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.

If Stalin said America is “a healthy body,” why can’t anyone find the source?

Joseph Stalin would have to have been drunk to call the U.S. "healthy," and to have complimented America's patriotism, morality and spiritual life. Even then, it would be unlikely. Why does this quote keep circulating?

This has been floating around Tea Party and other shallow venues for a while, but I’ll wager Stalin did not say it:

“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold:  Its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.  If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.”

I can’t find any source for it; it’s mostly quoted on right-wing sites where people marvel over what a prophet Stalin was.  All requests for a citation in five or six different forums I’ve checked, are unanswered.  Nothing like it appears at the often-checked Wikiquote.  The Stalin Archive holds nothing close to the claimed quote.

Perhaps more telling:  Is it likely that Joe Stalin ever would have called the U.S. “a healthy body?”  Stalin was of a school that claimed capitalism was diseased, and America was infested with a soon-to-be terminal case.  If he called America “diseased” by patriotism and religion, it would be consistent with other statements, but his calling America healthy for patriotism and spiritual life, it’s inconsistent with other claims he made, about America and about capitalism (see Stalin’s 1929 remonstrance to the U.S. Communist Party, for example).

So, Dear Readers, my request to you:  Can you offer the source of this quote, Joseph Stalin or not?

Why would a false claim from Stalin get such a life on the internet?

Update, March 15, 2012:  I’m calling this one:  It’s a bogus quote.  Joseph Stalin didn’t say it.  Not as many comments here as e-mails and comments on other discussion boards and Facebook — no one has come even close to anything like the line above from Stalin.  No source quoting the line even bothers to give a decade, let alone a year, a location, and a citation that would pass muster in a sophomore high school English class.  Tea Partiers, you’ve tried to twist history again — stop it.

Climate change deniers in high dudgeon as leaked memos reveal their deceptions

Previously:  John Mashey finished another epic analysis of the climate denialist world showing clear wrong-doing and potential violations of federal tax law on the part of denialists.  But as it was going to press, someone hacked the executive board of the anti-science Heartland Institute, and dropped the notes exposing the group as a propaganda bunch working hard against science into a couple of blogs.

Contrary to the stonewalling of the denialists, when scientists figured out who might have had access to the documents, the fellow confessed and resigned from several positions (honor on the science side, but not on the denialist side, once again).

News takes two or three years to penetrate to Rick Santorum, however, and he continued his soulless presidential campaign through the weekend claiming, contrary to the facts, that global warming is not happening.

Funny how he accuses those he opposes of doing the things his side does, isn’t it?

Anthony Watts, the leader of the anti-science mau-mauing breathlessly covered the resignation of Peter Gleick, the conscience-striken whistle-blower, but tended to ignore the evidence Gleick revealed.  So much for talking about real science.

(Watts also makes much of the California Institute of Science changing its exhibit on climate change after three years, as if when museums change exhibits, it means the science behind the old exhibit is no longer valid.  Is it just me, or is Watts really stretching to find the propaganda angle since his own data let him down, and demonstrated that warming, and the “hockey stick,” are real problems?)

Here are a few places you should visit to get the news and the facts:

• At Desmogblog, Mashey’s work:  “Fake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax” – anyone want to bet that Virginia’s jihad-engaged Attorney General Cuccinelli will act on these allegations (and evidence) of wrongdoing?
• For example, somehow Heartland’s SEPP’s dead chairman Frederick Seitz managed to come back from the dead long enough to sign the tax reports?  How does that work again?
• Heartland Institute inadvertently confirms authenticity of documents posted at Desmogblog, demanding they be taken down (with links to the documents)
• Climate scientist Peter Gleick authenticates the documents, but in doing so outs himself as the leaker
• New York Times Dot Earth blog on Gleick

This post likely will be updated.  Watch.  (Already updated to fix my error above about Seitz and SEPP.)

Einstein probably didn’t say that

Aphorisms that sound great, but to whom we have forgotten proper attribution, often get pinned on great people who did not say them.

Einstein's journals featuring comments on his first tour of Japan, in 1922 - Morgan Library via The New Yorker

It’s a common problem.  But I think everyone should strive to accurately cite quotations.

