Mermelstein: The man who forced us to remember

I first posted a version of this back in August 2006.  Since that time not much showed up on the internet to commemorate the story of Mel Mermelstein, nor to burn his deeds into the history books.  Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub had many fewer readers each day, then too.  This is a story that should not be forgotten about a story that must not be forgotten.

Mel Mermelstein, photo from Auschwitz Study Foundation

In early August 1985, Melvin Mermelstein struck a powerful blow against bogus history and historical hoaxes. Mel won a decision in a California court, in a contract case.

A group of Holocaust deniers had offered a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove that the Holocaust actually happened. Mermelstein had watched his family marched to the gas chambers, and could testify. He offered his evidence. The Holocaust deniers, of course, had no intention of paying up. They dismissed any evidence offered as inadequate, and continued to claim no one could prove that the Holocaust actually occurred.

Mermelstein, however, was a businessman and he knew the law. He knew that the offer of the reward was a sweepstakes, a form of contract. He knew it was a contract enforceable in court.  He sued to collect the offered reward.  The reward was an offer, and Mel Mermelstein accepted the offer and, he said, he performed his part of the bargain. The issue in court would be, was Mermelstein’s evidence sufficient?

Mermelstein’s lawyer had a brilliant idea. He petitioned the court to take “judicial notice” of the fact of the Holocaust. Judicial note means that a fact is so well established that it doesn’t need to be evidenced when it is introduced in court — such as, 2+2=4, the freezing point of water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius, etc.

The court ruled that the evidence presented overwhelmingly established that the Holocaust had occurred — the court made judicial note of the Holocaust. That ruling meant that, by operation of law, Mermelstein won the case. The only thing for the judge to do beyond that was award the money, and expenses and damages.

You can read the case and other materials at the Nizkor Holocaust remembrance site.

Appalachian State University takes the Holocaust seriously — there is a program of study on the issue, reported by the Mountain Times (the school is in Boone, North Carolina — not sure where the newspaper is).

Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations

Mountain Times, August 17, 2006

As co-directors of Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Rennie Brantz and Zohara Boyd are always eager to expand and improve the center’s methods of education. Seldom, though, does this involve airfare.

Brantz and Boyd recently visited Israel to participate in the Fifth International Conference for Education: Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations. The four-day conference was held in late June at Yad Vashem, an institute and museum in Jerusalem that specializes in the Nazi Holocaust. [link added]

“Yad Vashem is an incredible institute,” Brantz said. “It was founded in the ’50s to remember and commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust, and has been the premier international research institute dealing with the Holocaust.”

As Santayana advises, we remember the past in order to prevent its recurring. Clearly, this is a past we need to work harder at remembering.

Despite having been ordered to acknowledge the Holocaust, pay up on their sweepstakes offer, and apologize to Mr. Mermelstein, Holocaust deniers continue to publish claims that Mr. Mermelstein’s account is not accurate, or that it is contradictory or in some other way fails to measure up to the most strict tests of historical accuracy.  So it is important that you remember the story of Mel Mermelstein, and that you spread it far and wide.

More:

• Thomas T. Johnson, the judge who ruled that Holocaust history is a fact, died in late 2011
• Leonard Nimoy played Mermelstein in a television move, “Never Forget”
  
• Dutch Holocaust hero to be honoured in Amsterdam (thejc.com)
• Why Raoul Wallenberg’s centennial matters (timesofisrael.com)
• The man who saved 900 Jewish boys INSIDE a death camp (timesofisrael.com)

Crank history assault on Alabama Public Television

Highly disturbing news from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Alabama Public Television Apparently Heading Far Right

Posted in Extremist Propaganda

by Mark Potok on June 18, 2012

Lord help us. Alabama Public Television (APT), a voice of reason in a state that often seems to have very little, is apparently succumbing to the crazies.

Last week, the two top executives of the network were summarily fired by the Alabama Educational Television Commission, APT’s governing body, after they resisted an effort by a new commissioner to air DVDs produced by a far-right theocrat who has been roundly condemned by historians. In the days that followed, three members of a foundation set up to raise money for APT also resigned.

The videos were produced by David Barton, an evangelical propagandist who claims falsely that America was founded as a Christian nation and has also become Glenn Beck’s unofficial — and completely untrained — “historian.” The DVDs were suggested by commissioner Rodney Herring, an Opelika-based chiropractor who was appointed to the panel last year and elected its secretary in January.

Immediately after meeting in executive session June 12, commissioners ordered APT Executive Director Allan Pizzato and his deputy, Pauline Howland, to clear out their desks and leave APT’s Birmingham headquarters. Pizzato had been APT executive director for 12 years; Howland was his deputy director and the network’s chief financial officer.

Pizzato would not comment on the reasons for the firing, other than to say commissioners were seeking to go in “a new direction.” But Howland, in an interview with Current.org, a news service of the American University’s School of Communication, said that Pizzato and his staff had “grave concerns” about airing the videos, which strongly advocate a religious interpretation of the past that historians say is simply wrong. She said she was “baffled” by the firings but recalled Pizatto asking his staff for advice on how to respond to Herring’s proposal.

