Right Wing Nut House

Everyone agrees that global warming is real and that unless we do something soon our descendents will experience radical climate change that will destroy human civilization and send us back to the stone age, right?

Not quite:

Two of the world’s leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.

A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds

A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.

The controversy has erupted over an article published in Science Magazine by Dr Naomi Oreskes that purports to show almost universal agreement among climatologists over global warming being a genuine phenomenom and that mankind is indeed to blame.

Unfortunately for Dr. Oreskes, she um, didn’t quite tell the truth:

However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he makes had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.

Dr. Peiser thought that Science should publish the paper anyway. “As the results from my analysis refuted the original claims, I believe Science has a duty to publish them.”

This isn’t the only instance of global warming dissenters being shut out of legitimate scientific debate. Via Little Green Footballs we get this remarkable story from Canada. It seems that a group of scientists have made a documentary debunking global warming but are unable to get the show aired in Canada:

The numbers of scientists staggered me–17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two thirds with advanced degrees, are against the Kyoto Agreement. The Heidelberg Appeal–which states that there is no scientific evidence for man-made global warming, has been signed by over 4,000 scientists from around the world since the petition’s inception. I strongly questioned these high numbers, since I’ve had benefit of the Canadian government’s public relations machine on this issue. Dr. Leahey has since sent documentation to back his figures up.

All those scientists were in total agreement: the Kyoto Protocol was complete fiction.

The forces arrayed against dissenters are formidable. What’s at stake are hundreds of millions of dollars - perhaps billions - in research grants from governments and various NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) who have a vested interest in seeing the Kyoto Accords ratified by the world’s scientific community. With that kind of money floating around as well as the reputation and prestige of scientists on the line who’ve gone out on a limb to endorse the theory, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that dissenters are having trouble getting their viewpoints before the public and hence policy makers.

The third world has a huge stake in Kyoto in that they are not only immune from its requirements, they will be able to profit from the agreement because they will be able to “sell” emission credits to industrialized countries that can’t meet Kyoto’s stringent standards. Since the US has the farthest to go to meet the Kyoto target emissions, it could end up costing US taxpayers up to $800 billion dollars over the life of the agreement.

In short, Kyoto is nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth scheme from the industrialized world to impoverished and corrupt third world kleptocracies. No wonder one of its major supporters is that noted environmentalist and humanitarian Fidel Castro.

What are the pro-Kyoto scientists afraid of? Peer review is the lifeblood of scientific advancement. Unless your theories can stand up to the challenges of your peers, their not worth the paper they’re printed on. And with climate models, CO2 projections, and other greehouse gas emission predictions being so wildly off target the last few years, it may be that the proponents of the theory are just not up to the task of defending their work.

All they’re doing is defeating their own purpose. The US is never going to ratify Kyoto unless it’s amended to include China, the biggest polluter on the planet today, under its restrictive protocols. Even then, unless real debate is allowed, it’s doubtful that Kyoto has much of a future.

An orgy of remembrance took place all across Europe this last weekend as the continent’s increasingly passive and pacific countries celebrated the very war-like achievements of their grandfathers in tossing the regime of Adolph Hitler and all it stood for on the ash heap of history. Even France, where 2.5 million men of its armed forces never fired a shot in anger before their cowardly government surrendered thus leaving the British to face the Nazi onslaught alone, celebrated the end of World War II, confident in the knowledge that no one would bring up uncomfortable truths like their collaboration with Hitler or the myths surrounding the small minority of citizens who were actually involved in the resistance.

Where the French are concerned, some things are just better left unsaid lest Gallic huffiness spoil a good party.

Even George Bush was silent about the duplicitous French whose wartime actions as “ally” included armed resistance to the American landings in North Africa, handing tens of thousands of European Jews who had taken refuge in “unoccupied” France over to the tender mercies of the Nazi death merchants, and saddling the western world for a generation after the war with the prickly personality and insufferable haughtiness of Charles De Gaulle.

While the President may be faulted for his selective memory where the French are concerned, he should receive the thanks and admiration from all of us for being the only world leader to recall one of the immediate and proximate causes of the war; the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed a scant 2 days before the outbreak of Hitler’s unprovoked attack on Poland.

The fact that Bush spoke of this agreement in Latvia, one of the Baltic states that both Hitler and Stalin coveted is significant in that he connected the brutality of Hitler with the perfidy of Stalin and the Soviet Union in a way that’s rarely been done by an American President:

But in his speech, Mr. Bush indirectly acknowledged that the United States and Britain shared some blame for the annexation of the Baltics, noting that the 1945 Yalta agreement, in which Europe was carved up by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, was in an “unjust tradition” of earlier treaties like the Munich and Molotov-Ribbentrop pacts.

“Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable,” Mr. Bush said. “Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.”

