Today on Pat Kenny’s show I sent in an E-mail and he read it out. there was some quack talking about ‘energy therapy”, the usual bollocks, and I said:

Carl Sagan said “Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence”. This energy healing nonsense has been going on for far too long. Energy is the “ability to do work” not some aether flowing through the body. Too many people endanger their health every year by going to quacks like this instead of actual doctors.

Roflcopters all round. Here’s the best example ever of Alternative Quackery I’ve heard Junior cert science students come up with better nonsense. The only way to validate pseudoscience is by lying.
The one thing which really boils my blood is people using the word energy. Energy, as I say is the ability to do work. Presumeably, when these quacks talk about energy, they are referring to electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, mediated by the Photon boson. Electromagnetism in the form of electrical impulses, is how our nervous system communicates stimuli from the sensory organs to the brian. By applying electrical impulses to the skin you can make muscles contract, (try it with a slendertone, sometime) this has applications in medical science, by increasing blood flow, helping to work out knots in the muscles and even (as far as I’m aware, anyway, don’t go rehashing this in your anatomy exams, as I may have missed the point completely) to prevent muscular atrophy. Electricity does not flow through the body. if it did I imagine that conscious movement would be beyond us. These ideas of “chi” and “life force” are just compositions of the New Age movement. Skepdic, the Skeptic dictionary has a great article on Energy.

Okay if your head has been in the Christmas wrappings this month you might have missed this information that the in formation disseminated by the Climate Research Unit of University of East Anglia has been cooked  up in favor of those that support global warming see this article here. 

So what is better than a music video that shows the errors of these climatologists and their high priest Al Gore.  (Does this mean he has to give back his Nobel Prize?)

Related links to climate gate.

Hat Tip to DJP for point me to this.

Arrghhhhhh! my head just exploded 3 minutes into this craptacular presentation.

Homeopathy is just pseudo scientific non sense. This video just drives me nuts. This nutjob is in the same league as Deepak Chopra.

What could this possibly be?

A few weeks ago, I wrote:

When the facts change… we need our politicians to be flexible enough to respond

The event that caused me to get all hot under the collar was the sacking of Professor David Nutt, because of his excitable views on the dangers of cannabis relative to its classification.

It turned into a rant about how we ignore evidence in policy-making at our peril.

Well, today, there is news that made me squirm a little…

Faith schools ’strong on community cohesion’

screams the BBC News headline for this article, which claims that a study shows secondary faith schools have better marks from OFSTED on community cohesion. (Have I told you lately how much I hate OFSTED?)

Worrying. Very worrying.

People like me have railed against faith schools for years for the very opposite reason. I strongly believe that dividing educational policy and learning into schools based on faith is utterly absurd, on both moral and practical grounds. Morally, because it is wrong to label children as members of a faith when they have no choice in the matter; and also because of the dubious nature of such professed faith in the parents seeking to put children into a faith school; and practically, because of the needless duplication of resources to maintain such a system.

But now, it seems us anti-theists should just shut up. We were wrong all along.

Except, maybe there are chinks of light. Maybe evidence-based policy isn’t so clear cut.

The study found no difference at the primary school level.

The study was funded by the Church of England. Perhaps they got the result they wanted. I have no idea about the motivations of the Professor who led the research, but it would be wrong to accuse him of bias.

The careful selection of criteria is essential to getting a result. It seems OFSTED’s ridiculous school inspections now give them a grade based on “community cohesion”. Well. That is remarkable. A team of inspectors (often working in the private sector with a profit motive) drop in for a few days to a school. Suddenly, they become experts not just on the school but on the entire local community.

They must be pretty smart people.

Oh, and they base a great deal of their results on the school’s own “self assessment”.

Gosh, I wish when I’d done my examinations I could give myself a grade when I’d finished the paper. A*s all round, I think. To hell with grade inflation!

No, something’s not quite right about this story. The entire conclusion is based upon a small comparison of a couple of data points which themselves are remarkably silly. How on Earth can OFTSED possibly grade a school’s “community cohesion”?

This whole thing is typical of the nonsensical society we now live in, where everything is measurable and reduced to crude numbers, no matter how impossible the task. Even happiness.

Science has its limits. And when you step into the realms of pseudo-science, masquerading as an objective way of determining a desired outcome, we have to tread very carefully.

Maybe I’m living in denial. Maybe I’m a hypocrite.

But I won’t be convinced that easily.

One of the major problems with most religious people who try to launch an offensive against evolution is that they don’t have a clue what it is. You don’t need to get a degree in biology or even read a biology textbook. But, you should at least familiarize yourself with some of the basic concepts and sources of evidence for what you are trying to argue against. Otherwise, you end up making a complete fool of yourself.

Religious zealotry and ignorance of science can lead to some amazingly ridiculous questions. Today I was asked, “Why do we have to use science? Can you explain why we are eating pizza right now with science?”. Clearly, the person asking the question was not trying to seek the truth. He was creating a smokescreen to try and hide from the truth.

