Certificate Obsessed (BCO) people go on and on.

Let me note that the six hurdles still stand — six reasons why the objections to Obama’s eligibility will fail:

  1. Obama has a U.S. passport (claims that he doesn’t have a passport were put to rest when it was revealed, in March 2008, that State Department workers had illegally accessed his passport records).
  2. Because we know Obama has a U.S. passport, we can be quite sure his draft status was verified before it was issued — which puts to bed any issue about his registering for the draft (which he wouldn’t have been required to do in any case until 1980 — draft registration had been suspended in 1973 until the Afghanistan/Soviet crisis).
  3. Obama’s a lawyer; the National Conference of Bar Examiners, or the Illinois Bar, would have checked on any problems that surfaced when verifying his fitness to practice law.
  4. Obama was a U.S. senator; as a matter of course, the FBI does a background check on every U.S. senator to verify they may view top secret material. Security clearances are absolutely necessary for members of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Armed Services Committee.  Obama was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, chairing the subcommittee that deals with U.S. relations with NATO — a post that requires top secret clearances.
  5. Obama has been getting the full national security briefing every day that the president gets; CIA and Homeland Security would have to verify his top secret clearances, and then some.  There is absolutely no indication that this top, top check was not carried out.
  6. Perhaps most important, Obama posted an image of his birth certificate on-line in June; experts who checked the actual document verify it is real, and therefore authoritative.

Each of these six circumstances creates a rebuttable presumption that Obama is a citizen, and a natural born citizen under the somewhat ambiguous requirements of Article II of the Constitution.  In order to make a case that Obama is ineligible, contestants would need to make a strong showing, with clear evidence, to rebut the presumptions created by by these official actions.

Professional poker player Leo Donofrio has made no such evidentiary showing, anywhere, at any time.  Nor has any other Obama critic presented any evidence to overcome any of these six presumptions.

Recently a poster named Carlyle complained that my previous post had been unknown to him. While I posted trackbacks to his post at Texas Darlin’, that blog censors my posts and trackbacks, and thereby deprived this BCO from knowing about the facts (indeed, trackbacks are automatic, since Texas Darlin’ is also a WordPress blog; the only way the trackbacks and comments don’t show up at TD’s blog is because she censors them).  With some fury, Carlyle and others found that post from November 27 and complained I was unfair to them.  However, none has presented any serious challenge to the six hurdles.

How can I be unfair when they won’t make a case?

Here, below the fold, is an example of the heated and off-target responses I’ve gotten.  Of course, I offer comments as we go.

Read the rest of this entry »

23 Comments | Barack Obama, Citizenship, History, Hoaxes, Jurisprudence, Law, Natural Born, Politics, President Obama, Presidential Eligibility, Presidents, Rampant stupidity, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Good Interred With Their Bones Dept.: Michael Crichton

November 24, 2008

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9qtgQXtrl4Q/hqdefault.jpg

Author Michael Crichton railing against environmental protection and science he politically disagreed with, at the Smithsonian Institution, about the same time as his Commonwealth Club presentation.

One of my news grabbers found an article on environmentalism and religion at a Live Journal site, an answer to a speech by Michael Crichton on environmentalism as religion.  Crichton’s speech was delivered in 2003 to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, a venerable old institution for giving a soap box to doers and thinkers. [Note, April 2015: If that link doesn’t work, find Crichton’s speech here.]

Crichton’s speech started out with promise:

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.

The promise was short-lived.

Crichton described his learnings from studying anthropology, including an observation that religions always arise, and cannot be stamped out.  From there he makes an astounding leap, to claim that environmentalism is religion.  From that failed leap, the speech rapidly deteriorates.  He adopts tenets of American Christian and political fundamentalism, rapidly following up with a disavowal of fundamentalism, as if to try to hide what he’s done, or deny it, at least for himself:

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

From the promising start of claiming we must be skeptical and carefully sort out what is true from what is not true, he rapidly plunges from the stratosphere into the depths of the ocean of misinformation.  Count the errors:

  1. Newspapers have been regular carriers of claims that restrictions on DDT are unnecessary.  You won’t find such claims in science journals, in fact — they appear almost without exception in newspapers.  Crichton is wrong about where you’d learn that DDT is harmless.  You can’t learn it from people who know.
  2. DDT is a “probable human carcinogen” listed by every cancer-fighting agency on Earth.  Fortunately for humans, it appears to be weakly carcinogenic.  Recent studies indicate it’s devious in its carcinogenicity, too — it gives cancers not to the people who were exposed, but to their children.  Research into this path is only about a decade old.  Recent studies confirm carcinogenicity in humans.  Carcinogenicity in almost every other animal exposed has been long known.  It is highly unlikely that a compound known to cause cancer in every mammal tested, would not be carcinogenic in humans.  Again, you can’t learn this stuff in science journals.  You’ll have to learn it as dogma from cranks and crackpots.
  3. DDT’s links to the deaths of young birds is rock solid.  The links were clear by 1962, and no study has been done since 1962 to question those conclusions.  In fact, more than 1,000 studies have been done on the links, and published in peer-review journals.  Each one supports Rachel Carson’s conclusions that DDT is deadly to young birds.  The mechanisms are now known by which DDT causes eggshell-thinning, which increases the chick mortality.  Recovery of the bald eagle, osprey, and brown pelican correlate exactly with the decline of DDT in the tissues of the birds.  No scientist who has studied the matter doubts that DDT kills birds.
  4. DDT was banned because it disrupts eco-systems.  In the wild, it is uncontrollable.  Yes, it kills pests.  But it also kills all the pest predators, too.  The pests use reproduction as a survival tool, and outreproduce predators, and even DDT.  An application of DDT, then, kills off the predators that protect an ecosystem from the pests, and the pests come roaring back, unchecked by nature.  The poison is magnified as it rises through the food chain (trophic levels, if you want the science term).  By the time an eagle or predator fish eats, it gets a crippling dose of the stuff.  By the mid-1960s, insects and arachnid pests around the world had begun to show resistance and even immunity to DDT (bedbugs demonstrated resistance by 1950; some are completely immune to DDT; almost all mosquitoes now carry multiple copies of a gene which allows mosquitoes to digest DDT as a nutrient, doing no harm).  The restrictions on DDT had nothing to do with human cancers, but everything to do with saving crops and forests, and the wildlife that lives there.  Crichton pulls an old bait-and-switch when he claims regulators knew DDT “wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway.”  The regulators knew it might be a weak carcinogen, but they did not know it spreads through the environment and lasts almost forever, contaminating even human breast milk for at least six decades after application.  But this was not their concern.  The dangers of carcinogenicity were on top of the concerns about agriculture and forests and prairies.  Regulators acted to save the world we live in, and noted that such action also produced a minor reduction in cancer risk.
  5. DDT use in Africa never reached the nations where most malaria victims die today, at least not by 1972.  The ban on spraying DDT on cotton has nothing to do with malaria rates today, except that contrary to Crichton’s claim, it was the DDT use that aided malaria, not its cessation.  So for Crichton to claim that stopping the use of DDT on U.S. cotton crops led to a rise in malaria in Africa is a stretch of evidence way, way beyond any logical link.  Chaos theory only jokingly suggests the butterfly’s fluttering in Beijing last month affects weather in New York this month.  Boll weevils in the U.S. don’t carry malaria anyway, let alone fly to Africa to infect children there.
  6. Crichton dogmatically insists smoke is not a health hazard to non-smokers.  You won’t find much research to back his claim.  It’s another claim he makes religiously, on belief, not on evidence.  He can tell us second-hand smoke is not dangerous, but he can’t back the claim with evidence.  (Dangers of second-hand smoke have been well known since the 1970s; when Orrin Hatch got the law passed to switch to four, rotating warnings on cigarette packages, the debate was whether to include a fifth warning of second-hand smoke.)
  7. Urbanization figures cited by Crichton are low, and do not consider the damage done by urbanization to non-urban lands.  Low?  In one study, planners looked at Tippecanoe County, Indiana.  Recently, urban land use there rose from 8% to 12% — starting from a baseline larger than Crichton allows.  Crichton might argue that counties in North Dakota lose people, but the pollution and erosion from the urbanization in West LaFayette, Indiana, cannot be offset by relatively stable rural areas 600 miles away (I’m plucking a figure out of my hat), in a completely different watershed, in a completely different airshed, in a completely different climate, in a different economy.  Any soldier  or farmer can tell you that concentrating activities of people in a smaller area multiplies the impacts.  If you have 40 cows roaming over 6 acres, you don’t need to worry so much about where they leave their pies, or the concentration of ammonia in their urine.  If you put those same 40 cows in one small pen, however, you’ve just created a runoff problem, and health problems for the cows and the people who handle them.  Wholly apart from the numbers games, the facts show that urbanization increases the need for green and wild space for the people who move into the cities.  Two different presidential commissions reporting 25 years apart noted the needs, and the needs are only more fierce now (the link is to an article by Charles Jordan, who was one of the commissioners on the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors which reported in 1987, the second of the two studies referred to — see Jordan’s article for full details).
  8. If the Sahara is shrinking, that doesn’t help much.  South of the Sahara, in Niger, an area the size of Luxembourg is lost to desertification every year.  Deserts are advancing in Arizona, California, China (both the Gobi and the Taklamakan), and across the rest of Central Asia to Africa.  If the Sahara is shrinking, that’s probably good.  It’s not enough to suggest that desertification is not a problem, even in North Africa.  Ultimately, it’s not how much land is affected, but rather it is the effects themselves, and how they affect humans.  Desertification — which is defined by international agencies as the degradation of land — affects 16.5 million people in Europe alone.  According to the UN, desertification threatens the lives and livlihoods of about out of every six people on Earth — 1.2 billion people total.  How does the Sahara’s shrinking help them?  Is Crichton just pulling another bait-and-switch?
  9. The total ice on Antarctica is increasing because the waters around the icy continent are warming — “lake effect” increases snowfall when increased evaporation from warmer waters is carried by the air over land.  The rather dramatic increases in ice pack on parts of Antarctica are stark testimony to the ill effects of global warming.
  10. If Crichton is right, and no existing technology will allow us to reduce carbon emissions, then we need to hit the panic button, not the snooze button.