And Bush recalled the spirit of defiance of the Baltic states following Stalin’s occupation for their own “protection” following the Nazi-Soviet Pact:

The Baltic states had no role in starting World War II. The battle came here because of a secret pact between dictators. And when the war came, many in this region showed their courage. After a puppet government ordered the Latvian fleet to return to port, sailors on eight freighters chose to remain at sea under the flag of free Latvia, assisting the United States Merchant Marine in carrying supplies across the Atlantic. A newspaper in the state of South Carolina described the Latvian crew this way: “They all have beards and dressed so differently… They are … exhausted, but full of fighting spirit.”

By the end of the war, six of the Latvian ships had been sunk, and more than half the sailors had been lost. Nearly all of the survivors settled in America, and became citizens we were proud to call our own. One American town renamed a street Ciltvaira — to honor a sunken ship that sailed under a free Latvian flag. My country has always been thankful for Latvia’s friendship, and Latvia will always have the friendship of America.

Curiously, this acknowledgment went unnoticed in the press who instead played up Bush’s “apology” for US inaction after Yalta to halt the spread of communism across eastern Europe.

The sad history of Batlic occupation is a direct result of Stalin’s greed and Hitler’s warped vision for Germany. Small German minorities in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia allowed Hitler to cast a covetous eye toward the prosperous little countries while Stalin, ever the expansionist, had similar designs to incorporate them into his growing empire. But Hitler had a strategic problem of the first magnitude. Before he could gobble up the Baltics, he had to make sure his rear was secure. That meant a final showdown with France and Britain, the only two military powers that could challenge him in the west.

The problem arose because Stalin was nominally committed to come to the aid of France if she went to war with Germany. And Hitler’s plan to invade and occupy Poland would most surely trigger a response from France, goaded on by Britain. So Hitler needed to somehow separate Stalin from the west. He was fully prepared to invade Poland regardless of anything Stalin did, but realized a two front war would be as disastrous for him as it had been for the Kaiser.

Hitler scheduled the invasion of Poland to begin on August 26, 1939. But less than 24 hours before the Nazi blitzkrieg began to roll, Hitler evidently got cold feet. He recalled some of his forward units who had already moved up to the German-Polish frontier and delayed the strike for 72 hours.

The reason was Stalin. The Soviet Union was, as usual, in horrible shape economically. And on the 25th, German Foreign Minister Johann Von Ribbentrop had begun negotiations that promised Stalin not only gigantic deliveries of raw materials like coal and copper, but also grain, fodder, and meat stuffs for his perpetually starving country. All Stalin had to do was sit on the sidelines while Hitler dealt with, in order, the Poles, the French, and the British.

Stalin, a shameless opportunist and as two American Presidents could attest, a canny and tough negotiator, realized he had Hitler over a barrel and went for the gold. How about settling all of our differences? Poland, the Baltics, and the mutual defense pact with France could all be on the table.

Thus, in one of the most cynical deals in modern history, Hitler and Stalin carved up eastern Europe between them. For the third time in 500 years, Russia and Germany partitioned Poland with Hitler getting the prize port of Danzig as well as the bulk of Polish industrial production. Stalin, whose forces invaded Poland on September 22 with the excuse of protecting ethnic Russians in “a country that no longer existed,” got western Poland’s vast agricultural holdings as well as what he thought was a 1000 mile buffer between himself and Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

In addition, Hitler recognized Stalin’s “sphere of influence” in the Baltics and Finland while Stalin promised to do nothing to to fulfill his mutual defense obligations with France. Both dictators got exactly what they wanted. And both should be held equally responsible for the carnage and slaughter that followed. The treaty of “Friendship and Non-Aggression” was signed on August 29. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1.

There are some who argue that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was Stalin’s response to the Munich Agreement signed 2 years earlier where Britain and France colluded in the partition of Czechoslovakia, leaving the Soviet dictator to believe that both western democracies wanted Stalin to be the one to bear the brunt of stopping Hitler. He was right of course. But that doesn’t lessen Stalin’s culpability one whit. The fact is there was no reason for Stalin to insist on the partition of Poland nor the occupation of the Baltic States by Soviet troops. The last was pure greed on Stalin’s part. And his country was to pay for his greed and shortsightedness with the loss of more than 20 million Russians.

There was no mention of all of this in Moscow yesterday while Putin basked in the reflected glow of dozens of world leaders watching Russian troops carrying the old Hammer and Sickle flag while modern jets screamed overhead as a reminder of more recent Soviet military achievements. Until Russia comes to terms with its part in starting World War II instead of celebrating its role in ending it, the legacy and true meaning of that conflict will never be understood and the wrong lessons will be drawn from it.

This may be what Putin is after. Russian revanchism would complicate matters immensely both for the United States and the recently freed Baltic states. As they turn to the west, the question uppermost in their minds must be will we once again become the pawns in the deadly games played by big powers?

Hopefully George Bush’s speech eased some of those concerns.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

With only three nights to go in the series (the finale will be a two hour long roller coaster ride, thank God!), I thought I would try a new feature for Sunday night in which you, my loyal “24″ fanatics, can give me your wildest, funniest, and/or most outrageous speculation on how Jack is going to save the United States for the fourth straight year.