Commission Chairman Ferris Stephens disputed Current’s report in an interview with The Associated Press, but gave no specifics. Herring, for his part, claimed that disagreement over the Barton DVDs played an “at best minimal” role in the firings, which he described as part of an overall restructuring effort. “We believe it to be a positive change,” wrote another commissioner, conservative talk radio host J. Holland, in response to AP’s queries about the firings. “Simple as that.”

As simple as that? Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t believe it.

Stephens told the AP that Barton’s videos had been discussed in the last meeting before the one that produced the firings last week. He said there was another item related to Barton’s organization, WallBuilders, on the agenda for last week’s meeting, but that the commission didn’t get to that item before adjourning. Herring, for his part, denied knowing that Pizzato and Howland had any opinion at all about the DVDs, although Howland told Current that Pizzato had made it clear that he thought the films were “inappropriate” for APT.

Why is it that Pizzato and Howland were fired just as the matter seemed to be coming to a head? Why won’t Stephens and the other commissioners cough up the real reason for the firings, if it wasn’t what seems obvious? When the AP story ran last week, Herring was quoted saying the station may indeed broadcast some of the Barton videos. In fact, he said the commission had consulted attorneys about that possibility. That’s a funny thing to do if you’re just deciding whether to show a film on public television, not making controversial personnel decisions.

The sad truth is, this kind of extremism is getting to be par for the course in Alabama. We passed the immigrant-bashing H.B. 56 and, when legal problems with it came up, our legislators responded by actually making the draconian bill even worse. Last month, the same legislature, after the John Birch Society warned hysterically about a United Nations global sustainability plan, actually passed a law saying that property here cannot be confiscated as part of Agenda 21 — even though that entirely voluntary plan does not and could not require that. One of our current congressmen even claimed a few years back that he knew of 17 “socialists” in the U.S. Congress — although, like Joe McCarthy, he declined to name them.

Why does Rodney Herring want to show Barton’s videos? He isn’t saying. But what Barton has to say should make Alabamians’ hair stand on end.

Barton doesn’t only not believe in global warming — he thinks reducing carbon dioxide emissions would actually devastate the planet. Barton fought to have the names of Martin Luther King Jr. and labor activist Cesar Chavez removed from public school textbooks. He says God set the borders of nations, so immigration reform is unnecessary. He argues that homosexuality should be regulated because gay people “die decades earlier than heterosexuals” and more than half of all gays have had more than 500 sex partners — both falsehoods.

It isn’t only liberals who dislike Barton. Derek Davis, director of the J.M. Dawson Institute on Church-State Studies at Baylor University, says “a lot of what he presents is a distortion of the truth.” J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, says his writings are “laced with exaggerations, half-truths and misstatements of fact.” Mark Lilla, a scholar who has taught at University of Chicago and Columbia University, says Barton’s work is “schlock history written by [a] religious propagandist” and uses “selective quotations out of context.”

But none of this apparently came up when the commissioners, in their great wisdom, decided to fire Allan Pizzato and Pauline Howland. Instead, it looks like Barton’s backers succeeded, by a reported 5-2 vote, in silencing their own eminently sensible executives, and then refusing to come clean with the public about their action.

Once again, Alabama will be the poorer. Lord help us.

Supporters of Alabama Public Television set up a website to provide information on the fight to save APT.

David Barton is, of course, the voodoo history promoter from Texas, former vice-chairman of the Texas Republican Party who led the party into a variety of anti-education policies.  Barton’s organization to spread his bogus history claims is Wallbuilders.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Ellie.

More:

• PBS employees fired after standing against bogus Religious Right history (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Alabama Public Television Executives Fired Because They Didn’t Want to Air Videos by Pseudo-Historian David Barton (patheos.com)
• Some Alabama Controversies (geekalabama.com)
• Alabama Public Television Executive Director Allan Pizzato & CFO Fired, Frog-Marched & Escorted Out Of Building (warmsouthernbreeze.wordpress.com)
• Here’s a post from Barton’s supporters:   SPLC’s Potok Again Lies about David Barton (americanclarion.com) (I cannot vouch for the odd and disturbing ads you may get when you click to that site, and afterward, nor can I adequately warn you.) (Also, if you insist on posting the facts, you’ll get banned there.  Fair warning.)
• Alabama Public Television Officials Fired After Opposing Anti-Gay Christian Right Programming (thinkprogress.org)
• Madison County Democrats call for resignation of Alabama Educational Television commissioners (al.com)
• Links 6/16/12 (mikethemadbiologist.com)
• Why David Barton won’t defend his inaccurate books (RightWingWatch.com)

One more time: Recognizing bogus history

2012 is an election year, a time when we make history together as a nation.  Potential turning points in history often get tarred with false interpretations of history to sway an election, or worse, a completely false recounting of history.  Especially in campaigns, we need to beware false claims of history, lest we be like the ignorants George Santayana warned about, doomed to repeat errors of history they do not know or understand.  How to tell that a purported piece of history is bogus?  This is mostly a repeat of a post that first appeared at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub six years ago.