Those are just the factual errors in two paragraphs.  Environmentalism as religion?  Maybe that would be a good idea, if the religion honored accuracy and truth telling, rather than fictional accounts of what is going on on Dear Old Planet Earth.

I enjoyed Michael Crichton’s writing, and I hope his stories inspire kids to work at a life in science.  But, as with Caesar, as Antony noted, the bad stuff people do lives on past them.  Let’s change that for Crichton – kill the bad stuff, keep the good stuff.

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2

Update, April 4, 2013:  American Elephants, a blog that isn’t about elephants, isn’t about their conservation, and in my view, isn’t much about America, either, fell victim to Crichton’s errors, all these months later. Plenty of time to get the story right since 2008, but American Elephants couldn’t do it.  American Elephants is too often an example of the Dunning Kruger effect, alas.

Other sites that still get it wrong, five and six years later:

2 Comments | Accuracy, DDT, Environmental protection, History, Junk science, Malaria, Politics, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Is our children learning science? O, woe is Texas

November 5, 2008

So, last week or so I commented on the woes of Kentucky, where, the polls showed, 28% of voters were yoked with the millstone belief that our president-elect is Muslim. Someone commented, and sent me the link that showed 23% of Texans carry a similar burden in their own swim.

Can it get much more weird, more divorced from reality?

How about we marry bizarre, untrue beliefs about religion with bizarre, untrue beliefs about science? And then — God save us, please — how about let’s put that person on the state school board during a rewrite of science standards?

Meet Cynthia Dunbar, member of the Texas State Board of Education.

Cynthia Dunbar, Texas State Board of Education member

At the tinfoil hat website “Christian Worldview” (as if Christians are unable to see normally), Dunbar posted this bizarre statement:

So we can imagine the blatant disregard for our Constitution, but what other threats does an Obama administration pose? We have been clearly warned by his running mate, Joe Biden, that America will suffer some form of attack within the first 6 months of Obama’s administration. However, unlike Joe, I do not believe this “attack” will be a test of Obama’s mettle. Rather, I perceive it will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny.

Challenged by the Texas Freedom Network to do the American, patriotic thing and take the comments down, Dunbar refuses.

Dunbar was not worried about martial law when President George W. Bush actually took the steps she claims to worry about now, assigning troops to domestic crowd control in the U.S. It’s the marriage of presidential power with the bizarre phantasms of “the Christian worldview” that makes Ms. Dunbar’s views so nutty. It’s her position on the Texas State Board of Education that makes her views troubling, if not downright dangerous.