The main difference that separates science (e.g. evolution) and pseudo science (e.g. CrIntelligent Designism) is the process in which they arrive at conclusions. In science a hypothesis is made and observations are collected; if the observations support the hypothesis then the theory is accepted, otherwise, a new hypothesis needs to be made. However, with pseudo-science a conclusion is already presumed. Only observations that support said conclusion are collected and those that refute it are ignored.

Those who question the validity of science really need to wake up and take a look at the world they live in. Every day you take advantage of all the advancements and innovations made possible only with science. You have no problem with science when it comes to your computer, cell phone, car, medicine, contact lenses, clothes, and so on ad infinitum, but when it conflicts with your presumed conclusions you deny its usefulness. If that isn’t mental gymnastics I don’t know what is.

Wikipedia describes Sax as controversial and is accused of using “pseudo-science.” I kind of wish I had read this before I read the book.  The only thing that saves this book in my eyes from being worthless is the look at brain development, which varies substantially between males and females.  Luckily, this takes place at the beginning of the book and is relatively straightforward.  It set a good tone for the book and I began reading it enthusiastically.

Fundamentally, the book is flawed because Sax refuses the commonly accepted uses of the words “sex” and “gender”.  In a one page section in the back of the book in “Extra Materials,”  He cites the

“2001 monograph published by the National Acadamies:

• Sex is a dichotomous biological variable. Humans are either female or male.
• Gender is a continuous variable. Gender is socially constructed. Humans can be mostly feminine, mostly masculine, or anything in between.”

While he admits that gender may be partly socially constructed, he proceeds on a mission to undermine the tendency that he sees to overplay that.  I found his argument unsettling and it seems like this book is more about this guy working out a personal grudge than it is about making a sound (let alone scientifically supported) argument.

An example of his horrible substantiation of his gender claims is the case of David Reimer who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. At 38 years old, David commits suicide after apparently citing the failure of raising him as a girl.  He does not go into detail of the story and it is obviously anecdotal evidence of pretty much the most complicated situation around gender that I could imagine.

This brings me to my other huge criticism, and probably why the term “pseudo-science” has been applied to this work.  The brain development discussion does seem to be scientifically based. But, Sax uses this discussion as a launch pad to make other claims about gender, parenting and society that are non-scientific and in some cases wild leaps.  His scientific discussion that opens the book lends undue authority to his personal opinions about child-rearing and classroom structures and discipline.

His advise includes that “gender” be the determinate for everything from seating charts in a classroom to toys given at home.  He has very specific parameters for parenting for each sex at specific ages and seems to think a parent is doing their child a disservice if these guidelines are not followed.  I have read many parenting books over the last few years, and Sax seems more comfortable with having “right” answers than most.  Many focus on how kids are different and how your approaches will vary in response to the needs of your specific child.  According to Sax the most important “needs” of your child will be determined by “gender,” and any deviation from this is probably a result of previous parenting attempts that were not gender appropriate.

There was one point that was clearly his opinion, but actually seemed like an interesting one to follow.  This was that parents are less likely to discipline their children and more likely to medicate them.  It is an appealing thought to follow.  Children are subjected to an overwhelming amount of choice and responsibility in media, products and their social and homelife.  It makes sense that this would lead to overwhelm.  My guess is that there is not an easy trade-off between adding discipline or medication.  The more that I thought about it, the more that I suspect that parents who have decided to medicate their children HAVE tried disciplining their children. It was probably a last resort.

The recent leaked emails from East Anglia University in the UK came as no surprise to me or many others who chose to question Global Warming myths and pseudo science. I have a math/science background and possibly more importantly, I am from NC and many of us have built in BS detectors. When confronted with numbers and theories that appeared absurd, I did some real research and reported on this blog. Watch the following video from a real scientist and then visit or revisit articles presented here going back to February of 2008.
“Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails”

Frem a speech given by Keith O. Rattie, Chairman, President and CEO of Questar Corporation, on April 2, 2009, at the 22nd Annual UVU Symposium on Environmental Ethics, held at Utah Valley University.
Reported here, May 15, 2009
“My perspective on global warming changed when I began to understand the limitations of the computer models that scientists have built to predict future warming. If the only variable driving the earth‟s climate were manmade CO2 then there‟d be no debate – global average temperatures would increase by a harmless one degree over the next 100 years. But the earth‟s climate is what engineers call a “non-linear, dynamic system”. The models have dozens of inputs. Many are little more than the opinion of the scientist – in some cases, just a guess.”
“Another example, water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. [The media now calls CO2 a “pollutant”. If CO2 is a “pollutant” then water vapor is also a “pollutant” – that‟s absurd, but I digress]. Some scientists believe clouds amplify human CO2 forcing, others believe precipitation acts as the earth‟s thermostat. But scientists do not agree on how to model clouds, precipitation, and evaporation, thus there‟s no consensus on this fundamental issue.”
“But the reality for American consumers is that whether you buy that the science is settled or not, the political science is settled. With the media cheering them on, Congress has promised to “do something”. CO2 regulation is coming, whether it will do any good or not. Indeed, President Obama‟s hope of shrinking the now the massive federal budget deficit depends on vast new revenues from a tax on carbon energy – so called “cap and trade”. Harry Reid has promised cap and trade legislation by August.”
Cap and trade, Global warming, Fact vs Fiction