First, some speculation from me and a set up:

1. Who’s the mole? Who gave Marwan the trasponder codes for the football? Where did all the American mercs who are helping Marwan come from? How were they able to kidnap the Secretary of State way back in the beginning of the show?

My guess: AUDREY HELLER!

2. Will Marwan be able to launch the nuke? What city is targeted?

Yes, and say goodbye to D.C. As if to prove the show’s conservative tilt, the writers will nuke Washington and fullfil a secret fantasy that conservatives have harbored for more than a generation.

3. Is Paul really dead?

Yes, but would it suprise you if when the episode started tomorrow night his heart magically started to beat again?

Get the idea? Give me your best and I’ll do a post tomorrow night before the show with the best speculation!

It’s often been said that blogs are “new media.” I guess so. I mean, you can say that blogs are new media in the sense that no one has ever challenged the primacy of the mainstream media before. And the ease with which you can start a blog, build traffic, get noticed, and have your ego stroked by a multitude of sycophantic admirers offering you wealth, fame, and sex is truly amazing.

Well…maybe not the sex…

But ever since the much discussed and reported impact that blogs had on the 2004 Presidential election, it’s become de rigueur to talk of a “Blog Revolution” as if legions of geeky, bespectacled pajama clad fanatics are about ready to storm the moss covered walls of the MSM.

Maybe that’s why the New York Times is so worried:

The thing about influence is that, as bloggers well know, it is only a matter of time before people start trying to hold you accountable. Bloggers are so used to thinking of themselves as outsiders, and watchdogs of the LSM (that’s Lame Stream Media), that many have given little thought to what ethical rules should apply in their online world. Some insist that they do not need journalistic ethics because they are not journalists, but rather activists, or humorists, or something else entirely. But more bloggers, and blog readers, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent blogs with the highest traffic shouldn’t hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media.

Ethics? Us? Be real! I’m one of those bloggers who insist that we don’t need a code of ethics. If there’s one thing the blogosphere does extremely well it’s promoting sites with a distinctive voice and the talent to express it in unique and entertaining ways. Whatever ethics we have, we bring to the table ready made, forged by our life experiences and upbringing. We hardly need any advice on promulgating a “Code of Ethics from a group that collectively speaking has the moral standards of my pet cat Aramas.

At least Ari has several redeeming features; he can be extremely pleasant company, he’s very affectionate, and he doesn’t have a liberal bias.

And that’s not the Times’ only complaint. It seems that when blogs brought down both Eason Jordan and Dan Rather, we didn’t play fair. We didn’t call them first!

But Mr. Rather’s and Mr. Jordan’s misdeeds would most likely not have landed them in trouble in the world of bloggers, where few rules apply. Many bloggers make little effort to check their information, and think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first - or calling the target at all. They rarely have procedures for running a correction. The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent. (Wonkette, a witty and well-read Washington blog, posts a weekly shout-out inside its editorial text to its advertisers, including partisan ones like Democrats.org.) And bloggers rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they write about.

First of all, does Mr. Cohen (whose piece appears on the Time’s editorial page and is, hence reflective of its thinking) really believe that Dan Rather would have taken a call from “Buckhead,” the Free Republic poster who first raised questions about the authenticity of the TANG documents? Or a blog called “Little Green Footballs?”

Yeah sure. And once that “blogmob” got going (thanks for the new blogword Adam) can you imagine two or three thousand bloggers all calling Black Rock wanting to get in touch with Dan Rather?

The New York Times just doesn’t get it. I don’t really blame them because it takes a leap of imagination beyond their extraordinarily short-sighted and outmoded view of who and what blogs are to envision a media that really is self correcting. And the reason for the ease with which blogs are self corrected is simple; the blog universe really is a big place. Evidently, much bigger than Mr. Cohen and the Times are able to imagine. If they could see beyond their myopic view of news dissemination, they’d realize all the things Mr. Cohen wishes blogs had like verification procedures, a corrections regime, full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and a “clear wall” between editorial content and advertising are already in place and have been functioning quite well thank you.

Bloggers like John Hawkins plug their advertisers all the time and nobody would even think of accusing John of mixing into one of his posts a paean to his T-Shirt company (unless, like Ace he does it as satire.) And Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-tribune tried to tar and feather the boys at Powerline with the accusation that they’re being paid by the conservative think tank The Claremont Institute, a charge they’ve not only denied but threatened to sue the Unhinged One over.

When it came out that the “Daschle V Thune” site was a paid organ of the Senator’s campaign, blogs both left and right came down so hard on the bloggers who ran it that they may have been chased out of the blogosphere all together. I haven’t seen or heard of John Lauck, the proprietor of Daschle V Thune since November.

Would that such punishment could be meted out to the MSM when one of their undisclosed affiliations with the Democratic party came out.