Her statement is as crazy as if she had accused John McCain of being a communist sympathizer, and Manchurian candidate, for ‘having spent so much time schmoozing with North Vietnamese officials.’ It’s also every bit as offensive as such a claim would be.

One mystery remains: Do wacko views produce creationism, or does creationism produce these wacko views? We await the creationist who can make an argument in favor of creationism without making a detour off the deep end.

It’s going to take more than tinfoil to protect Texas’s children, and Barack Obama, from these nuts.

If you want to pray, pray that God grants us reason, to save us and our children from such nuts, and this one especially.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Chris Comer.

_________________



10 Comments | Barack Obama, Bogus history, Creationism, Education, History, Rampant stupidity, Science, State school boards, Terrorism, Texas Freedom Network, Textbook Selection, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hoaxers promise to slam Obama to the end

November 2, 2008

The Economist, that august, conservative British publication about economics, endorsed Barack Obama for president. (I added highlights, below):

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

We face tough issues, and tough times.  The world’s economy is in a fix, America is involved in two protracted wars, our reputation internationally is at a low ebb for the past 125 years, and too many of America’s institutions just are not working.

Serious issues won’t stop the hoaxsters from trying to hoax Americans about Barack Obama right up to election day, and probably beyond.

For example, there’s a guy named Mitchell Langbert, who insists that there remains an issue about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.  He goes so far as to claim that Obama might be committing fraud merely by running for office, and then he stretches a biased assessment of U.S. election law to say Obama’s running is a violation of voters’ rights.  The birth certificate hoaxers roll on despite their nuisance lawsuits being dismissed solidly in at least two jurisdictions, and despite the complete lack of any cogent or coherent case that there is a problem with Obama’s citizenship.

Consider this:  Obama’s birth was recorded by the State of Hawaii, in Hawaii, in 1961.  As many newspapers did at the time, the Honolulu Advertiser listed births in the state, and it listed Barack Obama’s birth there.  This issue would have been checked again on at least three occasions.  First, when he applied for his own passport, the U.S. State Department would have required a showing of a birth certificate.  Second, when he applied for a law license, he had to make such a showing to the National Conference of Bar Examiners (as we all did); I haven’t checked, but Illinois may have required a separate confirmation.  And third, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate, the FBI would have checked the issue in their routine checkings of senators for top secret clearances (Obama is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, where secret information is often passed to senators).

Finally, it is the duty of the state secretary of state (SOS) to verify that candidates are eligible for listing on the ballots.  I suspect most SOS offices take a certification from the candidate without much checking; however, what this means is that the SOS is the person who would have authority to challenge for citizenship.  Knowing that they have no case, none of the birth certificate hoaxers, not Langbert or Texas Darlin’, nor anyone else, has bothered to ask their SOS to check things out.

Other hoaxers are worse, creating whole cloth fictions, just for the sake of malice.  (See here, too, for a solid example of just plain malice in hoaxing.)

Remember the 7 Signs of Bogus History?  (You’ll find a link just under the masthead here.)  The first is that the work is conducted by press release, and not in the archives, or in serious searches for the facts.  Each of these anti-Obama hoaxes originates either with a press release or a blog post.  Not one has withstood scrutiny of any court, nor of any editor at any serious mass media outlet who seriously worries about libel, slander, or otherwise getting the facts straight.  That’s a serious indictment.

Gone are the days when one needed a printing press at least to make one’s views known broadly.  Web tools, like the blogging software and servers used by this blog, allow any fool (as I may well be) to throw his hat, brain too often included, into the public arena as a pundit.

The Economist conclude in their endorsement editorial:

He has earned it

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Update, November 2, 2008: Langbert appears to be censoring comments at his blog, as well – none of my responses other than my first post have been allowed to get through his personal filtering.  This is a pattern we’ve seen in many of the hoax blogs that complain about Obama, and the McCain sympathizer blogs that pose as disgruntled Democrat blogs.  Any post that offers serious criticism is dangerous to their posing as informed seekers of the truth — so posts that contain real information rebutting their claims are not allowed through their “moderation,” or are edited to say inane things.

For Obama voters, this confirms their fears that a McCain administration would probably continue the Bush administration’s suppression of views and filtering of helpful criticism.  Also, it means bloggers like Langbert are bullies who can’t take the hurly-burly of serious discussion.