From the Citizen Wells blog, March 10, 2008

“So, what is hampering our oil production. Environmental wackos. Let’s take Alaska for example. Of course, they always bring up environmental impact. But they also bring up animals like polar bears and whales. They use pseudo science of global warming and terms like may and could cause. They consistently use false data and science. I hear talk of polar bears becoming extinct almost every day when in fact their numbers have increased. Alleged receding ice will fundamentally have no impact on their numbers.”
Always follow the money

From the Citizen Wells blog, March 10, 2008

“Weather Channel founder John Coleman is calling global warming a fraud and says the station he founded needs to stop telling people what to think about climate change.”

“One of it’s meteorologists suggested two years ago that weathercasters who have doubts about global warming should lose their certification. Coleman advocates suing people who sell carbon credits — including Al Gore — because the attention in the courts could, in his words, “put some light on the fraud of global warming.””
 John Coleman on Al Gore Global Warming lies

From the Citizen Wells blog, February 28, 2008
“Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.”
“In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.”
“Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.”
R.A. Pielke Sr. provides a balanced view of climate science
 

Common sense goes a long way where I come from and the numbers and peudo science from the likes of Al Gore never made sense. I also checked some real data from time to time like summer temperatures in Antarctica.
Here is one of the better sources for information on climate change and earth facts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com

I’ve never been a steadfast fan of Glenn Beck. Too dramatic for me usually. But when Glenn Beck is good he’s well, good. There’s a lot of stuff he discusses that you won’t see on any other news show. You won’t see it on the suspendered cadaver-looking Larry King Almost Live. Not even Bill O’Reilly dares go where Beck goes. Take, for instance,  the Great Man-Made Global Warming Scam now coming to light:

Some historians have complained about the influence of Michel Foucault on the programs of historical associations and periodicals. I agree about his enormous influence, but applaud him insofar as he focuses us on institutions and ideologies in the diagnosis of mental illness;  I also think it is an error to identify one particular intellectual with the near-hegemony of “cultural history” or cultural studies. The same error was committed in the book The Shadow University by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate, which blames whacko speech codes and secretive kangaroo courts in academia to the baleful influence of Herbert Marcuse and especially his essay on repressive tolerance. The post1960s generation, however, did not initiate those tendencies in the teaching of history.

    This website has been reviewing the salvos directed at the “scientific historians” of the late nineteenth century by the German historicists (derived partly from Herder, the founder of comparative literature and cultural studies based on his concept of the Volksgeist) who created the field of “social psychology,” a field that simply swallowed up all of history in its capacious maw; it was the latter group of extreme subjectivists/relativists (oddly calling themselves “progressives”) who invented the policy of “multiculturalism” and the practices of “postmodernism.” Some historians reading my blogs will be aware of Carl Becker (a student of Frederick Jackson Turner). Becker was promoted by conservative liberals as a great historian and great artist (the linking is crucial) after his death in 1945. They might profit from a series of five lectures in English entitled What is History? by the German historian Karl Lamprecht (d.1915), an important influence on Becker (who seems to have simply appropriated his ideas), along with William James’. These Burkean gradualists knew exactly who and what the enemy was and took accurate aim: cities (the site of urban disorder and revolution), working-class militancy, “the economic interpretation of history,” the philosophes of the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century  liberalism (Adam Smith), the machine, materialism, empiricism, the possibility of an objective history of the past as it occurred,  the overstimulation of the modern world that was causing mass neurasthenia and the exaggerated belief in the perceptiveness of the individual fact-gatherer (aka narcissism) as well as the susceptibility of the masses to hypnotic suggestion by demagogues.

    Here is more detail about Lamprecht’s intervention in the campaign for the establishment of “culturally-oriented investigations” and the positing of “national identity.” See What Is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, by Karl Lamprecht, Professor of History in the University of Leipzig, translated from the German by  E. A. Andrews and published by Macmillan, 1905. William E. Dodd, Wilsonian historian and diplomat, had a hand in the revisions for the English-speaking reading public. Here is what the preface says about Lamprecht’s importance:

    [William E. Dodd:]  ”Like everything else in this world, this little book has its raison d’être and its special occasion. As to the former, the author felt that in his work on the “History of Germany” he had carried his investigations far enough into the different culture-epochs to justify him in formulating and presenting to the public his ideas as to the content of history and the true method of writing it. The immediate occasion came in the form of an invitation to take active part in the Congress of Arts and Sciences which met in St. Louis during the World’s Fair. There the first lecture was delivered. Being called on also to deliver some addresses on the occasion of the celebration of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Columbia University, New York, in October of the same year, it seemed proper to follow up there the same line of thought. In this way originated the last four chapters of the book. Another incentive was given in the literature of recent psychological science, particularly in von Lipps’ “Outlines of Psychology,” –a book which seemed to invite a further application of the laws of psychology to the science of history.”