Occasionally the misattribution takes on added significance because of the reputation of the person to whom it is misattributed.  This becomes a larger problem, because it often dragoons the reputation of some great person into a service they would not intend.

In the masthead of Climate Change Dispatch (“because the debate is not over”) we find this quotation, design to puncture the bubble arrogance surrounding all those climate scientists, I suppose:

“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”
—Albert Einstein

You know where I’m going with this.  Einstein didn’t say it, so far as I can find.

I can’t find any source older than about 2000 that even has the quote.  Most attribute it to Einstein.  It does not appear in any halfway scholarly collection of Einstein quotes, however.  It’s not at the WikiQuotes site.  It’s not in any of my three editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.   Just to check such claims, I ordered The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (collected and edited by Alice Calaprice) from Princeton University Press.  Alas, they had exhausted their stock.  When my favorite Border’s Books was closing out, I found the book in the reference section.

The quote does not appear in any form in The Quotable Einstein, that I have found.

Keepers of the Climate Change Dispatch site said the quote came from a book about Einstein read years ago, but now forgotten.  (Yes, I asked.)

I suppose it’s possible there is another, much over-looked source for the quote out there.  If you can find it, please let me know.

But for the immediate future, I would advise you to put the quote attributed to Einstien on your “no-he-didn’t-say-it” list.

One more example of how people attribute aphorisms to famous people, and as used to poke at climate scientists, another example of our getting into trouble, not because of what we don’t know, but because of what we know that just is not true.

Ironic, too.  It’s not that the current purveyors don’t know about the quote or about Einstein, but that they are arrogantly insisting on the veracity of a false quote.

I wonder if the masthead there will ever change.

More misunderstanding of the case against DDT

Well-meaning but misinformed dog breeder Terrierman (a guy who goes by the handle PBurns, too)  is just the latest to fall victim to false and nearly false claims about DDT and its effects on birds.

One of the claims made by pro-DDT and anti-environmental protection, anti-science groups is that DDT is not the bad guy in bird deaths.  The late DDT-nut Gordon Edwards said DDT had nothing to do with eagle deaths, and pointed to the 300-year decline in eagle populations from the time European settlers began shooting at them.  This idea has been touted by the chief junk science purveyor, Steven Milloy, and by many others over the years.

So, in one of his several posts slamming eagle conservation efforts that include stopping the use of DDT, Terrierman said:

What’s the story? Simple: that Bald Eagles and Osprey were pushed to the edge of extinction by DDT.

Not True.

Actually, that is true.  Terrierman got it wrong.  DDT was, indeed, threatening the very existence of the bald eagle.  While it is true that there were other pressures, some long-standing, it is also true that once those problems were cleared, DDT still barred the recovery of the eagle, plus other species like osprey, peregrine falcons, and brown pelicans.

What is the story?  The story is that eagles have been under assault since Europeans found America.  By 1900, eagle populations across North America were dramatically and drastically reduced.  A federal law in 1918 made it illegal to shoot eagles, but it had little effect.  A tougher law passed in 1940 finally got some traction.

But eagle recovery didn’t take off.  In the late 1940s and early 1950s bird watchers, and bird counters like those volunteers who contribute to the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count, noticed that young eagles disappeared.  Simply, adult, breeding eagles were not able to produce young who survived to migrate, mature, and breed later.

The culprit was DDT.  DDT kills young eagles in three ways, known in the 1960s.  It poisons them so they cannot grow in the egg.  It poisons them so they die after a period of growth.  It poisons them so they are unable to eat and digest properly, so they die shortly after they hatch.

DDT can also screw up the sexual organs of young birds, so they are unable to breed — perhaps a fourth way DDT kills young, by simply preventing their creation.

Then, in the 1970s, we found another way DDT kills species:  DDT makes the eagle hens unable to form competent eggshells.  The young die because the eggs cannot survive incubation.

DDT also kills adult eagles, especially migrating birds.  DDT accumulates in fat tissues, those fats that migrating birds burn.  When the birds migrate, the DDT comes out, and it can literally stop the heart or brain of the bird in flight.  (It kills bats the same way.)  Birds lost in migration rarely get found for necropsy.   The bird count simply falls, the population sinks one individual closer to extinction.