2 Comments | Barack Obama, Bogus history, Campaigns, History, Jurisprudence, Law, Obama 2008, Politics, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Palin slashes Special Olympics Budget: Accurate statement still unfair?

September 24, 2008

This is how bad it is:  Even accurate statements about Gov. Sarah Palin are called unfair by McCain campaign operatives and hard-shell, stiff-necked partisans.

Conservatives are complaining about media coverage of Gov. Sarah Palin.  For example, they say, she is accused of cutting funding for Alaska’s Special Olympics in half.  Not fair they say, and they offer the actual figures:  The budget for Special Olympics for 2007 from the Alaska legislature was $650,000.  Palin used her line-item veto, and cut the funding to $275,000.

Hello?  Half of $650,000 would be $325,000.  Palin cut the Special Olympics budget by 58%. Last time I looked at the math tables, 58% was more than half of 100%.

So, why would it not be fair to say that Palin cut the funding by half?  She cut it by more than half.

Oh, no, the conservatives say:  ‘You have to let us jigger the numbers first — the final total, after Palin cut it, was still more than the previous year’s allocation from the state.’

Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media takes up the conservatives’ cudgel, that it’s unfair to Sarah Palin to report her budget cuts accurately (you know, not even Dave Barry could make this stuff up).

And then Glenn Reynolds joins the morning howl, complaining that “main stream media” isn’t interested in debunking the “rumor.”

Excuse me?  Why should anyone be interested in “debunking” a “rumor” which is, as the sources indicate and the conservatives’ own research demonstrates, neither rumor nor error, but hard fact?

If you needed a demonstration that conservatives cannot count, or that they will not count accurately when only honor is at stake, these sorts of stories will do.

Below the fold, for the sake of accuracy, you’ll find a longish excerpt from Charlie Martin’s analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Debunking, denialism, Elections, Ethics, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, McCain 2008, Newspapers, Obama 2008, Politics, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

John Stossel: Wrong again, on DDT

September 17, 2008

John Stossel’s new book makes a detour to rail against the regulation of DDT and against Rachel Carson and her book, Silent Spring.

I’ve not read the book, but from what I’ve read about it, he’s got it dead wrong.  If the example offered by Grokmedia is their own, and not Stossel’s, shame on them.  (Stossel’s complained about DDT before, though, and gotten the facts as wrong as Grokmedia has them.)  The claims are unbelievable:

Consider the chemical DDT. I’m sure, if you’ve heard anything at all about DDT, it’s that it’s a horrible, deadly chemical, that must be banned to preserve the public’s safety. The truth is, the only thing DDT affects are mosquitos. Not humans. In fact, I’m old enough to remember trucks pulling through our neighborhood and spraying the stuff into the air, like gigantic clouds, bringing death – to the mosquito population. These clouds of DDT harmed no one. There were no great increases in any kind of cancer or other fatal diseases – and certainly none that could be associated with DDT. Enter the book, Silent Spring.

A woman by the name of Rachel Carson wrote a book that vilified DDT, and blamed our love of chemical solutions for her own cancer. (She died of breast cancer two years after the publication of her book.) Silent Spring is almost single-handedly credited with triggering a worldwide ban on DDT. The result of this ban has been, paradoxically enough, millions of deaths in countries like Ethiopia, where malaria kills due to mosquito infestations. U.S. aid policy bans sending money to any country that chooses to spray with DDT.

How did Silent Spring cause this wave of destruction? Marketing. The book was marketed by it’s publishers. The marketing efforts attracted the attention of a mainstream media hungry for stories that scare the populace to death. The unwashed masses Demanded That Something Be Done. Politicians, eager to grandstand (and free of conciences that might give them pause to think about the Law of Unintended Consequences) passed laws, and that was that.

Here’s what I wrote in comments to the post at Grokmedia, which appears to have gone into their own hell for any post that disagrees with their views:

Stossel said that about DDT?  Once again, he’s gone off the rails.

Do you seriously think that a book publisher with its meager PR budget could derail a multi-billion-dollar pesticide manufacturing industry that was led by several of America’s top 100 corporations?  Do you think corporations are really that incompetent at the public relations game?