    Here are two excerpts from the Third Lecture (Transition to Present Conditions) that lay out the ideological program of Lamprecht (playing doctor to society) and his successors among Pragmatists and Progressives and New Left postmodernist critics of mass culture/modernity. First he diagnoses the primary symptom of decadence, Reizsamkeit. (Because of individualistic science, Romanticism and naturalism, the world was too much with us.):

[Lamprecht:]   “The first effect of the revolution is a complete dissociation of the former socio-psychic conditions. The social changes with the resulting increase of city activity, with its nervous haste and anxiety, its unscrupulous abuse of individual energy, progress of the technical arts, and the extraordinary multiplication of the means of communication throughout the world, the rapid development of all the sciences which deal directly with man, followed this enlargement of life: all these and a thousand other moments of modern development produced a great number of new stimuli, which neither the individual nor the community could escape; for they formed in their totality, so to speak, a new historical atmosphere.  But the individual as well as the soul of the people as a whole, being continually surrounded, besieged, and permeated by a flood of new impressions, soon lost the former self-mastery and weakly yielded to the new stimuli. This went on, in the beginning, under a strong repulsion of the higher moments of will; energy was absorbed in a high degree by the acceptation and augmentation of the new stimuli, and was thus limited to an energetic volition in economic life and to a marked receptiveness in the domains of the higher intellectual culture. Moral standards (Anschauung) and intellect were taxed to the utmost; they were subjected to the perpetual assault of the new stimuli.  This is the cause of the general nervous excitement, which now began and which often came to light in pathological investigations–it was now that neurasthenia was discovered as a special form of disease,–and which has not abated until today, but rather entered into the very psychic nature of the present and has become a constituent of the excitability or mental attitude of the age.

     There appeared hand in hand with this increased irritability, according to the law of interaction, and as a sort of accompaniment, a condition of motor-psychic weakness: quick but shallow excitation of the will and a strong tendency to the enjoyment of excitation became general, because the much-desired compromise of excitations was never produced; excitations followed each other so rapidly that the even temper of mind, the oequitas animi of the ancients, was only seldom acquired.

   These were, and partly still are, conditions which can be observed in all departments of life, but most distinctly among the entrepreneur class and in the new society. The entrepreneurs, the social and political leaders of the upper bourgeoisie, are above all typical representatives of this modern Reizsamkeit. How does this class of men despair during great economic crises, then how rash are they in periods of prosperity! And how irregular do these people appear in their pleasures, when, after the excitement of the day, they repair either to the exciting charms of color and form in a modern home or to the modern theater or concert-hall, where the mind is kept in constant tension!

    Even the laboring classes created under the new conditions are subject to similar, though modified, psychic impressions; up to what degree is shown by the fact that special forms of psychosis, as e.g., the traumatic one, have appeared in that class as well as with their employers. Have the older classes remained untouched by the modern psychic state of excitability? We can hardly say positively that the peasants themselves, since they have exchanged their chalk accounts on the wall-door for the ledger and begin to read the market quotations, remain untouched, not to speak of the artisans, who have been seized by the rush of industrialism in the cities. What of the intellectual classes? The new nervosity is winning its way among them in various unobserved, and therefore most devastating, forms. (98-102)”

   To counter the devastating effects of Reizsamkeit, a new science is taking shape, one with a definite political program:

[Lamprecht:]   ”It is obvious…that, in a time of great psychic changes, the intellectual sciences would be thrust into the foreground. In this very domain a strong reaction set in against the unsystematic, individualistic investigation of the last decades; an analysis of the phenomena, to be made from new points of view, was required, and thus one came to the paramount methodical principle that, in the phenomena of intellectual life, the innermost, psychologic proceedings should be clearly understood, so that their reduction to general laws might be possible, be it laws of psychological mechanics or of evolution or biology. This is the impulse which is coming more and more to dominate the intellectual sciences, and the goal is a new synthesis rather than the detail work of the last few years.

     When thus the imaginative and intellectual activities entered into the vast sea of modern stimuli, taxing their own lines of development toward new dominants, a general stimulus seems to have been applied. Men began to collect their forces again in the several lines of human endeavor; personal motives and aims were soon more clearly defined and often not quite so high-flown; the excessive demands of the so-called Übermensch gave place to the more simple and yet entirely modern postulates as well of individuals as of the state, and in society.  Ethical movements with high-set altruistic aims began to take form–a universal peace being one of the chief of these; a so-called aristocratic feeling or appearance became the first demand of cultivated society; piety was no longer considered a luxury; the former exchange of aesthetic and religious devotion disappeared, nobody regretting or perceiving its loss. The great unifying elements, society and the state, gain the first place in men’s minds, and that not because of the influence of a distinguished personality, like that of Prince Bismarck, but as a result of entirely new tendencies and motives in the lives of individuals. Unreasonable economic competition was first attacked; new legislation corresponding to recently developed social-moral ideals was enacted; men felt the old avenues of progress, opened by the laissez-faire policy of the years just passed, closed by the new ideals of a growing moral and clerical cosmopolitanism.” (113-115)