At this point, one would think that the Times would quit while they’re at least even. No such luck:

Many bloggers who criticize the MSM’s ethics, however, are in the anomalous position of holding themselves to lower standards, or no standards at all. That may well change. Ana Marie Cox, who edits Wonkette, notes that blogs are still “a very young medium,” and that “things have yet to be worked out.” Before long, leading blogs could have ethics guidelines and prominently posted corrections policies.

Bloggers may need to institutionalize ethics policies to avoid charges of hypocrisy. But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline. As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.

Evidently, since I haven’t written down and published my ethical guidelines I’m “in the anomalous position of holding [myself] to lower standards, or no standards at all.” He’s right, of course. I’m a shameless hussy about this blog. Being a polemicist, I make no bones about the fact that I’m conservative and biased about everything I write. What else would you expect from a site named “Rightwing Nuthouse?” I mean, it’s not like I’m trying hide anything! Now, if I’d called the site “Leftwing Whackjob” and then put out a lot of rightwing propaganda, The Times could then accuse me of acting shamelessly.

And if I were the Times, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening any time soon.

Some, like Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media which includes Gizmodo, Wonkette, Fleshbot, and a half dozen other blogs pooh-pooh the idea of a blog “revolution:”

At a time when media conferences like “Les Blogs” in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down - people, careers, brands - than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: “Give me a break.”

“The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe,” he said. “They want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.”

(I do believe in blogs, I do, I do, I do believe in blogs)

I can see Mr. Denton’s point. If I had Skankette as an employee, I’d wonder about the future of blogs too, not to mention the future of western civilization especially if he thinks what the Skanker does is what blogging is all about.

It’s not, of course. The best blogs are either traffic cops (Glenn Anderson) or advocates (The Capn’, Malkin, etc.). The Smelly One may be a liberal, but she rarely deviates from a rather tiresome formula that’s at the same time conversational and condescending. And the penis jokes. Don’t forget the penis jokes.

Denton did get one thing right:

Other critics of the blog movement wonder whether the hoopla over the commercial viability of blogs - particularly as publishing ventures - is overstated. “Blogs primarily excel at marketing and promotion for companies or individuals,” Mr. Phillips of I Want Media said. “I think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a platform if they’re talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think the jury is still out on that.”

I think he’s spot on there. Blogs as on-line opinion magazines are probably a pipe dream. But what if a blogger could come up with a neat little niche e-zine idea? John Henke may have come up with a viable product with his “The New Libertarian.” Using his blog to promote his writing, John may have hit upon a new business model that, if successful, will be much imitated. I’d love to see his progress six months from now.

Six months from now will seem like an eternity in the blogosphere. With Pajamas Media ready to launch and Blogger News Network off the ground, it seems pretty clear that this revolution - a revolution that some are still denying or wanting to go away - will continue on its merry way, oblivious to the naysayers and serial deniers until a truly authentic “citizens brigade” of new media disseminaters gets the respect it already so richly deserves.

UPDATE

Tim Worstall is a very clever fellow. I have to say that because Mr. Worstall has given many of the same arguments that I’ve made above for why Adam Cohen should take a remedial course in Blogs:

Blogs are quite rightly not held to those standards of “ethical journalism”. Only what comes out of the system, after the unsupported allegations, the rants, the foam-flecked screaming, only after the filtering process provided by 8 million blogs shouting at and correcting each other, only that should be considered ethical journalism. Each individual blog post, he is correct, is simply the unsupported word of a partisan (given the financial rewards currently available, there is no one doing this who doesn’t have some kind of bee in their bonnet) but the system as a whole works very well. It’s an economic thing (not a great strength of NYT writers I know, but try some Hayek), that information is distributed. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of reporteers and fact checkers the NYT has (or any other organisation), how many sources they speak to, how often they refine their words, 8 million blogs have access to more information than they do. (HT: Instapundit)

Tim also has a different take on The Skanker…sex jokes but a different part of the anatomy:

It would be quite wonderful to see a piece on blogging that did not include Ms. Cox but apparently anal sex jokes really are the way to the MSM’s heart. Not sure who that says most about actually.

And Greyhawk makes the same point I made about Mr. Cohen’s clueless suggestion that we bloggers contact our prey before devouring them:

He’s trying to create the impression of blogs as being akin to The National Enquirer, of course. And I’ll note that I didn’t call Mr. Cohen before writing this. You see, I have his commentary before me now - he’s on the record. That’s what blogs do when dealing with media outrages, respond. I suppose I could contact him for clarification on this point: is he really clueless about the blogosphere, and therefore wrong in his accusations, or does he assume his readers are clueless, and is willing to deceive them?

I think Mr. Cohen is right. Someone should track down his home telephone number so that we can all call him for his response to the 10,000 blog posts that are going to fisk this idiot’s lights out.

Do you think he’ll get it then?

“The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7, 1945.”

Seventy million dead and that’s the best Ike could come up with?