The truth is that DDT was banned because of its harm to the environment, not due to its dangers to human health (though, to be perfectly accurate we should note that every cancer-fighting agency on Earth says DDT is a probably human carcinogen, and recent research has strengthened the links between cancer in people exposed to DDT in their mother’s breast milk and in utero, and that DDT is now known to be a rather nasty endocrine disruptor in all animals).  More than a thousand studies confirmed the dangers of DDT to birds and other predators higher up in food chains, especially in estuarine waters.

No one passed a law banning DDT.  If the action was popular, that was beside the point.  In 1962, in response to the half-million-dollar slander campaign against Carson by the pesticide manufacturers (don’t take my word for it — look it up), President Kennedy asked his Science Advisory Council to scrutinize the book.  In May 1963 they reported back that Carson was correct on all counts but one — they said Carson went too easy on the dangers of DDT, and that action needed to be taken right away to stop its use.  Kennedy dallied, however, and did little before he died.

The “ban” on DDT came nearly a decade later, in 1972.  It was not due to any “junk science” law (an interesting claim since it is based on junk science itself).  Two federal courts had ordered EPA to speed up its analysis of the registration of the pesticide, in lieu of simply ordering the stuff off the market after two entirely different lawsuits.  Pesticide manufacturers had been defendants in both lawsuits, and they put up a more than vigorous fight — but they lost on the science.

EPA dragged its feet, but finally acted against DDT in 1972, effectively banning the broadcast spraying of DDT on crops, but leaving it available for things like malaria control.  Of course the ruling was challenged in court, since under U.S. law, had the ruling been only popular, and not based on considerable evidence, the courts would have been obligated to nullify the ruling.  In two separate challenges, the courts ruled that EPA’s action was solidly based on the scientific evidence, and therefore would stand.

That’s quite a bit different from the picture Stossel paints, I gather.  Is this, perhaps, his first foray into fiction?

And, did you catch the contradictions?  The author claims mosquito abatement in Ethiopia is hampered by a lack of U.S. aid, as a result of Rachel Carson’s book in 1962.  Do they know that George Bush is president?  Do they really think Bush and Cheney are tools of Rachel Carson?  Do they know that bed nets have cut malaria rates by half where they were used in Ethiopia?

Looks like another example of DDT poisoning to me.

4 Comments | Africa, DDT, Junk science, Malaria, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Creationist success: Thermodynamicophobia strikes climate change denialists

August 17, 2008

Every once in a while we get a glimpse of what the future would be like if the creationists ruled education and could teach some of the fantastic things they believe to be true as fact.

For example, creationists have for years complained that the basic chemistry of life somehow violates what chemists and physicists know as the “laws” of thermodynamics. Patient explanations of what we know about how photosynthesis works, and how animals use energy, and what the laws of thermodynamics actually are, all fall on deafened ears.

Comes Jennifer Marohasy, an Australian blogger at The Politics and Environment Blog, with this fantastic explanation about how the well-established notion of radiative equilibrium, simply doesn’t work.

“For the Earth to neither warm or cool, the incoming radiation must balance the outgoing.”

Not really.

No, really. Go read the post. And see these critiques, at Tugboat Potemkin, where problems with the rules of the principle of Conservation of Energy are noted, and Deltoid, where LOLCats makes a debut in explaining physics to the warming denialists.

Then go back and read the comments at Marohasy’s blog.

It’s not just the confusion of terms, like treating watts as units of heat. There’s an astonishing lack of regard for cause and effect in history, too:

Conservation of energy: it’s not just a phrase. The theory of radiative equilibrium arose early in the 19th century, before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.

Probably didn’t mention it here before, but Marohasy is also one of those bloggers who suffers from DDT poisoning. Among other things, she and Aynsley Kellow (whose book she recommends) use an astounding confabulation of history to claim DDT wasn’t harming birds at all, completely ignoring more than 1,000 research studies to the contrary (and not one in support of their claim).

Suggestion for research: Is the denialism virus that affects creationists, DDT advocates, and climate denialists, the same one, or are there slight variations? A virus seems the most charitable explanation, unless one wishes to blame prions.

Creationist physics, denialism in meteorology, physics, chemistry, and history. It makes a trifecta winner look like he’s not trying.

See also:

1 Comment | Accuracy, Climate change, Creationism, denialism, Education, Global warming, History, Physics, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

American history denialism

July 14, 2008

A new outbreak of David Barton has been noted. The Centers for Disease Control offer no help, but you can find some relief here, at American Creation, in a post by Brad Hart.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, “Another Barton Debunking.”