    And Lamprecht means the rooted cosmopolitanism invented by his hero Herder, mentioned several times in the text: “…I must not fail to mention the honored name of Herder, the hundredth anniverary of whose death has just been fittingly observed by Germans throughout the world. In the realm of Germanic cultures, and even beyond it, Herder stands as the creator of the conception “Folk soul” (the psyche of the masses).  He was the first to admit the importance of the socio-psychic demands for the proper comprehension of the most important of all human communities,–nations,–and to draw from these the necessary conclusions…Science becomes a prophecy, philosophy turns to poetical metaphysics. That was the character of the great German period of subjectivity that began with Klopstock, and ended in the spreading branches of the philosophy of identity–the period to which Herder, as one of its first great phenomena, belongs….”(19-20, see also p.226 for Herder as rationalist).

     His last lecture imagines the future of cultural history, a “scientific Weltgeschichte“. The new discipline of “World History” anyone? There is a brief discussion of Lamprecht and his influence on the American historian Becker in “Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion,” by Charlotte Watkins Smith, Cornell University  Press, 1956, pp. 66-68. The author somewhat evades or minimizes the influence of Lamprecht, in my opinion, but quotes Becker’s letter to a sociologist, A. J. Todd who was critical of Lamprecht’s subjectivism and abandonment of scientific procedure:

    (Becker:)”It is quite possible to deal with the various sorts of particular activities in any period–the political, economic, religious, and intellectual activities–as illustrating, or as related to, certain mental or psychic characteristics common to the social group or nation. These common characteristics thus become a unifying principle round which facts or events, political or other, may be grouped.” (67)

     What I found most interesting about Carl Becker’s last work is his volte-face with respect to the egoistic and self-deceived Enlightenment philosophes depicted in his The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Yale UP, 1932) after the war started. In his address to The American Philosophic Society, April 22, 1943,”What Is Still Living in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?” (published in Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker, Cornell UP, 1958, a publication funded by the Ford Foundation), Becker reinterpreted the intellectual legacy of Thomas Jefferson, libertarian and agrarian advocate of small government, discarding Jefferson’s outmoded views to favor the social democratic state of the New Deal. Becker contrasted the Roosevelt administration and its regulatory measures with the selfish and ruthless laissez-faire policies of nineteenth-century liberalism that, he said, had led to global war and that he implied characterized Nazism! (234-235) Facts were now more separable from “the climate of opinion,” and the changing value biases of the participant-observer; apparently (in my view) historische Individualität could come and go as politically required.

    Becker wrote: “…the incredible cynicism and brutality of Adolf Hitler’s way of regarding man and the life of man, made real by the servile and remorseless activities of his bleak-faced, humorless Nazi supporters, has forced men everywhere to reexamine the validity of half-forgotten ideas, and to entertain once more half-discarded convictions as to the substance of things not seen. One of these convictions is that “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and “the inalienable rights of man” are generalities, whether glittering or not, that denote realities–the fundamental realities that men will always fight and die for rather than surrender.” (p.238)

     Stating that Jefferson’s core values were timeless, Becker’s essay ends with his rewritten Declaration of Independence that he calls the “modern declaration of democratic faith”:

      “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the individual man has dignity and worth in his own right; that it is better to be governed by persuasion than by force; that fraternal good will is more worthy than a selfish and contentious spirit; that in the long run all values, both for the individual and for society, are inseparable from the love of truth and the disinterested search for it; that the truth can be discovered only in so far as the mind of man is free; that knowledge and the power it confers should be used for promoting the welfare and happiness of all men rather than for serving the selfish interests of those individuals and classes whom fortune and intelligence have endowed with a temporary advantage; and that to secure these high aims in the life of man no form of government yet devised is so well adapted as one which is designed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” (240)

     Of course Hitler and Nazism were also opposed to laissez-faire, but American diplomats and propagandists were intent on carving a clear channel between the two societies, indeed an antithesis. When historians quarrel over the question of relativism, it is often the case that there is a sub-text invisible to many readers: whether or not there are certain structural similarities between combatants in World War II as they had attempted to meet the crisis of capitalism in the interwar period.

Cf. Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton U.P., 1939).  Like other slippery corporatist liberals, Lynd is transfixed by images of disintegration brought on by the excess of liberty and individualism transmitted by English high culture and spawned, he claimed (erasing the artisan radicals and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), by aristocrats.  Freud, unlike Jung, is one of their (degenerate) band, pessimistically resigned to the eternal wars generated by innate aggression (240).  Lynd’s faux Marxist polemic (originally the Stafford Little lectures at Princeton, 1938) may be seen as a manifesto of the structural functionalism produced by Talcott Parsons and other ‘antifascist’ supporters of Italian Fascism at Harvard.  Reprinted six times by 1948, Knowledge For What? could stand as handbook for all the corporatist liberals/social interactionists discussed in my book on the Melville revival, including Lewis Mumford and the New Left Melvilleans.  For these radical critics, American society was made decadent by “the culture of cities” and the unfettered Ricardian economics that bred imperialism (personified in the hyper-individualist proto-fascists Ahab and Pierre). 