Does the dog breeder know all of this?  I can’t tell — I tried to correct his errors at his blog site, but after I provided a link to an article that showed DDT appears to be harming California condors as well — in a post he has censored in moderation and which will never see the light of day at Terrierman, I predict — it’s clear he’s not up to gentle correction.

One more blog from which I am banned from telling the facts.

PBurns, if you’re bold enough to comment here, your comments won’t be censored (so long as not profane).  We need robust discussion, and I encourage it.

Below the fold — my final post to Terrierman, which he won’t allow through moderation.

Naomi Oreskes on the political need for truth-telling in climate change

The too-often odious Huffington Post features an interview with Naomi Oreskes, one of the authors of Merchants of Doubt.

You should read the interview (and the book, if you haven’t yet):

[Kerry Trueman]:The real mystery, then, is how to persuade American skeptics that we face profound disruptions in our own lifetime and that of our children. Can you describe, in a lay-person friendly way, some of the scenarios we might anticipate?

[Naomi Oreskes]: Well, the best example is the “monster storm” that just hit Alaska, described by one media outlet as a storm of “epic proportions.” Climate change is underway, it is affecting American citizens, and it is going to become increasingly costly and disruptive.

We are no longer talking about the future, about people far away in time and space. We are talking about us, now. I think this is what Americans do not yet understand. But if current trends continue, they will soon. Climate change is all around us, and most of it is not good.

More, there.

More at the Bathtub:

• “Quote of the moment:  Why the Clean Air Act mentions ‘climate’ — Naomi Oreskes”
• “Naomi Oreskes:  The lecture Lord Monckton slept through, which he hopes you will not see”

How deep is the stupid in Tea Party and among their fellow travelers?

Barack Obama has managed to tack on a bit over a trillion dollars to the national debt, mostly in a successful effort to keep the U.S. and the world from plunging into a Greater Depression.  We haven’t shaken off the harmful effects of the Republican assault on capitalism during the previous years’ assaults on the Constitution, science, education and other American institutions.

But in the alternate universe of conservative thought, Obama’s put $15 trillion in new debts on the books.  Being off by a factor of 10 to 15 is an accomplishment worthy of someone wholly unconnected with reality.  That would be Victor Davis Hanson in this case.  Not sure why, but some search took me to a blog called The Clue Batting Cage — batting away clues to reality is a sport to them, I suppose.  There I found this post:

Here’s some excellent wording from Victor Davis Hanson.

Despite nearly $15 trillion in federal debt, the administration apparently wants to defy the rules of logic and do more of what made things worse in the first place, under the euphemism of “investments.” American popular culture has coined all sorts of proverbial warnings about such mindless devotion to destructive rote: “Don’t flog a dead horse,” “If you are in a hole, stop digging,” and “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

No matter: The administration still adheres to the logical fallacy that the toxic medicine cannot be proven to be useless or harmful, because there was supposedly never enough of it given. And the proof is that the worsening patient is still not quite dead.
:
That there is never enough spending is a seductive fallacy because it never requires any empirical proof: If millions of those supported by the state have lost their self-reliance and self-initiative, perhaps it is because millions supported by the state were not supported well enough, and so in response, some resorted to stealing things they could not afford.

How many others could possibly be with these yahoos, looking through the telescope backwards?

Looking through a telescope the wrong way

Here’s what I posted in comments:

It’s difficult to reconcile the idea of someone who recommends Bob Park’s blog, and approves of Victor Hanson’s blather at the same time.

But then I look closer. You missed the boat completely. You didn’t even recommend the right Bob Park, but some imposter named Parks. You missed reality by one letter.

Reality is not an opinion, not that I expect you’ll ever change your opinion on that.

Lay off of Morgan’s blog for a while, maybe read some science or something. You may not feel better in the morning, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

9:38 PM

The author complains that my comments are too acid, and that the National Science Foundation is a “government site.”

If you call a private foundation the government supports, independent from the government by design to keep its advice unbiased, does that make it a government site?

Or is it still a four-legged calf?

A wise person said that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t get to by reason in the first place.  That’s the problem with the Tea Party in the first place.  It’s also the problem in the second place, and the third place, and on all issues.

To the Tea Party mindset, they are all five-legged dogs.

Tea Party's five-legged dog, by Esther Derby.com

Ethics in climate science: How do we know what we know?

It’s almost an arcane fight, but it’s an important one — if you’re going to discuss climate science and the policies required to clean up pollution that causes destruction of our planet, can we at least agree to stick to the facts, the real facts?

John Mashey is a computer smart guy who jumped into the fray to point out that most opponents to doing anything to stop the destruction have a social or economic interest in stopping the action and continuing the destruction, something Mashey determined from looking at the networks linking the people involved.  There’s a lot of howling about Mashey’s pointing out that the emperor is a crook.  So far he’s been proved correct.

An academic group you probably never heard of, the National Association of Scholars, has an elected leader who decided to take after Mashey, rather than clean up the house.  Peter Wood writes a column for the  Chronicle of Higher Education, and sadly, their editorial mavens appear not to have fact checked it.  To their credit, they allowed Mashey’s response.

Comments are brutal.

Here’s how Tim Lambert described it at Deltoid:

John Mashey and Rob Coleman have a guest post at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog replying to Peter Wood’s hit piece.

Wood’s article misused the platform of CHE. Its relevance to the concerns of CHE was minimal. It had little purpose but to damage the reputation of one of us, John Mashey, and the climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Wood has often denigrated elsewhere. The political false-association tactics were obvious. Climate scientists are under incessant attack, a fact strongly decried the day before Wood’s article by the AAAS Board. The muddy battlefield of blogs and media has now arrived on the CHE premises, easily seen in the comments.

If one tells the truth in climate science, one needs thick skin.  Go read Mashey’s piece before you read the comments.  More background from Lambert, here.

And the context you need:  Only one study on climate change has actually been retracted over the past couple of years — no, not any of those noting that warming occurs, not any of those that use the graph famously described as “a hockey stick,” but the piece that pulled together all the criticism of the science, at the behest of Republicans on the environment committees in the U.S. Congress, called the Wegman Report.  And it was John Mashey who assembled the extensive and sometimes elegant case that the Wegman Report was plagiarized and wrong.

This is, indeed, a case of trying to kill the messenger’s reputation.

Am I the only one suspicious that the National Association of Scholars may have been named to foster confusion about the authority of reports, say from the National Academy of Sciences, the long-time science advisory group to presidents whose reports urge action to stop climate change?  Notice their acronyms are the same.

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

Encore quote of the moment: Wolfgang Pauli, “not even wrong”

Talking about Tea Party and Republican economics in the next few months?  You’ll need to have Wolfgang Pauli’s wisdom at your fingertips:

Wolfgang Pauli, circa 1945 - Nobel Foundation photo

That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.

Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), as quoted by R. Peierls

From Wikipedia:

Peierls (1960) writes of Pauli, “… a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘That’s not right. It’s not even wrong’”. (Peierls R (1960). “Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900-1958″. Biographical memoirs of fellows of the Royal Society 5: 174-92. Royal Society (Great Britain))

Pauli won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945: ” At this stage of the development of atomic theory, Wolfgang Pauli made a decisive contribution through his discovery in 1925 of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle. The 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pauli for this discovery.”

A mostly encore post.

“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.

May 23, 1926: Mencken confessed the Millard Fillmore bathtub hoax

May 23, 1926, H. L. Mencken’s newspaper column confessed his hoax of nine years earlier — he had made up whole cloth the story of Millard Fillmore’s only accomplishment being the installation of a plumbed bathtub in the White House (in the 1850s known as the Executive Mansion).

Alas, the hoax cat was out of the bag, and the hoax information still pollutes the pool of history today.

Text of the confession, from the Museum of Hoaxes:

Melancholy Reflections

On Dec. 28, 1917, I printed in the New York Evening Mail, a paper now extinct, an article purporting to give the history of the bathtub. This article, I may say at once, was a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious…

This article, as I say, was planned as a piece of spoofing to relieve the strain of war days, and I confess that I regarded it, when it came out, with considerable satisfaction. It was reprinted by various great organs of the enlightenment, and after a while the usual letters began to reach me from readers. Then, suddenly, my satisfaction turned to consternation. For these readers, it appeared, all took my idle jocosities with complete seriousness. Some of them, of antiquarian tastes, asked for further light on this or that phase of the subject. Others actually offered me corroboration!

But the worst was to come. Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous “facts” in the writings of other men. They began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of congress. They crossed the ocean, and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference. Today, I believe, they are accepted as gospel everywhere on earth. To question them becomes as hazardous as to question the Norman invasion.

* * *

And as rare. This is the first time, indeed, that they have ever been questioned, and I confess at once that even I myself, their author, feel a certain hesitancy about doing it. Once more, I suppose, I’ll be accused of taking the wrong side for the mere pleasure of standing in opposition. The Cincinnati boomers, who have made much of the boast that the bathtub industry, now running to $200,000,000 a year, was started in their town, will charge me with spreading lies against them. The chiropractors will damn me for blowing up their ammunition. The medical gents, having swallowed my quackery, will now denounce me as a quack for exposing them. And in the end, no doubt, the thing will simmer down to a general feeling that I have once more committed some vague and sinister crime against the United States, and there will be a renewal of the demand that I be deported to Russia.

I recite this history, not because it is singular, but because it is typical. It is out of just such frauds, I believe, that most of the so-called knowledge of humanity flows. What begins as a guess — or, perhaps, not infrequently, as a downright and deliberate lie — ends as a fact and is embalmed in the history books. One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not 1 per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions. But every one of these fictions retains full faith and credit today. To question even the most palpably absurd of them, in most parts of the United States, is to invite denunciation as a bolshevik.

So with all other wars. For example, the revolution. For years past American historians have been investigating the orthodox legends. Almost all of them turn out to be blowsy nonsense. Yet they remain in the school history books and every effort to get them out causes a dreadful row, and those who make it are accused of all sorts of treasons and spoils. The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.

* * *

As a practicing journalist for many years, I have often had close contact with history in the making. I can recall no time or place when what actually occurred was afterward generally known and believed. Sometimes a part of the truth got out, but never all. And what actually got out was seldom clearly understood. Consider, for example, the legends that follow every national convention. A thousand newspaper correspondents are on the scene, all of them theoretically competent to see accurately and report honestly, but it is seldom that two of them agree perfectly, and after a month after the convention adjourns the accepted version of what occurred usually differs from the accounts of all of them.

I point to the Republican convention of 1920, which nominated the eminent and lamented Harding. A week after the delegates adjourned the whole country believed that Harding had been put through by Col. George Harvey: Harvey himself admitted it. Then other claimants to the honor arose, and after a year or two it was generally held that the trick had been turned by the distinguished Harry M. Daugherty, by that time a salient light of the Harding cabinet. The story began to acquire corroborative detail. Delegates and correspondents began to remember things that they had not noticed on the spot. What the orthodox tale is today with Daugherty in eclipse, I don’t know, but you may be sure that it is full of mysterious intrigue and bold adventure.

What are the facts? The facts are that Harvey had little more to do with the nomination of Harding than I did, and that Daugherty was immensely surprised when good Warren won. The nomination was really due to the intense heat, and to that alone. The delegates, torn by the savage three cornered fight between Lowden, Johnson, and Wood, came to Saturday morning in despair. The temperature in the convention hall was at least 120 degrees. They were eager to get home. When it became apparent that the leaders could not break the deadlock they ran amuck and nominated Harding, as the one aspirant who had no enemies. If any individual managed the business it was not Harvey or Daugherty, but Myron T. Herrick. But so far as I know Herrick’s hand in it has never been mentioned.

* * *

I turn to a more pleasant field — that of sport in the grand manner. On July 2, 1921, in the great bowl at Jersey City, the Hon. Jack Dempsey met M. Carpentier, the gallant frog. The sympathy of the crowd was overwhelmingly with M. Carpentier and every time he struck a blow he got a round of applause, even if it didn’t land. I had an excellent seat, very near the ring, and saw every move of the two men. From the first moment Dr. Dempsey had it all his own way. He could have knocked out M. Carpentier in the first half of the first round. After that first half he simply waited his chance to do it politely and humanely.

Yet certain great newspapers reported the next morning that M. Carpentier had delivered an appalling wallop in the second round and that Dr. Dempsey had narrowly escaped going out. Others told the truth, but what chance had the truth against that romantic lie? It is believed in to this day by at least 99.99 per cent of all the boxing fans in Christendom. Carpentier himself, when he recovered from his beating, admitted categorically that it was nonsense, but even Carpentier could make no headway against the almost universal human tendency to cherish what is not true. A thousand years hence schoolboys will be taught that the frog had Dempsey going. It may become in time a religious dogma, like the doctrine that Jonah swallowed the whale. Scoffers who doubt it will be damned to hell.

The moral, if any, I leave to psycho-pathologists, if competent ones can be found. All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub, printed on Dec. 28, 1917, was pure buncombe. If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer, is bunk.

Is the Constitution dead?

Oh, the eternal crabbiness of the conservative, striving-to-be intellectual mind.

Time cover, Is God Dead? -- April 8, 1966

At one of those hangouts for conservatives with more education and degrees than brains and sense — for example, friends and sympathizers with Francis “I am not an ID advocate” Beckwith — forgetting the trouble Time got into with the cover story asking “Is God dead?” I nearly twisted my ankle on a rhetorical hole that opened with this:

But more importantly, America has a problem: the Constitution is dead. Now what?

Assuming that statement to be a fact rather than a radical, perhaps hallucinatory claim, comments proceeded to denigrate the New Deal as completely unconstitutional and therefore worthy of complete rollback, in that future when these people take over and replace the Constitution.

Can you imagine what they would say if they stumbled into a leftist, pro-communist site making the same claims?

So, I questioned their judgment that the New Deal was unconstitutional, bad, and unjustified.   No nibbles on the invite to make a case they might be right, so I noted the thread earlier.

Those who think they are He-and-She-Who-Must-Be Obeyed* took great exception to my posts, said I had “one more chance.”

Skroom, you know?

Dear Readers:  Is the Constitution dead?  What evidence do you see?

Was the New Deal complete, unvarnished hoakum, or do you see value in any of the vestiges and legacy of the New Deal?

It could be an interesting discussion, if the Bathtub had any influence and a bunch of readers who would chime in.

Is the U.S. Constitution dead? Libertarians, Conservatives, and other ne'er-get-wells can't tell. So they use it as cover for raucous behavior, What's Wrong With the World, May 5, 2011.

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* Apologies to John Mortimer and Horace Rumpole.

Pure political smear from Walter Williams, or is there any factoid to back his claim?

Walter Williams wrote a column a dozen years ago in which he made some wild claims about Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich.

What did he really say? Stanford University Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich - L A Cicero image

Williams wrote:

Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, widely read on college campuses during the late sixties.  Ehrlich predicted that there’d be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”  He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, adn that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.  Ehrlich’s predictions about England were worse:  “If I were a gambler, I would take even money tht England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Walter Williams, More Liberty Means Less Government:  Our founders knew this well, Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 453, 1999, p. 134

Recently Williams revived that claim for another column, and the revived claim is all over conservative sites.

Steven Goddard, who appears to be making a living on screwing up references to the work of others, though had restricted most of his error to sciency issues like climate change denial, put up a post repeating Williams’ claim.

I imagined Ehrlich might have said something like that, but most likely in one of his “scenarios” like the three much different disaster scenarios he proposed in his 1968 book Population Bomb.  So I asked Goddard for a reference (pollution and economic scarcity, disease, and food shortages, were the three apocalyptic horsemen Ehrlich wrote about then).

It didn’t occur to me that the quote attributed to Ehrlich was wholly fictitious, but in more than a week of searching, neither Goddard nor Maurizio Moribito commenting at Goddard’s site can find anything even close to what Williams claimed.  I’ve pored through my old copy of Population Bomb, and it’s not there that I can find, not without a much more thorough reading I don’t have time for right now.  (My copy of Ehrlich’s Population, Resources and Environment is buried somewhere here in my bookshelves — that was the textbook Ehrlich wrote, a book used in a population and ecology course I took in the Biology Department at the University of Utah way back when.  It’s also a favorite book for conservatives to quote mine, wringing fantastic mischaracterizations from the early edition or a later one where Ehrlich and his wife were joined by John Holdren, now an adviser to President Obama.)

Dear Readers, help me out:  Did Ehrlich say anything like what Williams via Goddard claims he said, or did Williams pluck this smear from a some unlighted private library?  Was Williams just playing fast and loose with the truth (again)?

Did Ehrlich ever “predict” 65 million deaths from starvation in America in the 1980s?  Can anyone source the quote?

More, strings to follow:  

• Court in India questions why starvation deaths are allowed to occur
• In Arabia, Sir Bob Geldof warns of food wars and starvation deaths if food distribution problems are not fixed (1 billion suffering chronic hunger in 2010)
•  North Korea to blame for North Korean food shortages
• Arusha region of Tanzania suffering food shortages
• U.S. lifted trade sanctions on Sudanese bank
• Economist:  Only 10 million children under 5 starved to death in 2006
• Malnutrition deaths to elderly in the U.S.

Even more stuff on the topic:

• Seed magazine interview of and story about Ehrlich, August 4, 2009
• Nearly-rational discussion of Population Bomb at Primate Diaries, the blog; note especially the discussion of “nuclear winter,” a discussion that “global warming skeptics” frequently quote mine and misappropriate odd quotes from.
• Notes on Ehrlich’s bet with Julian Simon, and why it cannot be analogized to global warming — at Economix, a New York Times blog
• New York Times review of the Ehrlichs’ 1990 book The Population Explosion; according to the review, the answer to over-immigration from Mexico is to beef up Mexico’s economy so the economic drivers of emigration from Mexico are reduced.  This is the opposite of what commenters at Goddards blog claim.

Obama’s birth certificate: Putting the sideshow freaks and carnival barkers on the hot seat

No, it’s not particularly important, especially since we knew from so many other sources that Obama was, indeed, Honolulu born.

The White House pried the old birth certificate out of the records of the State of Hawaii, and released copies to the world today.

The White House video:

ABC Television’s report:

View a .pdf of the form here:  President Obama\’s original Hawaiian birth certificate

I predict Orly Taitz, Donald Trump, and all the other sideshow freaks and carnival barkers, will continue to bark away.  Remember, when P. T. Barnum made a copy of the hoax “Cardiff Giant,” people paid a premium to see the fake of the hoax.  P. T. Barnum’s ghost stalks and stomps on Republican and birther grounds now.

More:

• NPR’s story, with image of released document
• Three reasons White House made the release, Christian Science Monitor
• Wall Stree Journal blog headline says enough:  “China become world’s top superpower as US argue Obama’s birth certificate”
• Slate, on who benefits from release (putting Joseph Farah on the hot seat, as the headline promised)

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Boy, looking at this, you gotta know that Obama planned this all out, as Morgan claimed in comments below — just so he could get this story from Juan Williams and Shepard Smith at Fox News:

Oh, For Goodness Sake posted that video, without any other comment, as “National Mirror Moment.”  Birthers, Palinistas and Republicans must be choking on their dinners from that report.  Has the Fox turned on ‘em?

Always a good site to expose the inanity and insanity of Obama’s critics, especially on the issues of Obama’s history, Oh, For Goodness Sake has a particular bead on the hypocrisy of those same critics:

How many times have you heard the promise: The president could end this today if he’d just release his long form birth certificate? So now they’ve got the f—ing long form birth certificate, is it done for the Birthers?

No. No. No. No. No. No. And Nope.

Bigots.  Probably no small amount of racism in there, too.  Plus, they’ve exposed themselves as genuinely opposed to America’s good health.  David Gardner and Milton Goldstein pegged it, even if we have to paraphrase them a bit:  Had a foreign government tried to do what the birthers are doing, we’d have considered it an act of war.  History is not kind to idlers, those who fail to call out injustice, nor idiots.