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Education, Historic documents, History, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Politics, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Darwin and eugenics? Wrong again

July 1, 2008

Again at Café Philos, the anti-Darwin fifth columnists do their best to continue distortions of history, in this case, in high irony, claiming NOT to defend John Freshwater.

Not in defense of Freshwater’s walking over the Constitution and zapping burns on students in the shape of a cross? Why bother to go after Darwin? No explanation is necessary. It’s like the story of the frog and the scorpion. Creationists are like scorpions. It’s in their nature. (I believe it is a corruption of human nature that creationism visits on those who allow the demon in.) (“Paging Bobby Jindal! Creationist Demon Possession in the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion; what? You’re already there? When’s the exorcism this time?”)

In a cartoon, Darwin bans "Laissez faire," a shorthand for "Social Darwinism," and eugenics from his house. Unknown cartoonist, from a short essay on Northwestern University's discussion book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen.

In a cartoon, Darwin bans “Laissez faire,” a shorthand for “Social Darwinism,” and eugenics from his house. Unknown cartoonist, from a short essay on Northwestern University’s discussion book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen.

Here’s the exchange. If you find it boring, my apologies. I do weary at the prospect of having to do this again, and again. On the crashed hard-drive of my first laptop, I have files now 15 years old discussing this same silly claim. I’m posting here for the record, for my easy reference, with hope that someday it will not be necessary to post this stuff at all. You may need some of these links some day, and here they are, below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

23 Comments | Accuracy, Books, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, History, Racism, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Business, no environmentalists, oppose DDT in Africa

May 16, 2008

Steve Milloy and an entire host of DDT denialists hope you never read any newspaper from Africa.  Your ignorance is their best argument.

If you don’t read African newspapers, they can continue to blame environmentalists for any case of malaria that occurs in Africa.  They’ll claim, though it’s not true, that environmentalists urged a complete ban on the use of DDT.  They’ll argue, falsely, that African governments were bullied into not using DDT by environmentalists, ignoring the fact that some African nations have just never been able to get their kit together to conduct an anti-malaria campaign, while other nations discovered DDT was ineffective — and most of the nations have no love for environmentalists anyway (Idi Amin?  Jomo Kenyatta?  Who does Milloy think he’s kidding?).

If you don’t read African newspapers, you’ll miss stories like this one, from the Daily Times in Malawi, that say it’s Milloy’s old friends in the tobacco business who stand in the way of modest use of DDT.

If you don’t read African newspapers, you’ll miss stories like this one, from New Vision in Kampala, Uganda, that say it’s the cotton farmers who stand in the way of modest use of DDT.

If Steven Milloy wanted to get DDT used against malaria in Africa, in indoor residual spraying (IRS) campaigns, all he has to do is pick up the phone and ask his friends to allow it to be done. 

Someone who will lie to you about their friends’ misdeeds, and try to pin it on a nice old lady like Rachel Carson, will go Charles Colson one better:  They’ll walk over your grandmother to do what they want to do.  In fact, they’ll go out of their way to walk over your grandmother.

The New Republic seems to have come around to get the story straight.  Truth wins in a fair fight — it’s a fight to make sure the fight is fair, though.

John Stossel?  Your company doesn’t get tobacco money any more.  What’s your excuse?  Do you really believe the Bush administration is beholden to environmentalists on this one issue?  How long have you been covering politics?

(Texts of news stories below the fold.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Africa, Business Ethics, Conservation, DDT, Environmental protection, Ethics, Health care, Hoaxes, Junk science, Malaria, Newspapers, Public health, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hypocrisy all the way to 11

May 6, 2008

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.

Which is worthy of comment at the moment only because he’s banned my comments.  I was trying to figure out where he was coming from, and I followed his links to a column he wrote on Chuck Colson’s “Breakpoint” site, in which he discusses his struggles in debating scientists and others who understand evolution.

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?

Gilson argues evolution played a role in the Holocaust.  He’s not sure how, and he doesn’t know anything about what evolution theory is nor the history of the Holocaust, but he’s sure that if he just reads the Bible earnestly enough . . .

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.

Update:  P. Z. Myers found this guy, Jeff Dorchen.  Gilson, he’s got Stein pegged, I think.  What say you?

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. 

16 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, History, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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