     As a masked Burkean conservative (239) Lynd, a Columbia University professor, presented himself as the defiantly open-minded objectivist, resolutely overcoming philistines commanding college boards of trustees who notoriously restrained Marxist insights and all independent research; Lynd will be satisfied with revolutionary transformation if that proves warranted by the collective of interdisciplinary social scientists, by training fit to examine the minutiae of human behavior in specific settings, the better to make us happy.  Lynd’s (German idealist) historicist philosopher-kings take some matters for granted: (English empiricist) history, social psychology and philosophy (hitherto associated with laissez-faire theories of government) are obsolete, but useful insofar as these tools are dragged away from the Ivory Tower and made handmaidens to social scientists dedicated to the problem-solving and relevance urgently needed by a society in crisis (175, passim).  Most crucially, as Lynd cautions near the end of his book, people are not only naturally unequal in endowments, they are decisively motivated by emotions, not by educated understanding based on experience; with the (unmourned) waning of Christianity and all religion, there can be no national cohesion without irrational appeals; anyway there are only different versions of the truth (cf. “intersubjectivity” in postmodern literary criticism) (166).

     This passage says it all: “No large society can long exist which is careless of this element of community in feeling and purpose.  The tactics of a Hitler are profoundly right in so far as they recognize and seek to serve the need of human beings for the constant dramatization of the feeling of common purpose.  In our own culture, the roots of the earlier forms of common sentiment were in certain structuralized forms of authoritarian security: church, nation, local community, and family.  These latter, with the exception of nationalism, have weakened or disintegrated with the growth of historical criticism, science, and a mobile individualism.  The democratic right of the individual to think–or to think that he thinks–has played its part in the discrediting of some of these earlier authorities that were wont to focus man’s feelings.  And democracy, interpreted largely as the right to be free to take or leave the world about one and to acquire private property, has afforded little basis for deep common sentiment.  The heavy current reliance upon a man’s job (and the resulting offensive-defensive labor balance of property rights) to hold our culture together is due, not so much to the fact that people want only money, as to the fact that this is the clearest value that remains in a culture which has allowed other values to trickle away (85)…. American culture, if it is to be creative in the personalities of those who live it, needs to discover and to build prominently into its structure a core of richly evocative common purposes which have meaning in terms of the deep personality needs of the great mass of the people (230).” 

    (This is of course a paraphrase of Hitler’s populist analysis of Jewified modernity and its remedy, but Lynd does not seem to notice, having described Nazism/Fascism solely as racial theory run amok (159n), as “creeping” “leprosy” (221), or as “dictated…class-interest” 240.)  Lynd’s admired rooted cosmopolitans include (besides Mumford) Charles Horton Cooley, Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, Thorstein Veblen, George Santayana, John Dewey, Karen Horney, Harold Lasswell, Franz Boas, Carl Jung, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gardner Murphy, and the newly formed Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (164fn).

     Lynd’s book was a call for concerted action by antifascist, anticommunist social science intellectuals resolved to plan and deliver a totally analyzed, predictable, and controlled society where true love, spontaneity and mutuality could once again reign.  As an irrationalist, he did not have to adumbrate a rational theory of accountability in the organicist, harmonious utopia to be guided by the “blueprints” of rational and selflessly neutral planners–the social scientists who alone would determine what “cultural structures” needed change (237)–nor as a professed antifascist did he suggest a Fascist coup-type transition (213) to the benign and well-adjusted post-democratic but anti-authoritarian people’s community where everyone would get an education in the opera of everyday life. Where are the Foucauldians when you need them?

Whenever the “placebo effect” is mentioned, people always hurry to say that what they have experienced is not due to that. Somehow, they feel embarrassed to acknowledge that the placebo effect also works on them. Like being fooled by a magician. Instead, they prefer to believe in a pseudo-scientific explanation (homeopathy, chiropractice, reiki, tarot, astrology, …).

There is nothing shameful about the placebo effect. Next time you have a slight headache, try closing your eyes, putting your hand on your forehead and think of something peaceful. You´ll feel better already.

In fact, the placebo effect is more profound than just that. The placebo effect falls in either one of two categories:
- By believing some medicin will work, one feels better already which improves the healing process.
- Some ailments (headaches, sleeplessness, a cold) will improve just automatically and this improvement mistakingly might be attributed to medicins taking during that time.

Ironically, it´s a lot more foolish to believe the unverified and inconsistent theories of new-age quackery than to acccept the placebo effect. A case of pride upside down. The irony is that in their fear to be fooled by a magician, they believe in wizards.

In honour of the 150^th anniversary of the original publishing of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” a group of individuals have banded together to distribute free “special edition” copies of the book to university students across America (unfortunately, for reasons unknown to yours truly, Canada {and the rest of the world for that matter} have been left out of this campaign)!  This special edition contains a new 50 page introduction, which strives to provide “new” insights to Darwin’s masterpiece.    