Actually, Eisenhower wrestled with what to say about the German surrender that had just taken place at Reims, France in the early morning of May 7, 1945. He knew full well his words would echo down through the ages and wanted the announcement to be memorable. But the truth was, he and his staff were exhausted. They had been up for nearly 48 hours tracking the disintegration of the German armed forces as Army Group after Army Group surrendered locally to Allied forces.

On May 4 1945, the British Field Marshal Montgomery took the military surrender of all German forces in Holland, Northwest Germany, and Denmark on Lüneburg Heath; an area between the cities of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen. Monty had flatly refused to accept the surrender of Nazi armed forces fighting the Russians in the east, preferring to deal with the capitulation of the troops facing his forces alone. Previously, the Germans had surrendered in Italy (May 2), Austria (May 5), and Bavaria (May 5).

Finally, Admiral Donitz who had assumed control of what was left of the Nazi government, sent General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff for the German High Command to Reims to negotiate. Ike would have none of it. At one point, Eisenhower threatened to resume offensive operations against the Germans unless Jodl accepted the surrender terms unconditionally. Bowing to the inevitable, Jodl and the government representative Admiral Hans Georg Friedeburg signed the instrument of surrender early in the morning of the 7th. Eisenhower had tried unsuccessfully to coordinate an announcement of the surrender in London, Washington, and Moscow which became moot when the news leaked out anyway.

Friedburg later committed suicide. Jodl was executed for war crimes following his trial at Nuremberg.

As his staff gathered in the little schoolhouse that served as SHAEF heaquarters following the surrender, Eisenhower pondered what he should say in breaking the news of the German capitulation. His top aide, General Walter “Beedle” Smith says that Ike fiddled with the statement for about a half an hour, taking suggestions from other equally exhausted members of his staff until finally settling on the simple declarative statement he sent in a telegram.

While seeming to be anticlimactic, the statement relfects the mood of SHAEF headquarters at that time. Following the surrender, there was no joyous celebration. A bottle of champagne was brought out but when opened, was found to be flat. Most of his staff simply went to bed.

The next day, Jodl showed up at Marshall Zuhkov’s headquarters outside of Berlin where the Russians made a great show of taking the surrender. This is why the Putin’s celebration will be taking place tomorrow, the 8th.

Officially, V-E Day was celebrated by the Allied people on May 9.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

One would think that more than most subjects our children are learning in school, the physical sciences would be immune from the pressures of outside interest groups intent on imposing cultural relativism and multicultural “sensitivity” on the curricula. After all, unlike history or literature, science relies on empiricism and objective observation to resolve the mysteries of the universe. And the kind of interference associated with the multiculturalists would seem to be irrelevant when it comes to learning about universal laws like gravity or thermodynamics.

I am very sorry to disappoint you:

Several centuries ago, some “very light-skinned” people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After “many years under the tropical sun,” this light-skinned population became “dark-skinned,” says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education.

“Downright bizarre,” says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is “many years.” The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.

Pearson Education spokesperson Wendy Spiegel admits the error in describing the evolution of skin color, but says the teacher’s manual explains the phenomenon correctly. Just why teachers are given accurate information while students are misled remains unclear.

An isolated example? Hardly. And if it were only the moonbat left, it would be easy to dismiss as one more example of political correctness run rampant. Unfortunately, Christian idiotarians want to get in the act too:

A six-day courtroom-style debate opened on Thursday in Kansas over what children should be taught in schools about the origin of life — was it natural evolution or did God create the world?

The hearings, complete with opposing attorneys and a long list of witnesses, were arranged amid efforts by some Christian groups in Kansas and nationally to reverse the domination of evolutionary theory in the nation’s schools.

William Harris, a medical researcher and co-founder of a Kansas group called the Intelligent Design Network, posed the core question about life’s beginnings before mapping out why he and other Christians want changes in school curriculum.

School science classes are teaching children that life evolved naturally and randomly, Harris said, arguing that this was in conflict with Biblical teachings that God created life

What is going on here? While the goals of the moonbats and idiotarians are different, the motivations behind the meddling in science curricula are similar; to bend science to fit a specific worldview. While it’s pretty easy to make fun of “monkey trials” and attempts to equate tribal shamans with medical doctors, the sad fact is that by fiddling with the way science is taught, our children are the ones who suffer the consequences.

And those consequences could be devastating to both the country and the schoolchildren. When our kids grow up they must compete in a world where more than any other time in history, science will play a large part in the world’s economy:

In a field long dominated by the United States (with more than 1,300 U.S. biotech firms, compared with about 700 in all of Europe), the global competition is increasingly intense.

Britain, of course, was first out of the gate in starting its own biotech industry back in the mid-1980s when the outbreak of brain rotting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a form of bovine spongiform encephalopathies (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), first gathered public attention. 3 Britain now has 560 biotech companies. Of 70 or so publicly traded biotech concerns in Europe, half are British. This includes the grandfather of British biotech firms, Celtech, which pioneered drugs that exploit the body’s own antibodies to combat disease, and who posted a profit this year for the first time. Britain has approved its first three biotech products this year: a new anesthetic and treatments for migraines and Alzheimer’s disease.

The Netherlands-based firm Qiagen is the leading manufacturer of products for purifying genetic material such as proteins and nucleic acids; its products are now being used in most labs around the world.

The Swedish firm Prosequencing has become a technological leader in making systems for automated DNA sequence analysis, which is essential for mining the rich vein of data in the human genome.

It’s clear that biotechnology is a growth industry whose products promise to change our world in ways that are unfathomable to us today. The question is are our children going to run those bio tech factories? Or are they going to be sweeping the floors of factories owned by the Brits or Swedes?

It doesn’t help when pressure groups try and influence textbook publishers to put out stuff like this:

Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin’s fifth-grade textbooks won’t get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn’t mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill’s Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren’t named.

No Einstein? The man whose theories revolutionized the world isn’t even mentioned? And the three men - Waston, Crick and Wilkins - who unlocked the secrets of the structure of DNA, the biological basis for all life on earth are similarly ignored?

This kind of selective cultural memory is eerily reminiscent of tactics used by the Nazis when they purged their physical sciences of the names and even the achievements of Jewish scientists creating what they called “German” Physics and “German” Biology.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Hans Bethe believed that this kind of nonsense set the German atomic bomb program back significantly. He argued that when you throw out the theories of Einstein, Neils Bohr and others based solely on the fact that they were Jewish, there was no way the complexities involved in constructing an atomic bomb would be uncovered.

So there are extraordinary dangers when science education is subverted to serve some social engineering scheme. Not only does it do an injustice to history, it also poses a danger to the way that textbooks are written:

A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country. One
misstates Newton’s first law of motion. Another says humans can’t hear elephants. Another confuses “gravity” with “gravitational acceleration.” Another shows the equator running through the United States. Individual scientists draft segments of these books, but reviewing the final product is sometimes left to multicultural committees who have no expertise in science.

“Thousands of teachers are saddled with error-filled physical science textbooks,” wrote John Hubisz, a physics professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the author of the report. “Political correctness is often more important than scientific accuracy. Middle-school text publishers now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts.”

United States students are currently ranked 19th out of 21 leading industrialized countries when it comes to science. With attacks on objective scientific education by both the left and the right, the question must be asked: Why can’t Johnny dream? More than any other subject, science opens our minds to the staggering possibilities for acquiring knowledge about both the biggest and the smallest parts of our universe. And if that knowledge is dependent on being taught in such a way as to take into account the cultural sensitivities of students rather than the objective truths discovered through the ages, then Johnny will be left behind by those who don’t pay any attention to such nonsense.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Lean Left blogs the Kansas Idiotarians and makes a plaintive cry for sanity:

This is not about science – it is about using science classes to indoctrinate children in one particular version of religion. Nothing more. That needs to be said. loudly and often.

Agreed. But will the left make equally loud noises about about the multiculturalists and their fanatic attempts to destroy science education by making it more important to take into account a student’s cultural background than get the facts right?

This weeks Watcher’s Vote is in and the winners are:

In the Council category, Carpe Bonum’s excellent post on the status of our forgotten hostages in Iraq entitled : “Hostages: Time for America to Act.”

And in the Non-Council category New Sisyphus’s “The Great Islamic Warrior: Stewardresses, Elementary Schoolchildren and Wounded Crash Survivors.”

Congratulations to this week’s winners!

Marvin Moonbat is in the House!

IT’S NOT GOOD TO BE DEPRESSED (By Marvin Moonbat)

Chloe and I both stayed home from school today. For my part, I’m not missing much. The professor in my “A Post Imperial World: The Rise of Indigenous Peoples and “Rainforest Power” class has become insufferably long winded. He used to be pretty cool. The class (there are three of us) used to start out by discussing the oppression of indigenous peoples all over the world. After a while, we’d link the grievances of say American Indians with episodes of our favorite TV shows. It was great!. Drawing parallels between the “Trail of Tears and MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” was always a challenge.

Then someone ratted the prof out to the Anti-Imperialst studies Dean and that was that. Now, instead of talking about the latest life-changing automobile metamorphisis, we’re stuck listening to this wind bag drone on forever about how indigineous people live, what they believe, and all that stuff that no-one really wants to hear about…except Chloe. Chloe is dead serious about this crap and I’ve learned its better to humor her about this than risk not being able to play “hide the salami” with her for a week or so.

Anyway, we woke up this morning and as we were drinking our recycled coffee, we came across this item that really bummed us both:

What Didn’t Happen In Ohio
Russ Baker

Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings— but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush.

It was like losing all over again.

To have one of our own actually go out and prove the Bushitler didn’t steal the Ohio election is like a betrayal of everything we stand for.

The dummy should have let well enough alone. After all, it’s one thing to say there are things that have to be looked into as far as election irregularities in Ohio. It’s quite another to actually prove that there’s no conspiracy.