Recognizing bogus history, 1

Robert Park provides a short e-mail newsletter every Friday, covering news in the world of physics. It’s called “What’s New.” Park makes an art of smoking out bogus science and frauds people try to perpetrate in the name of science, or for money. He wrote an opinion column for the Chronicle of Higher Education [now from Quack Watch; CHE put it behind a paywall] published January 31, 2003, in which he listed the “7 warning signs of bogus science.”

Please go read Park’s entire essay, it’s good.

And it got me thinking about whether there are similar warning signs for bogus history? Are there clues that a biography of Howard Hughes is false that should pop out at any disinterested observer? Are there clues that the claimed quote from James Madison saying the U.S. government is founded on the Ten Commandments is pure buncombe? Should Oliver Stone have been able to to more readily separate fact from fantasy about the Kennedy assassination (assuming he wasn’t just going for the dramatic elements)? Can we generalize for such hoaxes, to inoculate ourselves and our history texts against error?

Perhaps some of the detection methods Park suggests would work for history. He wrote his opinion piece after the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in which the Court laid out some rules lower courts should use to smoke out and eliminate false science. As Park described it, “The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.” The Court said lower courts must act as gatekeepers against science buncombe — a difficult task for some judges who, in their training as attorneys, often spent little time studying science.

Some of the Daubert reasoning surfaced in another case recently, the opinion in Pennsylvania district federal court in which Federal District Judge John Jones struck down a school board’s order that intelligent design be introduced to high school biology students, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

Can we generalize to history, too? I’m going to try, below the fold.

Here are Park’s seven warning signs, boiled down:

Park wrote:

Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs — even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate. [I have cut out the explanations. — E.D.]

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

Voodoo history

Here, with thanks to Robert Park, is what I propose for the warning signs for bogus history, for voodoo history:

1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of non-historians, sometimes for pay.
2. The author says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.  Bogus history relies more on invective than investigation; anyone with an opposing view is an “idiot,” or evil.
   
3. The sources that verify the new interpretation of history are obscure, or unavailable; if they involve a famous person, the sources are not those usually relied on by historians.
4. Evidence for the history is anecdotal.
5. The author says a belief is credible because it has endured for some time, or because many people believe it to be true.
6. The author has worked in isolation, and fails to incorporate or explain other, mainstream versions of the history of the incident, and especially the author fails to explain why they are in error.
   
7. The author must propose a new interpretation of history to explain an observation.

Any history account that shows one or more of those warning signs should be viewed skeptically.

In another post, I’ll flesh out the reasoning behind why they are warning signs.

Monckton in New Zealand: His reputation for fabrication preceded him

John Abraham’s work ended up giving Christopher Monckton a bumpy ride into New Zealand, according to Country 99 News:

Monckton was lucky the news channel labeled him “Climate Skeptic” and not “Barking Mad.”

More: 

• Professor Abraham’s original presentation highlighting, profiling, revealing and documenting Monckton’s many, many errors about global warming, climate change, and the price of bananas in Brooklyn

“When we’re telling whoppers about Obama and government, please don’t pester us with the facts” Department

First:  American Elephant, a blog that insults pachyderms with its mendacious ways, stretches for ways to complain about President Obama.  In a recent post, the author tried to poke ill-humored fun at Obama and companies he’s visited over the past couple of years.  It’s the headline that caught my attention:

“President Obama has never held a private job, but picks the winners and losers for the economy”

The premise is false, of course — it’s based on that Republican smear meme that Obama and his cabinet lack experience in the private sector, a smear that breaks down quickly if anyone looks at the biographies of the cabinet.  Obama also comes from the private sector, though when confronted with the facts the meme spreaders tend to make rash and foolish claims like “the Catholic church is public sector” and “lawyers all work for the government.”

Cartoon by Chris Madden, via TV Tropes

I left a response there, but don’t expect the blog owner to show the decency of allowing it through moderation:

President Obama worked for a private group providing services to people below the poverty line, and then he worked for a very large private law firm, while teaching at the privately-run University of Chicago.  He had never worked for government until his election to the Illinois State Senate (is that salaried?).

You should probably correct the headline.

As if.  Not only is the headline wrong, but the evidence doesn’t support the second premise, and there are other serious problems with the claims and arguments advanced there.  True American elephants probably take to drink to try to forget what’s being done under their name.

Second, and probably third:  There is the minor kerfuffle of the hoax report out of Pakistan that nuclear power plants in Nebraska are either near meltdown, or already melted down, and you don’t know about it because President Obama ordered a news blackout to avoid panic but at the same time condemning hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners to radiation poisoning deaths.  It’s an absurd story on several fronts and several levels — news of the flood plight of the power plants has been reported around the world, for example — but those bent on being suckered by every conspiracy claim to come down the pike, or bent on criticizing President Obama no matter how much they must twist the fact to do it, cannot be dissuaded.

Take for example this odd blog:  A discussion of the imagined meltdown quickly disintegrates into defense of holding on to birther views despite Obama’s release of his “long form” birth certificate (no good information goes un-urinated upon).  Then discussion veers off into all sorts of paranoia — UN “control” of U.S. lands, occupation of several states by rogue Transportation Security Agents (you didn’t hear about it due to the news blackout, most likely), Obama’s being controlled by or controlling GE (‘didn’t GE have something to do with the design of those nuclear reactors?’), Army Corps of Engineers plots to flood the Midwest (????), Obama’s overturning the Constitution through the use of executive orders (which no one there can find at the moment, but they’re sure they exist, somewhere . . .  gee, did we misplace it?) including a wholly imaginary order to take over all rural lands in the U.S. (why?), and complaints that the U.S. is not deporting U.S. soldiers or their families quickly enough.

Such a ball of delusional paranoia and errors of history, law, and other facts!  One might imagine these people so involved in tracking down misinformation and distorting real information that they forget to kick their dogs.  (Seriously, I’d tend to think these people could be helped by having a dog or a cat, except for the very real fear I have they’d forget to feed the creatures; like a drowning person, fighting all efforts to save them.)

Our nation has a collective inability to deal with the facts of too many situations, because too many people simply deny the facts in front of our collective national face.  Jonathan Kay’s recent book, Among the Truthers, gets at the problem — you can imagine how strongly any of these bloggers and commenters would resist even reading Kay’s book.  It’s not that they seek information to make good decisions on policy, but that they seek the misinformation to justify their paranoid claims that “we are all really, really screwed!“

As with the blogs noted above, we witness the birth of voodoo history, bogus history, and intentional ignorance.

There is a great danger from these cesspools of willful ignorance.  As more people refuse to grant credence to facts, to reality, it becomes more difficult to muster a consensus on what to do about any particular problem.  Wildfires and drought in Texas this year already wiped out more than three-fifths of the state’s wheat harvest; floods in the upper Midwest will surely do serious damage to wheat crops there.  We face a shortage of the surpluses of wheat the nation has used to bring peace and vanquish hunger around the world for the past 60 years — think of our “sale” of wheat to the old Soviet Union, stopping the starvation death toll under 10 million and indebting the USSR to the U.S. and the non-communist West — a debt the USSR never could pay off, and a debt which was the hammer to start the crumbling of the foundations of Soviet Communism.  In short, we have a wheat supply problem, caused in no small part by weather extremes that are, mostly likely, aggravated by global warming.

Can we agree to take action?  Probably not, not so long as so many people deny that warming is happening and throw every roadblock in the path of action, in the name of “preventing government takeover.”

As a nation, we have problems with flood control, and emergency preparedness, and the management of undeveloped lands and farm lands — not to mention the many urban problems we face.  What are the odds we can get a consensus on any of those problems, at least enough of a consensus to take constructive action?

For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, begins the old saw.  We can’t even get agreement that horseshoes should be nailed to a horse’s hoof — how can we get the consensus to make sure there are enough nails to do the job?

• Perhaps related:  Jason Stanley at the online New York Times, explains how words can be used to unfairly silence others – the use of propaganda to distort the truth, mischaracterize and demonize good people and good views.

The Sarah Palin History Network 06/07/11

The Sarah Palin History Network explains the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The Sarah Palin History Network 06/07/11, posted with vodpod

Is any comment really necessary?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Joan Samuels Kaiser.

What sort of crazy is the warming denialist?

I’ve got to stop looking over there.

Goddard’s got a post up showing the great disregard he has for the facts, and the law, and history, etc., etc., etc.  It may be an unintentional showing, but there it sits, “like a mackerel in the moonlight, both shining and stinking.”

Jerome Corsi, that serial fictionalizer of vital issues, has a book out promoting his slimy schemes besmirch President Obama.  Goddard urges people to buy it.

But they really pile on in the comments.  It’s almost as if Casey Luskin had a whole family just like himself, and they got together to whine about Judge Roberts again.

Warming denialism, creationism and birthers — is it all just three minor variations on the same brain-sucking virus?  Or could three different diseases produce the same sort of crazy on so many different issues?

I’m reminded of the old saw that you cannot reason a person out of a position he didn’t reach by reason.  These guys will never see the light.  Heaven knows, it ain’t evidence that gets ‘em where they are now.

Previous posts at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• “Stubborn Birthers soldier on”
• California court tosses out the challenge
• “Birther Karma:  Hoaxers get hoaxed on alleged Kenya document”
• “Birther control“
• Birthers wallow in the gutter
• NBC on the issue (note links)
• Blogger indicted for threats against Obama
• Election certified
• “Fail repeated”
• “6 ways challenges to Obama’s citizenship fail”

Special kind of birther crazy:

• “Bush appointed judge smacks down Orly Taitz,” at Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• “Taitz appeals to UN for protection,” Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Hawaii confirms Obama’s eligibility (again); but who knows where Donald Trump really came from?

NBC’s Michael Isikoff grubbed out the story to get Hawaii to confirm, once again, that President Obama’s birth certificate is archived and well, and says exactly what Obama said it says, and what Hawaii said it says, under seal.

The mystery deepens:  Why is Donald Trump making an issue about this now?

After the Bathtub noted that we don’t know where Trump was born, and that the story of his life can’t be corroborated exactly as he claims, Trump released what he called a birth certificate.

But it turned out to be bogus.

What is Trump trying to hide, with all his pointless fulminations?  At this point, anything he releases must be regarded as suspect.

Quotes that will live in infamy: Michelle Bachmann, another history “F” (“shot heard ’round the world”)

In Concord, New Hampshire, on March 11 and 12, 2011, apparently testing to see whether that little state has bad enough education standards before announcing a presidential bid, Michelle Bachmann butchered history and geography once again, according to the conservative Minnesota Independent:

“You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord,” she said, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” an ode to the lives lost at the start of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

How many bites at the apple does stupid get?  Has Ed Brayton picked up on this yet?

Minnesota U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann

More:

• “Concord Hymn” read by Bill Clinton
• “Paul Revere’s Ride” 150 years old during National Poetry Month (2010)
• “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”
• Celebrating April 19:  Paul Revere and the shot heard ’round the world
• Remember why it is important to watchdog Tea Partiers as they savage U.S. history, from this article by Erik Christiansen and Jeremy Sullivan in Inside Higher Ed

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pat Carrithers.

Update:  Oh, yeah, others noticed:

• New American did its damnedest to explain it away as a slip of the tongue – either assuming Bachmann is too reckless not to use prepared remarks for her first foray into New Hampshire (maybe a more serious indictment), or not paying attention to her written remarks (Was it just one more in a long string of really stupid slips of the tongue?  Loose tongues sink as many ships as loose lips . . .); in another article New American falsely claimed a worldwide ban on DDT, falsely claiming the ban killed 30 million kids, and said that it disrupted food growing in America, though food crops hadn’t been sprayed with DDT for nearly a decade when its use was banned on agricultural crops in the U.S. alone.  Accuracy isn’t in that animal
• And that site for undiscriminating, miseducated people, American Elephants, thought Bachmann’s earlier distortions of history just lovely.
• Peter Fenn blogging at U.S. News and World Report asks, “Why does anyone take Michelle Bachmann seriously?”
• Politico notes the long history of Bachmann getting the facts wrong, and reveals that Bachmann repeated the error about the location of the Battle of Concord at least twice in that New Hampshire swing. Bachmann can’t hire competent aides, either?  Politico questions Bachmann’s basic governing competence, noting that, while she is a member of the House Intelligence Committee and should know better, she urged President Obama to follow the counsel of Gen. David Patraeus about intervention in Libya.  Petraeus isn’t in the chain of command on Libya since he took over the job in Afghanistan several months ago.
• The Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor took a hands-off approach, using the Associated Press story on the gaffe
• Cartoonist Jeff Danziger, one of America’s best, puts the event into pithy perspective (see below)
• Mike the Mad Biologist, who uses one of the greatest images for free speech as his avatar, lists Bachmann as “dumber than a sack of hammers”
• Even Little Green Footballs appears to take after Bachmann, but with an account that is, after all, just the facts

Jeff Danziger

Fox News needs to rein in Steven Milloy

The stuff NPR’s money guy said is rather pale by comparison.  Fox News needs to act, and apologize and retract for their commentator Steven Milloy’s errors and rash claims, if their commentator won’t.

Green Hell? Milloy slanders Ruckelshaus as “mass murderer”

This week, EPA bashing took front and center on the performance stage that passes as Congress these days.  There is a school of thought that thinks EPA should be eviscerated because EPA is carrying out the mandate an earlier Congress gave it, to clean up the air.  Especially, the recent assailants claim, EPA should not try to reduce carbon emissions, because clean air might cost something.

Steven Milloy, who makes crude and false claims against William Ruckelshaus, a great lawyer and the hero of the Saturday Night Massacre. Why does Milloy carry such a pathetic grudge?

Wholly apart from the merits, or great lack of merits to those arguments, the anti-EPA crowd is just ugly.

78-year-old William Ruckelshaus, the Hero of the Saturday Night Massacre, a distinguished lawyer and businessman, and the founding Director of EPA who was called back to clean it up after the Reagan administration scandals, granted an interview on EPA bashing to Remapping Debate, an ambitious, independent blog from the Columbia School of Journalism designed to provide information essential to policy debates that too-often gets overlooked or buried.  [Remapping Debate sent a note that they are not affiliated with CSJ; my apologies for the error.]

Ruckelshaus, as always, gave gentlemanly answers to questions about playing politics with science, and bashing good, honest and diligent government workers as a method of political discourse.

Steven Milloy, one of the great carbuncles on the face of climate debate or any science issue, assaulted Ruckelshaus at Milloy’s angry, bitter blog, Green Hell.  Milloy calls Ruckelshaus “a mass-murderer,” a clear invitation for someone to attack the man. Milloy wrote, cravenly:

He’s the 20th century’s only mass murderer to survive and thrive (as a venture capitalist) in the 21st century.

Milloy owes Ruckelshaus an apology and a complete retraction.  I rather hope Ruckelshaus sues — while Milloy will claim the standards under New York Times vs. Sullivan as a defense, because Ruckelshaus is a public figure, I think the only question a jury would have to deal with is how much malice aforethought Milloy exhibits.  Malice is obvious.  Heck, there might not even be a question for a jury — Milloy loses on the law (nothing he claims against Ruckelshaus is accurate or true in any way).

This is much more damning than what got two NPR officials to lose their jobs.

Who will stand up for justice here?  Rep. Upton?  Rep. Boehner?  Anthony Watts?

I tried to offer a correction, and since then have written Milloy demanding an apology and retraction — neither comment has surfaced yet on Milloy’s blog.  Here’s the truth Milloy hasn’t printed:

No, Sweeney did not rule that DDT is not a threat to the environment. He said quite the opposite. Sweeney wrote, in his ruling:

20. DDT can have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish and estuarine organisms when directly applied to the water.

21. DDT is used as a rodenticide. [DDT was used to kill bats in homes and office buildings; this was so effective that, coupled with accidental dosing of bats from their eating insects carrying DDT, it actually threatened to wipe out some species of bat in the southwest U.S.]

22. DDT can have an adverse effect on beneficial animals.

23. DDT is concentrated in organisms and can be transferred through food chains.

On that basis, two federal courts ruled that DDT must be taken off the market completely. Sweeney agreed with the findings of the courts precisely, but he determined that the law did not give him the power to order DDT off the market since the newly-proposed labels of the DDT manufacturers restricted use to emergency health-related tasks. With the benefit of rereading the two federal courts’ decisions, Ruckelshaus noted that the courts said the power was already in the old law, and definitely in the new law. [See, for example, EDF v. Ruckelshaus, 439 F. 2d 584 (1971)]

DDT was banned from use on crops in the U.S. as an ecosystem killer. It still is an ecosystem killer, and it still deserves to be banned.

Ruckelshaus’s order never traveled outside the U.S. DDT has never been banned in most nations of the world, and even though DDT has earned a place on the list of Dirty Dozen most dangerous pollutants, even under the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty of 2001, DDT is available for use to any country who wishes to use it.

Please get your facts straight.

Would you, Dear Reader,  help spread the word on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or any other service you have, that the Brown Lobby has gone too far in it’s error-based propaganda against clean air and those who urge a better environment?  Please?

Hoaxing Congress: Claiming DDT as pixie dust

Tuesday morning, March 8,  the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce opened hearings on global warming, staging an assault on science with a series of witnesses, some of whom recently have made a career out of mau-mauing scientists.

One witness took after the EPA directly and Rachel Carson by implication, with a specious claim that DDT is harmless.  Donald Roberts is a former member of the uniformed public health service.  Since retiring, and perhaps for a while before, he started running with a bad crowd.  Of late he’s been working with the Merry Hoaxsters of the unrooted Astroturf organization Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), a group dedicated to publishing editorials tearing down the reputation of Rachel Carson, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

(That would all be purple prose, were it not accurate in its description of people, organizations and their actions.)

Here’s a link to Roberts’ written testimony at the committee website.

(Here’s a link to all the other written stuff from the March 8 hearing.)

Why was Roberts testifying at a hearing on global warming?  He’s carrying water for the anti-science, “please-do-nothing” corporate crowd.  It’s a tactic from the old tobacco lobbyist book:  Roberts claims that scientists got everything wrong about DDT, and that the ban on DDT done in error has wreaked havoc in the third world.  Therefore, he says, we should never trust scientists.  If scientists say “duck!” don’t bother, in other words.

Roberts is in error.  Scientists, especially Rachel Carson, were dead right about DDT.  Because corporate interests refused to listen to them, the overuse and abuse of DDT rendered it ineffective in the fight against malaria, and DDT use as part of a very ambitious campaign to eradicate malaria had to be abandoned in 1965.  The entire campaign had to be abandoned as a result, and more than 30 million kids have died since.

So don’t grant credence to Roberts now.  He’s covering up one of the greatest industrial screw-ups in history, a screw up that, by Roberts’ own count, has killed 30 million kids.  What in the world would motivate Roberts to get the story so wrong, to the detriment of so many kids?

Roberts said:

Putting issues of EPA budget aside, I want to introduce my technical comments with a quote from a recent Associated Press article with a lead statement “none of EPA’s actions is as controversial as its rules on global warming.”  In my opinion, this is wrong.

Roberts is correct here in his opinion.  It is simply wrong that EPA’s rules on global warming and controls of the pollutants that cause it should be controversial.  Among air pollution scientists the rules are not controversial.  Among climate scientists the rules are not controversial.  Roberts and his colleagues at the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute, Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) work hard to manufacture controversy where the science does not support their case.

It is wrong.  Roberts should be ashamed.

Roberts said:

Almost forty years ago EPA banned DDT in the United States. Its action against DDT was extraordinarily controversial, and still is. As activists advanced fearful claims against DDT, the EPA was warned, over and over again, a ban would destroy critically important disease control programs and millions upon millions of poor people in developing countries would die as consequence. Leaders of the World Health and Pan American Health Organizations, and even the U.S. Surgeon General warned against the ban. The EPA banned DDT anyway, and the doomsday predictions of those public health leaders proved prescient.

Hmmm.  Roberts signed a “truth in testimony” statement — but that’s not the truth, even if no one paid him to fib.

EPA’s ban on DDT in the U.S. was limited to the United States.  Roberts doesn’t say it flat out, but he implies that the U.S. ban on spraying DDT on cotton fields in Texas and Arkansas — and cotton was about the only crop where DDT was still used — somehow caused a ban on DDT in Africa, or Asia, or South America, or other places where malaria still occurs.

Not so.

In fact, EPA Director William Ruckelshaus defied two federal courts who had ordered a complete ban on DDT use and manufacturing — and left U.S. manufacturing to continue for export markets.  This met all objections to the U.S. ban from all health officials.  DDT use could be allowed in the U.S. for health reasons, or for other emergencies (DDT was used in the Pacific Northwest against the tussock moth in 1974, after the “ban”).  Because U.S. DDT manufacturing was dedicated to export, the ban on domestic use of DDT effectively multiplied the stocks of DDT available to fight malaria, or river blindness, or any other insect vector disease.

I’m also not sure that health officials “pleaded” to stop the U.S. ban on any grounds, but certainly they did not plead with Ruckelshaus to keep spraying DDT on cotton.  Roberts is making stuff up in effect, if not in intent.

Probably more to the point, health officials had stopped significant use of DDT in Africa in 1965, seven years before EPA acted in the U.S., because overuse of DDT on crops in Africa had bred mosquitoes that were resistant and immune to the stuff. Since 1955, in close cooperation with the malaria-fighting experts from the Rockefeller Foundation including the great Fred Soper, WHO carried on a methodical, militant campaign to wipe out malaria.  The program required that public health care be beefed up to provide accurate malaria diagnoses, and complete treatment of human victims of the parasitic disease.  Then an army of house sprayers would move in, dosing the walls of houses and huts with insecticide.  Most malaria-carrying mosquitoes at the time would land on the walls of a home or hut after biting a human and getting a blood meal, pausing to squeeze out heavy, excess water to make flight easier.  If the wall were coated with an insecticide, the mosquito would die before being able to bite many more people, maybe before becoming capable of spreading malaria.

DDT was Soper’s insecticide of choice because it was long-lasting — six months or more — and astonishingly deadly to all small creatures it contacted. 

But, as Malcolm Gladwell related in his 2001 paean to Soper in The New Yorker, Soper and his colleagues well understood they were racing against the day that mosquitoes became resistant enough to DDT that their program would not work.  They had hoped the day would not arrive until the late 1970s or so — but DDT is such an effective killer that it greatly speeds evolutionary processes.  In the mid-1960s, before an anti-malaria campaign could even be mounted in most of Subsaharan Africa, resistant and immune mosquitoes began to stultify the campaign.  By 1965, Soper’s crews worked hard to find a substitute, but had to switch from DDT.  By 1972 when the U.S. banned DDT use on cotton in the U.S., it was too late to stop the resistance genes from killing WHO’s anti-malaria program.  In 1969 WHO formally abandoned the goal of malaria eradication.  The fight against malaria switched to control.

Roberts claims, implicitly, that people like those who worked with Soper told EPA in 1971 that DDT was absolutely essential to their malaria-fighting efforts.  That could not be accurate.  In 1969 the committee that oversaw the work of the UN voted formally to end the malaria eradication project.  In effect, then, Roberts claims UN and other health officials lied to EPA in 1971.  It is notable that Soper is credited with eradicating malaria from Brazil by 1942, completely without DDT, since DDT was not then available.  Soper’s methods depended on discipline in medical care and pest control, and careful thought as to how to beat the disease — DDT was a help, but not necessary.

Interestingly, the only citation Roberts offers is to his own, nearly-self-published book, in which he indicts almost all serious malaria fighters as liars about DDT.

Can Roberts’ testimony be trusted on this point?  I don’t think we should trust him.

In fact, DDT and the eradication campaign had many good effects.  In 1959 and 1960, when DDT use was at its peak in the world, malaria deaths numbered about 4 million annually.  The eradication campaign ultimately was ended, but it and other malaria-fighting efforts, and general improvements in housing and sanitation, helped cut the annual death toll to 2 million a year by 1972.

After the U.S. stopped spraying DDT on cotton, mosquitoes did not migrate from Texas and Arkansas to Africa.  As noted earlier, the EPA order stopping agricultural use, left manufacturing untouched, to increase U.S. exports.  So the ban on DDT in the U.S. increased the amount of DDT available to fight malaria.

Malaria fighting, under Soper’s standards, required great discipline among the malaria fighters — the sort of discipline that governments in Subsaharan Africa could not provide.  Had WHO not slowed its use of DDT because of mosquito resistance to the stuff, WHO still would not have been able to mount eradication campaigns in nations where 80% of residences could not be sprayed regularly.

Advances in medical care, and better understanding of malaria and the vectors that spread it, helped continue the downward trend of malaria deaths.  There was a modest uptick in the 1980s when the parasites themselves developed resistance to the drugs commonly used to treat the disease.  With the advent of pharmaceuticals based on Chinese wormwood, or artemisinin-based drugs, therapy for humans has become more effective.  Today, the annual death toll to malaria has been cut to under a million, to about 900,000 per year — a 75% drop from DDT’s peak use, a 50% drop from the U.S. ban on farm use of DDT.

With the assistance of WHO, most nations who still suffer from malaria have adopted a strategy known as Integrated Vector Management, or IVM (known as integrated pest management or IPM in the U.S.).  Pesticides are used sparingly, and insect pests are monitored regularly and carefully to be sure they are not developing genetic-based resistance or immunity to the pesticides.  This is the method that Rachel Carson urged in 1962, in her book, Silent Spring.  Unfortunately, much of the malaria-suffering world didn’t come to these methods until after the turn of the century.

Progress against malaria has been good since 2001, using Rachel Carson’s methods.

Don Roberts’ blaming of science, EPA, WHO, and all other malaria fighters is not only misplaced, wrong in its history and wrong in its science, but it is also just nasty.  Is there any way Roberts could not know and understand the facts?

These are the facts Roberts works to hide from Congress:

1. “Science” and scientists were right about DDT.  DDT is a dangerous substance, uncontrollable in the wild according to federal court findings and 40 years of subsequent research.  If we were to judge the accuracy of scientists about DDT, we would have to conclude that they were deadly accurate in their judgment that use of DDT should be stopped.
2. If the ban on DDT was controversial in 1972, it should not be now.  All research indicates that the judgment of EPA and its director, William Ruckelshaus, was right.
3. EPA was not warned that a ban on agricultural use of DDT would harm public health programs, in the U.S., nor anywhere else in the world.  In any case, EPA’s jurisdiction ends at U.S. borders — why would WHO say anything at all?
4. DDT use to fight malaria had been curtailed in 1965, years before the U.S. ban on farm use, because overuse of DDT on crops had bred DDT-resistant and DDT-immune mosquitoes.  Consequently, there was not a huge nor vociferous lobby who warned that health would be put at risk if DDT were banned.  Claims that these warnings were made are either false or grossly misleading.
5. Malaria death rates declined to less than 50% of what they were when DDT was banned from farm use in the U.S. — there was no “doomsday” because the U.S. stopped spraying DDT on cotton, and there never has been a serious shortage of DDT for use against malaria, anywhere in the world.

How much of the rest of the testimony against doing something about global warming, was complete hoax?

More:

• Tim Lambert at Deltoid dissected the errors in Dr. Roberts’ claims against a UN study, claims that Roberts is spreading far and wide; Roberts claims the UN committed fraud, but it appears he is in error in his statistics and mathematical computations; Lambert also commented on Roberts’ testimony to Congress
• RealClimate gave a heads up on the hearing, and live-blogged the thing at the Science site
• Climate Progress has a few things to say
• Climate Central live blogged the hearing
• Prehearing comments at FrumForum, including puzzling over Roberts’ testifying

[Editor's note:  My apologies.  I put this together on three different machines while conducting other activities.  On proofing, I find several paragraphs simply disappeared, and edits to make up for the time of composing and fix tenses, got lost.  It should be mostly okay, now, and I'll add in the links that disappeared shortly . . . oh, the sorry work of the part-time blogger.]

Roger Bate’s simple lie about DDT

In the last two weeks we’ve seen a virtual-world assault by Richard Tren, Roger Bate and Don Roberts, alternately telling fantastic tales about how Rachel Carson from beyond the grave organized a mass murder that rivals Joseph Stalin, or saying that environmentalists conspire to keep life-saving chemicals from getting to Africa and Asia.

This morning’s e-mail brought a release from the often-fact-challenged American Enterprise Institute, under the by-line of Roger Bate — “The UN’s Scientific Fraud Against DDT.”

Fraud?  That’s all on Bate.  Here are things Bate will not tell you:

• No malaria fighting organization claims it needs more DDT.
• DDT has never been banned in Africa, nor Asia.
• If any nation wishes to use DDT to fight malaria, that nation need only write a letter to the World Health Organization informing WHO of that fact.
• If anyone violates the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty (POPs) and uses DDT without telling WHO first, there is no penalty.
• Malaria death rates are, now, at the lowest level in human history.  While there is a threat of a resurgence of malaria, the threat comes because the malaria parasites themselves develop resistant to the pharmaceuticals used to treat the disease in humans — no connection to DDT.
• DDT use cannot stop malaria.  Consider:  India is one of two or three nations today who still manufacture DDT, and India uses more DDT than all the rest of the world’s nations put together.  Malaria is still a problem for India.
• Beating malaria requires more than poisoning the hell out of Africa.

Roger Bate:  Walking science, history, law and policy fraud.  His claims are hoaxes.

Update: Tim Lambert at Deltoid looked at the claims of Bate and Roberts, and found that they appear to have made many errors in simple math and statistics.  Read about it here.

DDT: Zombie ideas of the right-winged and ill-informed

John Quiggin’s done with his book, Zombie Economics:  How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us.

Cover of John Quiggin's Zombie Economics

Go buy a copy.  You will be happy you did.

Today, at Crooked Timber he’s looking at zombie ideas he was sure would eventually go away — like the bizarre, false idea that a lot more DDT should be used to fight malaria.

Is Quiggin ever wrong?

Quote of the moment: Lewis Carroll on Republican politics, climate skeptics, DDT advocates and creationism

Alice and the Red Queen - illustration by Sir John Tenniel

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland, 1866

[Yes, the illustration is from Through the Looking Glass, 1871]