Unfortunately, the group banding together to distribute this altered version of Darwin’s work is lead by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (here by to be referred to as Mr C+C).  “The Origin of Species” will be reproduced in its entirety, but the “special” 50 page introduction has been added, and this introduction will serve as a platform for intelligent design and christian evangelism gospel.    

Before getting into this topic further, let me provide you with some background information on Mr. C+C.

Kirk Cameron is most notably known for his role as Mike Seaver on the popular 80’s sitcom “Growing Pains”.  Ray Comfort is an evangelical minister originally from New Zealand.  Mr. C+C, both christians, (evangelical christians to be exact) met several years ago and created their own ministry, Way of the Master (WOTM).  For a more in depth understanding of Mr. C+C vision, check out their christian propaganda machine….

Oops…I mean website:

http://www.wayofthemaster.com/

Once at the WOTM website you can learn all sorts of interesting things!  For instance you can learn about how you are not following Mr. C+C’s version of the 10 commandments, so you are going to hell.  Or you can learn about how family members who have died from cancer (and are not part of Mr. C+C’s ministry are going to hell).  Or you can learn about how any individual who is not part of Mr. C+C’s ministry is going to hell!  Really positive and up-lifting information!   

But I digress…

I have not been able to obtain a free copy of Mr. C+C’s version of “The Origin of Species” (copies are available on their website for only a few dollars, but frankly I refuse to pay for anything that will somehow contribute to Mr. C+C cause, which will be outlined below) but the “special” introduction (written by Mr. Ray Comfort) has been posted on Mr. C + C’s website:

http://assets.livingwaters.com/pdf/OriginofSpecies.pdf 

I have gone over the document, and…well…what can I say…?

It is exactly what I imagined it would be!  Each paragraph is laced with numerous logical fallacies.  Furthermore the document is filled with inaccuracies, misunderstandings (usually related to science + evolution), and out and out false hoods to numerous to name.  Honestly, it would take me weeks to pick apart all of the errors made by Mr. Comfort, and annotate proper corrections.  But don’t just take my word for it…when you have a moment take a look at the document.   

Alright…

With all of that out of the way…onto the topic of this blog post!  The following video was recently put out by Mr. C+C regarding the distribution of their “special edition” of “The Origin of Species”.

1^st off, let us get the following out of the way.  This blog post is not intended to be a debate regarding whether or not god exists.  Instead this blog post is meant to address the inaccuracies propagated by Mr. C+C in their video.    

With that in mind, let us analyze the statements made by Mr. C+C shall we!

At the very beginning of the video: “One by one our god given liberties are being taken away from us”

This statement is simply untrue.  1^st off, no liberty is “god-given”.  Liberties are given by the society that we live in.  Liberties change and evolve as a society changes and evolves.  Liberties evolve as the individuals within a society decide that they should.  2ndly, as outlined in the above statement, liberties are not being taken away.  The liberties we enjoy are simply evolving to better reflect the current beliefs/values of our society as a whole. 

Also at the beginning of the video: “Our children are not able to pray in public” and “Are children are no longer able to freely open a bible in school”

Again, this is simply incorrect.  Any child is free to pray in public.  However what is not tolerated, is forcing all children to pray in public (say at the beginning of each school day).  What Mr. C+C seem to forget is that not everyone is a member of the WOTM ministry.  Additionally, children are also free to read the bible in public, no different then I am free to read “The God Delusion” by Mr. Richard Dawkins.  What is not tolerated is to hold an audience captive and make them listen to you read from your version of the bible.    

At the 00:15 mark: “The 10 commandants are no longer allowed to be displayed in public places”

And this is the way that it should be.  Again, I think that Mr. C+C forget that not everyone is a member of their WOTM ministry, or even a member of the christian faith.  Consequently, it is not appropriate to put this document in a public place, because it is not a view/value system that adequately represents the views of our society as a whole.  Additionally, church and state are separate for a reason.  This means that despite the “majority” religion/faith at any given time, each and every individual is has the right (or liberty it you will) to FREELY practice the religion of his/her choosing (and this includes Mr. C+C). 

Regarding statements made at the at 00:45 mark:

Simply untrue.  Individuals in these fields are not brain washed.  Instead the individuals in these fields entered into them with a belief system/world view already in place, and the field that they entered is simply an extension of that belief system/world view.  On a personal note I have graduated from 2 science/health care programs, and I do not recall any classes, courses, or lectures that attempted to “brainwash” me into becoming agnostic or atheist.    

Regarding the comments made at the 01:04 mark:

That’s funny.  I always thought that intelligent designers (which Mr. C+C claim to be) stated that the “intelligent designer” was not the christian god, but a non-descript omnipotent being.  In this statement Mr. C+C reveal their true colours.  They are not trying to advance science and our understanding of the natural world, instead they are selfishly trying to advance their own belief system, and force it upon other people. 