What’s Keith Olberman going to do now? What are they going to talk about on “Air America?” Will Daily Kos and The Democratic Underground now shut down because there’s nothing left to investigate?

And if that’s not bad enough, we had our friends in Britain betray us by re-electing that American lap dog Tony Blair. I mean, I just can’t understand it. We’ve now had three elections in the English speaking world and all three - John Howard in Australia, Tony Blair in England, and our very own smirking chimp - reelected even though the Iraq war has proven to be a disaster. Don’t people realize that some really smart people have said the Iraq war is wrong? I mean, I know most of what these smart people have said would happen in Iraq hasn’t happened, what with the successful elections and forming a government and all. And it’s not their fault that they didn’t see that with the successful elections in Iraq democracy would break out all over the middle east. I mean, who could have predicted that? No one did, as far as I know.

So Chloe and I got hit by a double whammy of bad news this morning and we both decided to protest by not going to class. For a while, I kind of thought that we could use the time off to get “reacquainted” with each other so to that end, I got out the really good ganja
and started to roll a really fat one but Chloe stopped me dead in my tracks. What kind of protest is it if we get high and lollygag about in bed all day, she asked.

So instead, Chloe brewed up some herbal tea and initiated her favorite tantric meditation rite involving aromatherapy and some really nasty body oils. She said only by getting in touch with our “inner child” can we appreciate that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and only through prayer and meditation can we rebalance the forces that are so out of whack that Gaia has punished us with global warming, forest fires, and earthquakes. Not to mention angering Pele-`ai-honua , the volcano god.

And you wonder why I’m so depressed today?

I am Ajai Raj, and I am a jackass.

This has to be considered one of the most riotously ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, solipsistic, and sophomoric examples of liberal buffoonery in history. The young man who today is the talk of the internet for being arrested at an Ann Coulter event after saying “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but f**k his wife up the ass?” left a love note for all his moonbat fans at Daily Kos in which he proves that perhaps NOW has been correct about abortion all along; some pregnancies, including the one that resulted in Mr. Raj vomiting forth into this world, should be terminated to save society the trouble of caring for the mentally deficient.

The open letter to Kos readers reveals a pathology so deep as to be beyond description…so of course, I’ll try.

In the screed, Mr. Raj preens, he prances, he’s so self congratulatory and proud that one gets the distinct impression that, if he was able, he’d lick his own balls, so worked up and full of self-satisfied vainglory as he is:

From the beginning I was yelling obscenities along with my friends, roaring at Ms. Coulter’s right-wing bullshit festival the way no one else had the balls to. Mr. Sampath writes in his article that (and this is my take) the protesters were told to be good all along. They were told to sit in the back and hold their signs and leave quietly. No wonder hippies get such a bad rap nowadays; protesters today might as well be ornaments on the Rightmobile. When I want someone to know I’m pissed off, I’m going to throw down and give them a good shit-ruining. I wanted to show Ms. Coulter that people are down if she wants to hold a circle-jerk, but we’re not gonna do it her way. Not me, at least.

So Mr. Raj “threw down” and by “yelling obscenities” and “roaring.” Here is someone who’s so certain of his rightness, his correctness, his goodness that allowing someone to speak who he vehemently disagrees with should be…what, Mr. Raj. Illegal? If not illegal, they should just be prevented from speaking, is that it?

God, the Sandanistas would have loved this guy! For that matter, any quasi-totalitarian regime given the stamp of approval by the likes of Jimmy Carter over the last decade or so could really use the Raj’s on the moonbat left. For you see, this guy and his ilk have a secret yearning for authoritarianism. They’re brown shirt mentality doesn’t require specific instructions from party headquarters. They know exactly what to do. They break up opposition rallies. They destroy opposition printing presses. They beat up, shout down, trip up, and kick in the groin anyone that disagrees with them.

Christian idiotarians pray for their enemies. These guys are a little more demonstrative:

So yes, the Q&A session came around, and it was pathetic. Her slack-jawed fans got up and licked her face so she could pat them on the head- one schmuck offered to be her bodyguard, and she smiled, doubtlessly making a mental note that she wouldn’t touch his nether regions if she were King Midas; liberal protestors posed well-intentioned but woefully timid questions and got shot down in a hail of ignorant shitfire from the She-Dragon. Standing in line awaiting my turn, I watched her send a moderate Republican, who had questioned the sheer incendiary magnitude of her rhetoric, walk away in tears when she tore him apart for daring to question her.

So yes, I saw my “opportunity to say something lewd and offensive.” And I took it.

She had just said something about gay marriage, the typical rightwing bullshit spiel that is still convincing people that the Bible is really the Constitution. Knowing that taking the time to say something insightful, specific, or even slightly critical would get me a lame comeback and a ticket back to my seat, I realized that the only way to win this battle was to fight fire with fire. Or bullshit with bullshit.

Whereupon Mr. Moonbat said his dirty word. Judging by his letter, he should have been excused on the grounds that his vocabulary was inadequate to the task of expressing his vaporous thoughts. Please notice however, the famous moonbat ploy that forgives all sins, covers all blemishes, and wipes clean the slate as Mr. Raj heroically stands on the battlements and waves a bloody shirt while “fighting fire with fire” (OOH! The drama) or “bullsh*t with bullsh*t.” (OOOH! The naughtiness.)

I’ve said it many times; moonbats act like this because they have the emotional maturity of an 11 year old girl. In Mr. Raj’s case, I take that back in order not to insult 11 year old innocents.

Did I give a shit? No. If I had a message, it’s that the whole thing was a joke- hell, our whole political scene today is a fucking joke. Everyone’s out to either pat themselves on the back for being right or whine about how they’re being wronged without ever lifting a finger to fight for it.

So rather than dignify anyone else, I “made masturbatory gestures” as I exited. Again, bingo! I danced a jig and set my hand a-jerkin’ at crotch-level, sneering for the crowd and letting them know I was ready to roll. I yelled to my friends that we were gonna split and made for the door.

What a delicate flower. It takes a special kind of lickspittle to be proud of “sneering” at people. But then, I’m sure he never sneered at anyone. I’ll bet you five to your one that this guy doesn’t even know what a “sneer” is. But like the rest of his remarkably incoherent and vapid testimony, his target is the heart of moonbats who, in their non sexual fantasies, see themselves giving the finger to the rest of the world and everyone cheering them for it.

Then again…maybe that is their sexual fantasy…

If so, then getting arrested obviously made this guy positively orgasmic:

Two cops approached me. I figured they were going to tell me I had to leave, so I said “You can’t fire me, because I quit!”

“You’re under arrest.”

It was my turn to be shocked. I tried to ask them what for; saying “f**k her in the ass”" at a college isn’t a crime, last time I checked. They apparently mistook my inquiries for aggression, and grabbed me roughly and slammed me into the door. Within seconds the backmost two or three rows was surging forward, following the scene as the cops dragged me out the door. They yelled and chanted; my friends were more outraged than I’d ever seen any of them before. As they pushed me into the car, I heard my good friend Jeffrey Stockwell scream, “THIS ISN’T A JUSTICE SYSTEM! YOU CALL THIS PROTECTING AND SERVING?!” The crowd took up a chant at the UTPD officers: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Shame is f**king right. When I asked the cops why they thought I needed cuffing, they told me that they didn’t even see anything that happened, they were just doing as told.

Leaving aside the ignorance of one who doesn’t know that everyone who’s arrested for any reason gets cuffed, the scene the moonbat describes is right out of the Yippie playbook from the 1968 Democratic Convention complete with the crowd chanting “The whole world is watching…The whole world is watching.” Nothing makes a moonbat feel better than to relive the glory days of movement politics when police were the enemy and one was considered heroic to resist the forces of fascism.

It really does take a special kind of nitwit to be a moonbat. And judging from this discourse by Mr. Raj, he’s going to need nitwit lessons to catch up.

UPDATE

I’m glad to see that Mr. Raj’s revealing admission that he’s related to a horses rump made Wizbang’s “Quote of the Day.”

May I nominate Raj’s revelation for ‘Moonbat quote of the month?”

Ann Coulter before her date with Superhawk

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter, known for her sharp tongue and acerbic wit, was arrested today and charged with misdemeanor assault when she allegedly used a bar of soap to wash out the mouth of one of her questioners.

“My mother used to do it when we were kids and used a nasty word and I just figured if it was good enough for my brothers and I it was good enough for a liberal potty mouth.” the gorgeous blond rightwinger said.

The “victim,” Dick Less, was accosted by Coulter immediately after asking a question laced with obscenities at her lecture in Arlington Heights. Reportedly, Coulter approached Mr. Dick Less and, after getting him in what’s known as a “Boston Crab Grapevine Leg Lock,” she allegedly grabbed his hair with one hand and with the other, withdrew a bar of Dial “Tropical Escape” soap and proceeded to thoroughly cleanse the oral orifice of Mr. Dick Less.

After the initial assault, Coulter turned and, according to witnesses, gave Mr. Dick Less a spinning heel kick followed quickly by a cross face chicken wing.

“I don’t know what the moonbat is complaining about.” Coulter said of Dick Less. “After all, I used the tastiest bar of soap I could find. ‘Tropical Escape’ has a nice, fresh, pineapple smell and I hear kids love it.” she added.

Coulter immediately went back to the podium and resumed her lecture to a standing ovation from the crowd.

There were no further disruptions.

Police were uncertain whether to charge Coulter or give her a medal. In the end, they settled on the misdemeanor charge in exchange for autographed copies of Coulter’s book “How to Talk to a Liberal.”

UPDATE

Since the only readers of this post I’ve gotten so far have been of the moonbattis undelici variety, how can I go wrong if I link to My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for a little balance?

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network