Regarding the comments made at 01:40:

Oh I love this one!  The creationist…Oops…I mean intelligent designers attempt to link Adolf Hitler to Charles Darwin.  Charles Darwin spoke of evolution and “survival of the fittest”, and his observations where an initial attempt to describe the manner in which creatures in nature (including human beings) evolve.  Adolf Hitler on the other hand, spoke of eugenics, which is the selective breeding (and in the case of Hitler killing/murder/genocide) with the aim of “improving” the human race.  2 VERY different concepts!  Additionally, I must admit that I find it extremely interesting that Mr. C+C attempt to link Darwin to Hitler, but fail to mention the extremely close relationship of the 3^rd Reich and the christian church all throughout the Second World War (as outlined in “God is Not Great” by Mr. Christopher Hitchens).  Interesting omission…but I digress  

Regarding comments made at the 01:45 mark:

Mr. C+C attempt to paint Darwin as both a racist and a sexist.  Funny, Mr. C+C do not want to speak to the theory put forth by Darwin, instead they would much rather attack him personally.  Additionally, Mr. C+C fail to mention the NUMEROUS examples of racism and sexism within their own sacred text, the bible. 

Regarding the statements made at 01:50:

This is a complete misunderstanding of the work of Darwin and evolution as a whole.  The theory of evolution does not speak to the origin of life.  Instead, the theory speaks to how different species have evolved over time.  The theory of evolution does not pretend to have the answer to the origin of life despite what Mr. C+C would have you believe.   

Regarding the comments made at the 02:05 mark:

Again, this is a complete misunderstanding of the theory of evolution.  Put simply, Mr. C + C do not understand the science behind the theory of evolution.  Further proof of this point is Mr. Comfort’s $10,000 prize for anyone that can prove evolution by providing an example of one species giving way/giving birth to another (for example a dog giving birth to a cat). 

Regarding comments made at the 02:17 mark:

What else can I say other then these statements are extremely dishonest.  Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal god.  This is an assertion that is often attributed to Albert Einstein by many theists, and it is simply incorrect.  Regarding the rest of the individuals named by Mr. C+C, these statements are also extremely misleading.  Yes, some of these individuals did believe in a personal god, but their belief in a god, does not invalidate the theory of evolution.  Additionally, many of the individuals named by Mr. C+C lived in a time when science was, put simply, not where it is today.  With this information in mind, putting for the names of scientists from decades (or even centuries ago) that believe in a personal god (with the intent of disproving evolution) is not all that impressive. 

Regarding the comments made at the 03:00 mark:

Great!  Mr. C+C, let me personally extend you an invite to contribute to the scientific literature!  But that would require you to put forth some sort of testable hypothesis (other than the statement, “god did it”).  Science is all about putting forth a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis.  Instead you complain about not being allowed into the scientific community, but your only contribution seems to be “god did it”.  When asked to explain a phenomenon , you state “this is evidence of god as an intelligent designer”.  Then later when said phenomenon is demonstrated to be a product of evolution, you move the goal posts and pick some other phenomena and continue with the line of reasoning of “god did it”.  You have not been included in the scientific community or academia because you have nothing to contribute. 

Regarding the comments made at 03:15:

Echoing the statements made above, Mr. C + C mistake being “censored” for being ignored for not having a single solitary thing to contribute to science/academia.    

Regarding the comments made at the 04:20 mark:

Again showing their true colours, I would argue that Mr. C + C are proud of the fact that they are lying about their intentions with the distribution of their “special edition” of “The Origin of Species”.  There intent is not to contribute to the scientific literature.  Instead their intent is to spread their faith/religion.  I have no problem with this, what I have a problem with is when it is done in a deceptive manner to unsuspecting individuals.  Essentially, Mr. C+C are being completely dishonest about their intentions, and are lying to the individuals they are distributing the books to. 

Hmmm…

Does not seem very christian of them does it?

Addendum

As pointed out by one of the skeptical samurai blog readers/comment contributors, Ron Partlow (Thanks for contributing Ron!  Anyone looking for additional information on Ron or his various activities, have a look at the following link: http://www.bigronpartlow.com/ )…

Despite the claims of Mr. C + C that their “special edition” of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” is a page for page reproduction of the original (+ the 50 page intro written by Mr. Comfort), further investigation reveals this is simply NOT TRUE.  As pointed out in a review by Eugene Scott PhD at the following link (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/10/30/how-creationist-origin-distorts-darwin.html#read_more), Mr. C + C have OMITTED chapters 11, 12, and 13 of their version/reproduction of “The Origin of Species”.  It should also be noted that contained within these omitted chapters is key information presented by Darwin regarding biogeography and why evolution makes sense in relation to classification, morphology, and embryology.   

Hmm…

Seems strange that Mr. C + C would purposefully omit such information…

But at this point, should we really be surprised by these types of tactics from individuals such as Mr. C + C?

Here is something for you to laugh at – Charlene Werner explaining the physics of homeopathy!

She doesn’t like being laughed at, which makes laughing at her even more fun!

I am very proud to present a graphical illustration that illustrates how to imagine all the 10 dimensions that exist in the universe of Seventh. I am proud because it took a long time to get my mind around and I think it Illustrates well what it is meant to illustrate.

Please view the image and read the text to understand how to imagine all the dimensions in the Seventh Universe: