Creationism intell design
Creationism ties into anti-science which manifests in AGW, vaccine
icf Rep War on Sci. Scu suppression just crashed, so overflow here 5/14
Oregon petition main guy home school curric scam
also home school/segregation thus vouchers
see mis-education EDUC2 GW BS
odd that right rejects darwin but embraces social darwinism
SEE TEMPLETON
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05/01/2026
by
- Jackson Lahmeyer says that he is running for Congress because "the war on Christianity in government is real": "President Trump is fighting to end it. I will carry that fight to Capitol Hill."
- Lauren Witzke insists that "dinosaurs were a Nephilim inspired cross-breeding science experiment that died with the flood and you can’t convince me otherwise."
https://www.desmog.com/2015/11/19/evangelical-christian-zeal-behind-marc-morano-s-climate-denial-documentary-climate-hustle/
The Evangelical Christian Climate Deniers Behind Marc Morano’s Climate Hustle Documentary
By Graham Readfearn on Nov 19, 2015
One unambiguous video title states that “Climate Policies kill. People will die”, while others scream how moves to cut greenhouse gas emissions “devalues human life” and “kills thousands” in Britain.
All this extremist language comes from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a US-based Christian evangelical group that rejects climate science and is preparing to release a new documentary in the coming weeks.
Cornwall has been posting preview clips under the banner “Greener on the other Side: Climate Alarmism – Fact, Not Fear”on its YouTube page.
The views in the clips are extreme but represent a grab bag of climate science denialist talking points, ignoring the mountains of evidence gathered from multiple sources over many decades of the impacts of loading the atmosphere and the oceans with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
The clips cut across energy policy and climate science and claim, amongst other things, there is no evidence to support cuts to the use of fossil fuels which are beneficial to the planet.
In one segment, the alliance’s supposed climate experts promote creationism. “There has to be a designer – a creator behind this,” says David Legates.
The Cornwall Alliance is preparing to release the full DVD at the end of November under the title “Where the Grass is Greener”, only days before another climate science denial documentary, Climate Hustle, gets its premiere in Paris.
The two films also share a number of experts, including statistician William Briggs, climate denial activist Tom Harris, Australian “sceptic” Bob Carter, British peer Lord Christopher Monckton and blogger Anthony Watts.
But the similarities between Greener on the Other Side and Climate Hustle do not stop there, because both films share the same director in Chris Rogers and were produced by his company – CDR Communications.
Rogers’ CDR Communications was also behind another Cornwall Alliance extremist video effort in 2010 — Resisting the Green Dragon — that claimed environmentalism was a “false religion” and that it was a cover story for a “global government” power grab.
Rogers is also the chairman of The James Partnership, the umbrella arm that includes the Cornwall Alliance as one of its projects and pays the salary of Calvin Beisner, Cornwall’s founder and spokesperson.
While Cornwall Alliance will be unlikely to gain traction for its DVD outside of evangelical Christian circles, Marc Morano has much greater ambitions for Climate Hustle.
Climate science denialist Morano is the bombastic communications director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
As DeSmog reported, after a “red carpet premier” of the film that Morano modestly claims will “rock the climate debate”, CFACT wants a US cinema release for the documentary, followed by DVD sales andthen distribution in schools and colleges.
In the most recent trailer for Climate Hustle, CDR Communications staffer Anna Milograno is credited as the editor, with Rogers as the producer and director.
In two earlier trailers, CDR Communications staffers Ian Jelliffe and Jay Kim were also credited, alongside “director of photography Joseph Rossell”.
Rossell is a research analyst at the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) who has been writing stories attacking climate science on his IRD blog Juicy Ecumenism and also on the NewsBusters website. NewsBusters is a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), which describes itself as “America’s leading media watchdog in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.”
Morano has previously credited MRC as helping to produce Climate Hustle by providing access to archive news footage. Morano once worked as a journalist at Cybercast News Service, another MRC project.
Both MRC and CFACT have previously accepted grants from oil company ExxonMobil, which is currently under investigation by the New York attorney general for allegedly lying about the risks of climate change to the public and investors.
In the latest Cornwall Alliance film, Paul Driessen, CFACT‘s senior policy advisor, says: “I’m often accused of taking fossil fuel money – I’m still waiting for the check from ExxonMobil”.
Understanding the links between Morano, Climate Hustle and evangelical religion reveals an irony. Morano and other climate science deniers will frequently attempt to disparage climate science by comparing it to a kind of religion, implying that they are blinded by faith.
Yet the very people Morano employed to produce his new documentary are fundamentalist Christians with a warped view on science. The one being blinded by faith, it seems, is Morano himself.
teach both sides started with creationism, grabbed by fosil fuel deniers now bleeding out into CRT?
race to the botton is ampl fdbk sys:
Conservative pundit recently expressed concern about Republicans in Arizona, Texas, and Florida as he detailed what he describes as the "race to the bottom" to "see who can be the most MAGA."
On Friday, October 15, Charlie Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, appeared on MSNBC where he specifically criticized the "absolutely batshit crazy" Republicans in Texas. "I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy," Sykes said to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace.
He went on to compare the differences he sees between Texas Republicans of the past and present. He also highlighted common behaviors he's seeing in Republicans across three states: Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
Sykes' remarks came amid a discussion about Texas law requiring teachers to develop that offers "opposing perspectives on historical events," HuffPost reports. In fact, a school administrator was recently criticized for insisting educators "should 'make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one' with alternative viewpoints."
"Texas Republicans used to be respectable," Sykes continued. "And now we are almost in this competition … between Florida, Arizona, and Texas to see who can be the most MAGA, who can play the most hair-on-fire culture war games, because that seems to be this race to the bottom that we're talking about here."
Sykes, however, insisted that it is "easy to beat up on the administrator" but "the focus ought to be on the law and the fact that the teachers are terrified. They don't know what's going to happen."
"What is the other side of the Holocaust?" Sykes later asked. "Are you going to assign fourth-graders 'Mein Kampf'? Are you going to make them listen to Seb Gorka's radio show? I just don't know what she actually had in mind. But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/right-wing-science-denial
no lnx grafx
The psychology behind right-wing authoritarians' denial of science
The Conversation September 17, 2021
by Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University
Vaccine refusal is a major reason COVID-19 infections continue to surge in the U.S. Safe and effective vaccines have been available for months, but as of mid-September 2021, only 65% of eligible American adults are fully vaccinated. In many areas, a majority of eligible adults haven't taken advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated.
In the U.S., polling on intent to get vaccinated shows a massive political divide. Counties that went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election show higher vaccination rates than counties that went for Donald Trump. Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee's summer meeting cheered the fact that the U.S. didn't meet Biden's July 4 vaccination goals for the country.
Politically motivated denial of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness tracks with a dramatic politicization of trust in science itself. In a survey conducted in June and July, Gallup found that the percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal" or “quite a lot of" trust in science is down, shockingly, from 72% in 1975 to only 45% today.Over the same period, confidence in science among Democrats is up from 67% to 79%.
Scientific institutions have never been perfect, but overall they have a tremendous track record of success – both in basic research and in applied sciences like epidemiology and immunology. The vast majority of expert opinion on, say, antibiotics, radio waves, orbital mechanics or electrical conductivity is accepted without complaint by the general public. Evidently people are satisfied with applied science in almost all walks of life.
So why is confidence in science so malleable, and what does a person's political orientation have to do with it?
The rejection of scientific expertise with regard to COVID-19 vaccines appears to be standing in for something else. As a philosopher who has studied science denial, I suggest that this “something else" includes factors like distrust in public institutions and perceived threats to one's cultural identity.
Ideologies that mesh with science denial
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Identifying as a Republican is very strongly associated with embracing central tenets of conservative ideology. A 2021 public opinion study confirms that endorsement of conservative political ideology is currently the dominant predictor of anti-science attitudes.
Another recent study of anti-science attitudes identifies several tendencies particularly associated with conservative ideology. People who hold anti-science beliefs tend to be sympathetic toward right-wing authoritarianism – that is to say, they are conformists who defer to selected authority figures and who are willing to act aggressively in the name of those figures.
They also tend to support group-based hierarchy, with “superior" groups dominating “inferior" groups. Political psychologists call this “social dominance orientation" and see it in, for example, attitudes about racial or gender equality.
Indeed, social scientists looking at the causes of science denial have increasingly narrowed in on two contributing causes. Certain personality traits, including comfort with existing social and cultural hierarchies and a predilection for authoritarianism, go along with a skepticism for science. So do closely related aspects of identity, such as identification with a dominant social group like white evangelical Christians.
Conservative traditionalists from the historically dominant white Christian demographic in the U.S. have had the most reason to feel threatened by science. Evolution by natural selection is threatening to many doctrinal religious traditionalists.Climate science threatens the economic status quo that conservatives seek to conserve. The whole concept of a public health mandate runs counter to the “small government" individualism of political conservatives.
Further, because COVID-19 has been starkly politicized since the beginning of the pandemic, public health measures have become directly associated with the political left. Rejection of such measures has consequently become a signal of political and cultural identity.
Other recent studies on science denial have shown that people who don't have a lot of confidence in the honesty and reliability of others, as well as in social institutions like government, academia and media, tend to deny the dangers of COVID-19. Low social trust tends to track with conservative political orientation – in particular, withsupport for Trump. His supporters are much more likely to say that scientific inquiry is driven by political considerations.
Grasping for a sense of control
Increasing economic inequality and racial and ethnic diversification are also part of the science denialism mix.
One school of thought in psychology, called compensatory control theory, holds that many social phenomena – including ideological science denial – stem from the basic human need for a sense of control over one's environment and life outcomes. According to this theory, perceived threats to one's sense of personal control can motivate denial of scientific consensus. [koch afp grn police ad]The idea is that due to a combination of economic insecurity, demographic changes and the perceived erosion of cultural norms favoring whites, some people feel an existential threat to the white supremacy they've long benefited from – which in turn spurs them to deny government warnings about the dangers of COVID-19.
I believe this compulsive defensiveness plays a big part in the phenomenon of science denial, once trusted elites like politicians or news media hosts trigger the inclination to oppose some particular science-based public policy. You can't control the coronavirus – or inequality, or a changing culture – but you can control whether you take the vaccine or wear a mask. This sense of control is implicitly but powerfully attractive on a deep, emotional level.
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The need for control may also explain an attraction to politicians or media figures who promise to give you your power back by endorsing unproven, alternative home remedies.[horse rx v big pharma?]
Denial feeds on political polarization
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As I discuss in my book, “The Truth About Denial," I think that science denial, including COVID-19 vaccine denial, is probably best seen as the result of vicious feedback loops. Factors like economic pain, white Christian identity and low social trust play off one another in populations experiencing relative social and informational isolation. This denialism can take hold more easily in people who have chosen to limit their experiences to relatively homogeneous geographic areas, social contexts and news media environments.
In the short run, the failure of a society to vaccinate enough people to get COVID-19 under control will dramatically change life for everyone for years to come. The larger issue is the way science itself has become politicized in ways never seen before. This development endangers the ability of organized society to respond effectively to pandemics and other existential threats, including climate change.
Is there any hope of depolarizing the issue of COVID-19 vaccination, or trust in science itself? I'd say probably not until leaders in conservative politics, media and religion exert a concerted effort to change the narrative.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mark-meadows/
roger salon
Last week, Lin Wood, a right-wing Georgia attorney who has recently inserted himself into Donald Trump's failed crusade to rewrite the results of the election, attacked White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for reportedly shooting down a number of harebrained, illegal strategies to hijack victory floated in an Oval Office meeting last weekend. (Wood also represents Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man accused of shooting three people, killing two of them, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.)
"Someone needs to do a deep dive on @MarkMeadows," Wood wrote on Twitter. "I have heard there are some serious skeletons."
In a sense, Wood is correct about skeletons — as well as about digging deep. Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, had since at least 2018 apparently failed to disclose a loan and monthly income of $11,000 related to the sale of a deed to a Colorado fossil park dedicated to promoting the creationist fiction that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.
Though Meadows has not been cited for this apparent violation, it would not be his first breach: The House Ethics Committee sanctioned Meadows in 2018 for failing to respond appropriately to sexual harassment allegations made against his former chief of staff, and for paying the alleged harasser more than $40,000 in taxpayer money when the staffer was no longer employed in Congress.
Further, Salon reported earlier this year that Meadows appears to have misused congressional funds again in 2020, this time to help a friend of his wife raise money for her failed campaign to fill Meadows' congressional seat. Additionally, the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint accusing Meadows of campaign finance violations, based on a previous Salon report.
But at the time of the dinosaur-park purchase, first reported last year in The New Yorker, Meadows was still just a restaurateur and aspiring real estate baron, devoted to teaching his home-schooled children the tenets of fundamentalist Christian creation science. Not only did Meadows score the real estate deal, he also appeared in a documentary about what turned out to be a fake discovery of a real allosaur, which is currently on display at a creation science museum as a purported piece of scientific evidence that the Big Bang never happened.
In May 2002, Meadows, who is a fundamentalist Christian, took his family on a dinosaur fossil hunt for homeschoolers, with the intent to "discover what the Bible says about dinosaurs and the Great Flood." The expedition was organized by a group of self-identified "creation scientists" who contend that dinosaurs walked the earth with human beings, and that their extinction was caused by the great flood of Noah's time, which was no more than a few thousand years ago.
The Meadows family joined a group of about 30 other homeschoolers on the expedition, which traversed a nearly 100-acre park in Dinosaur, Colorado, owned by creation scientist Dana Forbes — property that Meadows himself would purchase just five months later. The trip was led by two creation science groups, who had each promoted the event as a recruiting tool.
The first group, Creation Expeditions, was a family-run operation out of Florida, headed up by patriarch Pete DeRosa, who had a contract with the landowner to carry out six such tours a year. According to its now-defunct website, Creation Expeditions held to the belief that "God created in six literal consecutive 24-hour days, the heavens, earth, and all that is within them. We believe in a young earth that is not more than 6,000 years old."
Creation Expeditions marketed the expedition as "the Dragon's Den Dig," an allusion to the creation-science contention that all dinosaurs are dragons (although, strangely enough, not all dragons are dinosaurs). Promotional materials promised that participants would work with "a professional excavation team" in "the famous Dinosaur Triangle," a nickname bestowed on the fossil-rich Colorado region by actual paleontologists.
The second expedition was headed by Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum, a San Antonio-based group that published a popular online and print catalog of books and videos aimed at homeschoolers. The catalog had promoted the 2002 fossil hunt — priced at $995 per person — next to a book entitled "The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved" by Ken Ham of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, who would go on to purchase the deed to the dinosaur park from Meadows. (Ham's concerted campaign to undermine modern archaeology was documented in a Salon report from August 2005, published the day the levees broke in New Orleans.)
Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida, told Alabama.com for a 2017 article on then-Senate candidate Roy Moore that Phillips and Vision Forum were "extreme and far outside the mainstream of organized religion." Moore had faced scrutiny that year for his connections to Phillips, including for participating in a 2011 textbook which argued that Christians are morally bound not to vote for women, and that women should not work outside the home or vote, among other activities.
(Phillips resigned from Vision Forum after confessing to an affair with a girl who later alleged in a lawsuit that Phillips began grooming her when she was fifteen.)
The documentary was Phillips' idea. The movie, "Raising the Allosaur: The True Story of a Rare Dinosaur and the Home Schoolers Who Found It," was intended to show homeschool students discovering an allosaur skeleton, believed to have lived about 150 million years ago, which the children would then "scientifically" prove had actually died 6,000 years ago in the Biblical flood.
Meadows and his family, including his wife, mother and two children, make appearances throughout the video, but Meadows nabbed a pivotal role. On the final day of the dig, the narrator (identified as "Winston MacArthur," but really Doug Winston Phillips, who also plays himself in the film) laments that it appears the troupe will not find an allosaur — but a voice comes over Phillips' walkie-talkie: "Hey Doug, we've got a claw up here!"
Phillips rushes to the discovery site, where he finds future White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his daughter Haley, then 9, whom a Vision Forum press release would later credit for the find: "Nine-year-old home schooler Haley Meadows was dusting away dirt with her brush when she found the claws to a 100-foot Sauropod, presently believed to be of the rare Ultrasaurus variety."
Phillips and Meadows then engage in a dialogue.
Phillips: Mark, I understand that we found a little something here.
Meadows: We did
Phillips: Tell me what happened.
Meadows: Well, my daughter Haley and I, we were working towards the end of the day here, just trying to get just one last bit of rock out before we finished. And so she was back-digging, and we were taking the brush and trying to take some of the sand out and all the sudden we spotted a little bit of bone, we thought, and we found a claw.
Phillips: Pretty exciting. Haley, is this the very first behemoth claw you've found?
Haley Meadows: Yes.
Phillips: Do you think you'll be finding others?
Haley: Yes.
Phillips: Good, I like that. Hey, that must have been very exciting.
Meadows: It has been exciting. This has been the trip of a lifetime.
The narrator then explains that the discovery has changed the course of the excavation, delivering a "resurgence of hope" that rallies the diggers to find the allosaur's skull. The group turns to prayer, beseeching Jesus to "bring forth the skull for the glory of God," so that they may shatter "the lies of evolution."
In no time the skull is found, and along with it "deposits of partially fossilized and unfossilized organic material," according to the narrator, the existence of which "clearly points to a recent deposition."
The narrator concludes: "The search for the allosaur is over, but God has answered their prayers and given them yet another devastating evidence for rapid burial, recent deposition and the Biblical Flood Model."
Vision Forum posted "Raising the Allosaur" for sale just in time for Christmas. It cost $15. Meadows was apparently impressed enough by the operation that he bought the set itself, shelling out $250,000 and entering into a ten-year, $1,000 per-year commercial lease with Creative Expeditions.
"Raising the Allosaur" was successful enough that it spurred Phillips to create the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival in 2004. Just before the festival opened, however, Phillips had to yank the film: It turned out that the skeleton had not in fact been discovered by Haley Meadows, but had been uncovered two years earlier by Dana Forbes, the landowner who eventually sold the site to Meadows. A paleontologist named Joe Taylor had identified the skeleton as an allosaur in May 2001, a year before Meadows' trip. When these facts were exhumed they mired Phillips' documentary in controversy.
This led to a bitter dispute over who owned the dinosaur. Before the conference, Phillips sent out a letter to attendees that said "a series of ethics-based issues have been brought to our attention," leading him to suspend sales of his film "pending a season for Creation Expeditions to appropriately address the aforementioned issues."
Creation Expeditions posted a note to its website claiming that its ministry had "endured an outrageous attack."
"This doesn't surprise us, as we know the wiles of the evil one is to try to thwart the Kingdom advance," the post said.
The allosaur eventually found its way to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which is owned by Answers in Genesis. That group received the skeleton as a donation in May 2014 from a charity group that had bought the fossil from Taylor, the paleontologist.
"It was a bad deal that we had to accept," Taylor told the New Yorker, who said the dispute mediation with Creation Expeditions would have left him nearly $100,000 in debt and destroyed his business. He sold the fossils for about $125,000 to a Christian foundation, which eventually donated them to the museum. At that time the estimated market value of the allosaur was about $450,000.
It's unclear if any additional dinosaur fossils were ever found on Meadows' land. In 2016, he sold the property to Answers in Genesis for $197,000, taking a deed of trust for $192,000, which had a 4.5% interest rate and monthly installments of about $11,000. That deed was released in 2018, and Meadows presumably would have collected the $11,000 payments for the following 18 months, which he never reported.
In December 2019, Meadows announced he would not seek re-election to Congress. In fact, he resigned before the end of his term after President Trump appointed him chief of staff in March. And while Lin Wood's tweet was cryptic, it would appear that Meadows long ago escaped the reach of House ethics investigators.
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aha interesting ID used ~ AGW
2010
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https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/an-evangelical-backlash-against-environmentalism/
over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called creation care, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue.
“We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity’s responsibility to address it,” hundreds of evangelical leaders declared in a 2006 statement on climate change.
But while a growing number of local and national nonprofit groups have formed to spread the “creation care” message, an increasingly fierce backlash against the mingling of Christianity and environmentalism has emerged from other quarters of the evangelical movement.
Leading the Christian counterargument on the environment is the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical nonprofit that strenuously opposes action on climate change and describes the environmental movement as a “false religion” that Christians must avoid at all costs.
This December, the group released a 12-part educational video series, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” warning Christians that radical environmentalism “is striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.”
The video series includes appearances by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery, senior vice president of Focus on the Family; and other conservative evangelical Christian leaders.
The series takes direct aim at the “creation care” movement, citing a “well-funded effort to infiltrate churches” by groups with beliefs that are “deadly to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“Some of what goes under the name of ‘creation care,’ even in evangelical circles, is infected by the false worldview and theology of secular and pagan religious environmentalism,” Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance, said in a statement accompanying the videos.
In an e-mailed response to questions, Mr. Beisner said that “creation care” environmentalists and evangelical politicians, like Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mike Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, who have advocated for action on climate change, probably did not understand the science behind the positions they were advancing, and were parroting alarmist views propagated by radical environmental groups and the mainstream media.
Mr. Beisner wrote that he had so far not met a single evangelical “who has been able to rehearse the most basic arguments pro and con regarding the most important physical issue” in the global warming debate, “which is climate sensitivity.”
He added, “That suggests to me that most are embracing conclusions without understanding the arguments.”
Mr. Beisner, a former professor of theology and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, argued that the science is still unsettledon whether greenhouse gases are warming the climate and that projections of dangerous human-driven warming in the future are flawed and unreliable. But an “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” on the Cornwall Alliance’s Web site urges all evangelicals to accept that recent global warming is natural and that mankind is incapable of altering the climate.
“We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent designand infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory,” the group’s declaration reads. “Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”
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an 820
at the evangelical Creation Museum, dinosaurs lived alongside humans and the world is 6,000 years old
Summer travel in the United States has slowed but not stopped due to thecoronavirus pandemic. Among those destinations that have recently reopened is, as of June 8, is the…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/historian-trump-isnt-fighting-science-hes-stealing-its-authority/
...These bills do not claim to fight against science. If they did, they would lose. Few parents want their children to miss out on learning about science. Instead, these bills confuse and distort the issue by pretending that non-mainstream views about evolution have equal intellectual credibility. They insist that their religious views have earned scientific legitimacy. As have creationists for over a century, today’s activists fight for science, for the right to call their ideas truly scientific. Then they offer those ideas to public schools as better science.
Trump is doing something similar and similarly harmful. When President Trump says his decisions will be based on a “hunch,” he is repeating the tactics of generations of creationists. It might sound at first like he is rejecting the need for scientific credentials or expertise. In fact, though, Trump is positioning himself as superior to those experts, not against them. Like creationists, Trump does not deride the authority of science itself. Instead, he portrays himself as the best arbiter of the meaning of scientific details, the perspicacious decider-in-chief.
For instance, just after his pronouncement that he had a “hunch” about the true nature of coronavirus, Trump explained that his hunch was
based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor.....
full:
no lnx
Historian: Trump isn’t fighting science — he’s stealing its authority
Vice President Mike Pence, joined by Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, listen as President Donald J. Trump takes questions from the press during a coronavirus update briefing Tuesday, March 31, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
Written by History News Network April 27, 2020
If it were still just reality TV, it might be funny. In his discussions of coronavirus, President Trump has veered between spouting wildly inaccurate statements and making claims of super-human knowledge. It is tempting to accuse Trump of being anti-science, but as the history of American creationism shows, Trump is doing something else, something much more dangerous.
It’s not that President Trump is fond of traditional mainstream scientific expertise. Even Trump’s biggest fans might agree that the President does not follow the rules of mainstream scientific thinking. In the face of scientific fact, President Trump has claimed that coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear in warmer weather. He has implied that antibiotics have something to do with viruses. He has claimed an ability to make life-or-death public health decisions based on his superior mental abilities, using the “metrics” in his head instead of the usual data. Perhaps most strangely of all, President Trump has suggested absurd remedies such as blasting victims with ultraviolet light and subjecting them to injections of “the disinfectant.”
Yet these claims and untruths do not mean Trump is fighting against science itself. Like today’s struggle against coronavirus, America’s long history of conflicts over science would be very different if they were actually a struggle for or against science itself. Instead, battles about science are usually battles to claim the prestige of capital-s “Science.” Fights against science itself tend to lose, but fights for the right to call bad ideas “Science” can go on for generations.
Nothing illustrates this distinction better than America’s long-running battle over the science of evolution. For over a century now, creationists have confounded Americans’ scientific knowledge of evolution by claiming to have better science on their side. Creationists have hardly ever attacked science itself. Rather, they have insisted that their religious ideas have given them better science.
Nearly a century ago, for example, in the lead-up to the infamous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Tennessee, celebrity prosecutor William Jennings Bryan insisted that his creationism made him a superior scientist. In 1921, Bryan attacked the science of Darwinism as nothing but an “absurd hypothesis.” Unlike real science, Bryan insisted, which is built on facts, Darwinian evolution was only a string of guesses held together by bitterness and atheism.
A generation later, creationists such as Bernard Ramm continued the fight. Like Bryan’s crusade, Ramm’s campaign was not a fight against science, but rather a struggle to define science. As Ramm put it in 1954, science only has a chance at explaining the realities of life if it is infused with “the light of revelation.” The pretenders to modern science, Ramm argued, had foolishly abandoned the vital questions of first cause and final goals. Only a real science based in true religion had a chance to answer the big questions.
In the 21st century, even the most radical creationists fight for science, not against it. For example, when arch-creationist Ken Ham debated Science Guy Bill Nye in 2014, Ham did not say he opposed science. As Ham argued in his opening statement, “the word ‘science’ has been hijacked by secularists.” Like generations of creationists before him, Ham wanted to take back science. Ham tried to make a distinction—a distinction recognized by no mainstream scientists—between authentic “observational” science and false “historical” science. For Ham, real science could only make claims based on what it directly observed, not on evidence left behind from millions of years of evolution.
Creationists’ long battle to call their religious ideas “Science” has direct and damaging policy implications. Having failed in their attempts to push creationism into public-school science classes, creationists these days try to water down the kinds of science schools will include. In the past decade, creationist lawmakers have introduced dozens of “academic freedom” bills in state legislatures. These bills often call for science teachers to teach “the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution.” The range of views taught would presumably include the mainstream science of evolution along with religion-friendly ideas such as intelligent design.
These bills do not claim to fight against science. If they did, they would lose. Few parents want their children to miss out on learning about science. Instead, these bills confuse and distort the issue by pretending that non-mainstream views about evolution have equal intellectual credibility. They insist that their religious views have earned scientific legitimacy. As have creationists for over a century, today’s activists fight for science, for the right to call their ideas truly scientific. Then they offer those ideas to public schools as better science.
Trump is doing something similar and similarly harmful. When President Trump says his decisions will be based on a “hunch,” he is repeating the tactics of generations of creationists. It might sound at first like he is rejecting the need for scientific credentials or expertise. In fact, though, Trump is positioning himself as superior to those experts, not against them. Like creationists, Trump does not deride the authority of science itself. Instead, he portrays himself as the best arbiter of the meaning of scientific details, the perspicacious decider-in-chief.
For instance, just after his pronouncement that he had a “hunch” about the true nature of coronavirus, Trump explained that his hunch was
based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor.
Concealed within Trump’s ramblings is a claim to know science better than experts, better than “a lot of people that do this.” Similarly, when Trump announced that he will make decisions about re-opening society based on the “metrics” in his head, it might sound as if he is throwing out the need for consultations with real scientists. But that’s not what Trump was saying. As Trump continued,
I can listen to thirty-five people. At the end, I gotta make a decision.
Even if “thirty-five” scientists make their best cases, in other words, they still need someone like Trump to figure out the truth behind their claims.
Trump’s statements make for terrible science, but they are not anti-science. An anti-science approach would dispute the validity of careful evidence, expert review, and cautious claims. Trump does not dispute science; he only disrupts science and makes the communication of scientific information far more difficult. By standing athwart the scientific process and shouting “Look at me,” Trump’s antics are far worse than if he were merely anti-science. As mainstream scientists and public-health experts do their best to communicate evidence-based information to the public, Trump is getting in their way. He is mixing good science with bad, diluting evidence-based facts with personal fantasies and magical thinking. Worst of all, Trump is claiming the ability to choose between and among scientific evidence and scientific experts to find the real truth.
If Trump mocked Science, very few people would listen. But when he insists that he has a better, more authentic Science on his side—one based only on his own superior charisma and powers of discernment—he has a much better chance to keep people’s attention. Instead of communicating a clear, unified message about current best knowledge and best practices, Trump’s fantasy science makes the coronavirus crisis far more dangerous.
==
Part of the fabric of life’: Missouri House passes minister’s bill allowing Bible to be taught in schools
==
AN
Trump, fresh off an embarrassing loss on the shutdown and his wall to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is turning his attention from the Southern border to an entirely different topic: religion.
The President, desperate to shore up his rapidly dropping polling numbers, kicked off the week with a tweet aimed at the only segment of his base that is still sticking by him: Christian Evangelicals.
“Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible,” Trump tweeted. “Starting to make a turn back? Great!
Trump may have been motivated byan article in last week’s USA Today that reveals a “wave of ‘Bible literacy’ bills” are “emerging in state legislatures.”
“Some of the lawmakers – and leaders of Christian groups supporting the bills – say they want to restore traditional values in schools and give students a chance to study the religious text deeply,” USA Today notes.
“The Bible is an integral part of our society and deserves a place in the classroom,” said Republican state Rep. Aaron McWilliams of North Dakota, a co-sponsor of a bill that would require the state’s public high schools to offer an elective on Bible studies.
==
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed
bad doc, not MPI, ben stein
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-21-2017/
paranoid science
Paranoid Science: The Christian Right's War on Reality: Antony ...
https://www.amazon.com/Paranoid-Science-Christian-Rights-Reality/.../1479827134
1.
Paranoid Science: The Christian Right's War on ... - Google Books
https://books.google.com › Religion › Religion & Science
May 23, 2017 - Explores the Christian Right's fierce opposition to science, explaining how and why its leaders came to see scientific truths as their enemyFor ...
Review of Antony Alumkal, 'Paranoid Science: The Christian Right's ...
https://www.insidehighered.com/.../review-antony-alumkal-paranoid-science-christian...
1.
Nonfiction Book Review: Paranoid Science by Antony Alumkal. New ...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4798-2713-8
1.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/exposed-how-creationists-texas-are-putting-pressure-schoolbook-publishers-bring-god-biology
==
AlterNet [1] / By Dan Arel [2]
5 States Gunning to Make Their Kids As Scientifically Illiterate As Possible by Teaching Creationist B.S.
June 25, 2014 |
The British government dealt a strong blow to creationists last week when they clarified and extended their laws banning creationism in the classroom to not only free schools, but to academies as well.
Academies, including free schools, are the UK’s version of the charter schools in the US, and there were concerns that, since academies are often run by religious organizations who taught and endorsed creationism in the classroom, kids who attend them were not being taught actual science.
The scientific community put heavy pressure on the British government to extend a similar law passed in 2012, which did not apply to free schools nor all academies and allowed some older schools already teaching creationism to grandfather their questionable curriculum in.
With this new ruling, "[…] The Government has extended such an explicit rule to all new Academies and Free Schools and made it clear that it believes that existing rules mean that no Academy or Free School can teach pseudoscience," said Pavan Dhaliwal, The British Humanist Association’s Head of Public Affairs explained in the press release.
In the US however, the battle to bring creationism and intelligent design into the classroom is alive and well. It has been ever since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which the teaching of evolution was found to be a violation of Tennessee law. The trial banned the teaching of human evolution in any publicly funded school.
The battle finally came to a head in 1987 when the Supreme Court heard Edwards v. Aguillard, in which Don Aguilard took the state of Louisiana to court over a law that required that creationism be taught in public schools.
The case, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to the religious right when the court ruled that teaching creationism in publicly funded schools was unconstitutional because the original law was specifically intended to promote a particular religion.
A similar blow was dealt decades later when in 2005 when a US District Court ruled that intelligent design was not scientific and even encompassed creationism and teaching either to be unconstitutional.
So one would think that since both creation myths that are endorsed by the religious right have been struck down in the highest courts in the country that this debate would be settled. How on earth could we still be fighting the creationist proponents when they have been dealt solid deathblows?
According to the National Center for Science Education [3] (NCSE), an organization that tracks anti-science bills around the US that deal with evolution and global warming, almost every southern and bible-belt state in the US has at the very least attempted to pass education bills that either remove evolution from the curriculum or make it legal for teachers to offer alternative theories to human origins.
The states fighting to pass these laws are predictable if you pay attention to any national politics, the more red a state votes, the more it fights to remove science education from its schools or at the very least, replace science classes with a form of Bible study.
So what states and bills have been the worst to science education? Here are five examples of states either enacted or relentlessly fighting to pass anti-evolution and or anti-science bills to change their educational standards to appease the Christian Right.
1. Louisiana
Louisiana seems to be trying harder than any other state to produce the most scientifically illiterate students it possibly can. Governor Bobby Jindal has overseen most of these bills and has endorsed them all.
Jindal even pushed and won to get a voucher program installed in the state that would allow public funding to be used for private education, including religious schools that taught creationism.
A 2008 proposal that was approved in the state allows teachers to, “[…] Supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner,” according the language drafted in the law.
The law clearly had evolution and climate science in its sights when allowing teachers to use other sources of information to critique scientific theories.
A repeal effort has been made under Senate Bill 175, in April 2014 it went in front of the Louisiana Senate Education Committee and the repeal was voted down 3-1, meaning that teachers could still skirt the federal law and use their own materials in the classroom against well understood scientific theories.
The failure to get SB 175 passed has continued to ensure those with religious power in the state control science education.
2. Missouri
Missouri recently advanced a bill, House Bill 1472, to its House that would allow parents to opt their children out of class during lessons about evolution.
According to NCSE the bill's sponsor Rick Brattin (R-District 55) told the Kansas City Star (February 6, 2014) that requiring students to study evolution is "an absolute infringement on people's rights" and that evolution is "just as much faith and, you know, just as much pulled out of the air as, say, any religion."
Bills being written by politicians who know less about the scientific theory of evolution as the students they believe they are protecting, cannot be a good thing. States like Missouri are turning to politicians and not scientists when drafting this type of legislation.
Missouri even looks to take this one step further and has another bill, House Bill 1587, that is currently with the House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education that would remove the ability of school administrators to prevent teachers from miseducating students about "scientific controversies" around evolution. No date has been set for the committee to discuss this proposed legislation.
3. South Carolina
South Carolina republicans want to “teach the controversy.” This creationist gem, a much laughed at and discarded argument was brought back into the limelight when Senator Mike Fair (R-District 6), a member of the states Education Oversight Committee (EOC) and long time opponent of evolution told the Charleston Post and Courier that, We must teach the controversy ... There's another side. I'm not afraid of the controversy."
The proposal he was advocating at the time was supposed to revise the states science standards and require that students, "Construct scientific arguments that seem to support and scientific arguments that seem to discredit Darwinian natural selection"
The proposal passed the EOC with a 7-4 vote and went to the states board of education, which held a meeting on June 11, 2014. A number of scientists came to oppose the proposal and the only advocates who came to speak in the proposals defense were two speakers affiliated with the Discovery Institute, an anti-evolution organization that supports intelligent design as an explanation for life.
Thankfully the state board of education saw through the religious fog and rejected the proposal.
4. Oklahoma
Oklahoma faced not one, but two anti-evolution bills this year. The first brought forth in February, Senate Bill 1765, would have made it impossible for school administrators to mislead students about “scientific controversies”. The first bill died in the hands of the Senate Education Committee.
Shortly after, a second and similar bill, House Bill 1674, was proposed and even passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 70-6, sending the bill to the state senate. This new bill specifically mentioned "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" as subjects which "some teachers may be unsure" about how to teach, according to NCSE.
HB 1674 however never made it to vote in the senate and expired. One can only assume a third attempt will not be far off.
5. Virginia
Another bill put forward to tie the hands of school administrators is House Bill 207. Like the bills in Oklahoma and Missouri HB 207 would allow teachers to challenge scientific theories and offer other alternatives and not face any punishment for violating educational laws that prohibit religious alternatives.
The bills only sponsor, Richard P. Bell (R-District 20), acknowledged to the Washington Post (January 29, 2014) that HB 207 would apply to such scientific theories such as evolution and climate change. Bell also admitted to another local paper The Recorder that he himself was a creationist.
The Recorder later publicly came out against the bill and said they believed it was a threat to the states scientific educational standards.
The bill however died when the House Educational Committee did not vote on the issue before the bill expired.
These five states are some of the top examples but they are not the only five, and in the US were evolution is not widely accepted this hurts the country's scientific future.
A recent poll conducted by Gallup [4] showed that 42% of Americans believe in the creation myth as to the origins of life on earth. There is glimmer of hope though, because the same poll conducted in 2012 showed that 46% of Americans believed in the creation myth.
The biggest threat to the US education is the Republican Party’s refusal to accept scientific evidence as fact and turn every scientific claim into some form of liberal conspiracy.
While 42% is an improvement over two years ago it still shows just how far behind the US is to the rest of the developed world. Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and France all poll in over 80% acceptance of the theory. In fact, when apoll [5] was conducted of European countries that included Turkey, the US fell behind every country except Turkey that happened to poll at 25% acceptance.
Both Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson have spoken out about the dangers of not teaching evolution, seeing as how evolution is one of the foundations of science, especially life science.
Nye’s video criticizing creationism and scolding those who refuse to teach their children about evolution led to a nationally publicized debate between himself and Ken Ham of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis.
So while federal laws make it clear that the teaching of creationism and intelligent design are unconstitutional and are clear religious endorsements, it is obvious that the struggle to teach actual science across the US is an ongoing battle.
National science standards such as the Next Generation Science Standards [6] need to be adopted across all fifty states and put an end to GOP controlled states creating their own religious based science curriculums.
tagged with:
creationism [8],
education [9]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/5-states-gunning-make-their-kids-scientifically-illiterate-possible-teaching-creationist
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/dan-arel
[3] http://ncse.com/
[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx
[5] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/21329204.html
[6] http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards
[7] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 5 States Gunning to Make Their Kids As Scientifically Illiterate As Possible by Teaching Creationist B.S.
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/creationism
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/education-0
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
climate: http://www.alternet.org/environment/why-neil-degrasse-tyson-poses-direct-threat-creationists-pushing-climate-change-suicide
AlterNet [1] / By Dan Arel [2]
Neil deGrasse Tyson Praises Scientist Who Knew to Check His Religion at the Door; Creationists Go Apoplectic
May 12, 2014 |
Creationists want religion out of Cosmos, unless of course it favors them. Each week Neil deGrasse Tyson has been attacked by creationists and the religious right for anything he says that makes religion look bad. In this week's episode about electricity, Tyson discussed a Christian scientist, brushing off the importance of religious belief while engaging in scientific inquiry. Naturally, creationists don't like that.
Michael Faraday was introduced this week to millions around the globe for his contributions to science, many of which benefit us all today in our everyday lives. Faraday was a devout Christian, and Tyson mentioned this, but as David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute [3] points out:
“Faraday's faith is mentioned at the beginning but implicitly dismissed as having anything to do with his science. Cosmos shows us his impoverished family saying grace at the dinner table and explains that he 'took [their] fundamentalist Christian faith to heart. It would always remain a source of strength, comfort and humility for him.' That's it—nothing more than a warm blanket on a cold night.”
Tyson is not lying or misrepresenting Faraday here. Faraday was a great scientist who knew how to check his faith at the lab door and study the actual data in front of him.
This upset Klinghoffer to no end. He goes as far as to mention his 12-year-old son, a fan of Cosmos, who is not allowed to watch any episode because of the content. You have to love the open mindedness of raising your kid to only believe what you believe.
Klinghoffer quotes MIT professor Ian H. Hutchinson:
“One example of the influence of [Faraday's] theological perspective on his science is Faraday's preoccupation with nature's laws. 'God has been pleased to work in his material creation by laws,' he remarked, and 'the Creator governs his material works by definite laws resulting from the forces impressed on matter.'”
While this is correct, how would Tyson benefit the viewer by pointing this out? Faraday’s discoveries would not change based on his belief or the validity of his personal faith. Faraday calls them nature’s laws; he just happens to believe a God created them.
Klinghoffer continues:
“Tyson has gone out of his way, indeed twisting the facts, to depict faith as an obstacle to science. But when acknowledging its vital role in scientific history would be most appropriate, Cosmos invariably falls silent.”
It is Klinghoffer who twisted the facts, trying to make his readers believe that all of Faraday’s discoveries were based on his faith and not his devotion to the scientific method.
Tyson and the writers at Cosmos are not in some anti-religion conspiracy. They are simply delivering a dialogue about the world we live in. Creationists demand validity when none should be afforded to them.
A scientist like Faraday can exist today and indeed does. Scientists around the world hold their own religious views. The ones who are successful at science are the ones who are able to check their faith at the door and can work in the lab using the scientific method, not fairy tales.
Tyson has brought up religion a handful of times, to counter its stance against evolution, call out the claims that earthquakes are caused by moral issues, and remind everyone that in the past the church has gone so far as to kill those who used science to speak out against the Bible. However, Tyson and the writers at Cosmos have not made it a point to mention every scientist’s religious beliefs if they had no impact on the story at hand.
The Discovery Institute is simply embarrassed, as it was weeks before when its worldview was deconstructed on national television. In retort it stoops to ad hominem attacks of Tyson, MacFarlane and the writing team atCosmos, who are telling a beautiful lesson week after week.
Organizations such as the Discovery Institute highlight why there is such a divide between religion and science. The fact that they take offense at a scientist having religious beliefs that do not influence his discoveries in the lab shows once again that truth is not their goal.
As in weeks past, when the data invalidate the claims, the next best response is to attack Tyson. And just as in weeks past, science prevails when it simply produces verifiable data over ancient myths.
See more stories tagged with:
religion [5]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/belief/its-funny-soon-neil-degrasse-tyson-brings-religion-creationists-dont-want-him-talking-about
AlterNet [1] / By Janet Allon [2]
8 of the Worst Right-Wing Wackos This Week: War on Science Edition
May 10, 2014 |
1. CNN’s S.E. Cupp to Bill Nye: You science guys are bullying us.
Remember when we all used to agree that science and knowledge were good things? When scholarship was respected? When we looked to educated people to do research and inform us about what was actually going on with the world?
It wasn’t that long ago.
This week, after the White House released a report on just how devastating climate change has shown itself to be right here at home, with superstorms, flooding, droughts and tornadoes already pounding America (and the rest of the world) with increasing frequency—the very phenomena reputable scientists have been warning about for a long time—what did the deniers do?
They upped the ante.
Not only are they impervious to knowledge, reason or fact, they apparently feel attacked by knowledge, reason and fact. So, they counterattacked. On CNN, S.E. Cupp accused scientists of being bullies. Scientists who are just trying to inform people about facts and something that affects us all. WTF is wrong with these people?
It happened on CNN’s Crossfire. Heritage Foundation economist Nicholas Loris argued with science guy Bill Nye and activist Van Jones that the extreme weather trends are "uncertain."
"I’m not a denier, I’m not a skeptic,” Loris said. “What I’m saying is, climate is changing — yes, manmade emission are in some part to that — but we haven’t seen these extreme weather event trends. The observed data doesn’t prove that."
Poor Bill Nye was flabbergasted.
“So let’s just start with, we don’t agree on the facts,” Nye said. “This third report came out, saying it’s very serious, you say no. There’s the essence of the problem, S.E."
That would be the S.E. Cupp from the Heritage Foundation, who then said this to Bill Nye: “Isn’t it a problem when science guys attempt to bully other people? Nick here had to say, ‘I’m not a denier.’ He had to get it out: ‘I’m not a denier.’ Because really, the science group has tried to shame anyone who dares question this, and the point I’m trying to make is, it’s not working with the public.”
Attack the scientists! The purveyors of knowledge! Kill the messengers!
Anyone else getting a Taliban-like feeling from this crew?
2. A sign that Fox News’ Benghazi obsession just might be getting out of hand.
OK, we’re not sure, but we think it just might be possible that Fox News is developing an unhealthy obsession with Benghazi. We’re just worried that maybe they should see someone for that particular problem. There are treatments. Cognitive behavioral therapy can loosen the grip such obsessions have. You can acquire tools to drive away these negative, repetitive thoughts swirling around in your brain. The thoughts that are preventing you from thinking about or doing anything about actual problems like, oh, we don’t know... maybe climate catastrophe!!!
Maybe we’re wrong though. Blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Here’s what got us worried. You tell us. Does this seem like a worrisome sign?
It was on Monday, just after the White House released the landmark report on climate change and its observable disastrous effects. It also announced that President Obama would be doing interviews with local weather announcers and meteorologists around the country to try to get the word out, and deliver the information from a source people generally know and trust, like Al Roker or (insert your local weatherperson here).
Here’s Fox News host Dana Perino on that:
"Tomorrow, President Obama is going to do interviews with meteorologists all across the country about a new climate change report ... I hope they ask him about Benghazi!"
Hear that, Al Roker?
3. Charles Krauthammer continues the assault on science, calling it superstition.
Fox News managed to find another crazy, irresponsible idiot disguised as a sentient being to debunk facts and science: good old Charles Krauthammer. He said on Tuesday that the belief in global climate change is mere “superstition” akin to the “rain dance of Native Americans.”
Why would he say such a provably wrong thing? We have no idea. It could be wishful thinking. Sure, we wish this whole climate change catastrophe would go away, and that we could wake up from it like a bad dream. We wish all these meanie scientists conducting real research based on actual facts would just stop discovering that the news is so very, very bad, and bullying us about it.
Krauthammer took his point a little further, about science actually being superstition. Yah, and the other way around, too. Up is down, Charles. Black is white. No is yes. “It’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament, it’s in the rain dance of Native Americans — if you sin, the skies will not cooperate.”
Still more crazy talk from Chuckie Kraut: “Ninety-nine percent of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not,” Krauthammer said. “I’m not impressed by numbers, I’m not impressed by consensus.”
What does impress you, Charles? On second thought, maybe don’t answer that.
4. Pat Robertson: Fighting climate change will destroy America.
Pat Robertson added his sober assessment to the news of the new study on climate change’s damaging impact on the U.S. [3] by warning that efforts to combat climate change will 
[4].”
During his “700 Club” program Monday night, Robertson said actions to curb human-influenced climate change are part of an anti-American “socialist agenda,” saying it all goes back to “the playbook of Obama’s mentor.”
He did not appear to notice that he resembled an insane man as he said it.
Fighting climate change “is high on the agenda of the radicals who want to destroy America, it isn’t high on the agenda of those who really care about what goes on in life,” he said.
Patty, just one question. What the hell are you talking about?
h/t: rightwingwatch [5]
5. Fox News is just wondering if female breadwinners are a recipe for disaster. Just wondering.
It takes a ton of work, a huge budget and an army of numbskulls to try to set the social clock back roughly to the Victorian era. Or maybe just the 1950s. Either way. Lots of work. But the Fox Newsians are on it.
Some women are making good money. More than their husbands, apparently. Is that good? Fox News is just wondering. It’s emasculating. They’re just saying. Just reporting the news, that’s all.
This was the topic of a discussion Brian Kilmeade and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had with author financial writer/professional advice giver Farnoosh Torabi, who managed to be pretty calm in the face of questions like Kilmeade’s: “Is it worth it to have the man be the second highest paid person in the house?”
Because sometimes husbands cheat under those circumstances. And sometimes marriages break up when the man makes less. And we all know that none of those things happen when the man makes more.
And what if he’s the third highest earning person in the house? Like, what if one of the kids' careers takes off. What then? Would he divorce his kids?
Well, we don’t know, but something is going to have to be done, because the statistic they are citing is that in 24 percent of households, women are out-earning men. While normally Fox likes it when people earn money, especially rich people, they like it a little less when women do it, and emasculate their men.
h/t: mediamatters [6]
6.AZ Christian pastor: Women in yoga pants partially responsible for rape.
Last month, Dean Saxton, a University of Arizona student who preaches under the name Brother Dean Samuel [7], protested outside a documentary [8] about 1998 Miss World Pageant winner and rape survivor Linor Abargil.
It was her fault, he explained this week in an interview with Vice. She had put out some provocative pictures of herself. Therefore, she was asking for it. “I believe that if she was at home, and if she had kept to her Orthodox Jewishness, that rape would really probably would not have happened.”
Nice. This douchebag also likes to wear T-shirts that say “You whore.”
During his protest, he held a sign that said “You Deserve Rape.” He yelled at women to “give up your immodest clothing” and that “yoga pants are a sin.”
Do not even get him started on downward-facing dog.
h/t: rawstory [9]
7. Tony Perkins warns that condom use leads to tyranny, because, of course it does.
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins responded to the news this week that the Department of Education will investigate 55 colleges and universities for “mishandling sexual assault claims [10]” by coming to the very reasonable conclusion that contraception distribution “leads to tyranny.”
Huh? Sorry, Tony. Care to connect those dots for us?
Well, the problem, Perkins said on his “Washington Watch [11]” program, is “the sexualization that is taking place in our culture in general but on college campuses.”
Right, because 18- to 22-year-olds never used to think about sex. Furthest thing from their minds.
“Contraception is made available as if it were candy which sends a message, well it’s there, it must be there for a reason, and then we’re surprised when — this is not justification, it’s wrong, we are all responsible for our actions — but we’re surprised when people act on these outside factors that they are surrounded by,” Perkins sputtered.
Then, the non sequitur he apparently thought followed his already wobbly sequence of kind-of thoughts: “It leads to tyranny,” he said.
Dot connection fail.
h/t: rightwingwatch [12]
8. Gordon Klingenschmitt speculates that forbidden fruit in Genesis might have been marijuana.
Hoo boy! Crazy Gordon Klingenschmitt was at it again the other day on his “Pray in Jesus Name” program. Seems Klingenschmitt, a.k.a. “Dr. Chaps” felt called to respond to those “pot hippies” who cite Genesis 1:29, the line about God having given you "every herb bearing seed," as biblical justification for legalizing weed.
Oh, those dastardly hippies. Reading the bible? That is just low!
Klingenschmitt has cooked up a theory in his busy little brain that maybe the “forbidden fruit” was no apple; it was marijuana (maybe disguised as an apple? or smoked in an apple?).
No, actually, he’s done a little research. The bible does not use the word “apple,” he pointed out. It uses the word “forbidden weed.”
C’mon, people, weed?!! Remind you of anything?
“How do you know that the serpent didn't give pot to Eve and say 'go ahead, and the day that you eat this, you're not going to die,'” Klingenschmitt said. “But you are going to die.”
Oh man, what a buzz kill.
h/t: rightwingwatch [13]
See more stories tagged with:
s.e. cupp [15],
charles krauthammer [16],
fox news [17],
climate change [18],
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/8-worst-right-wing-wackos-week-war-science-edition
Links:
Conservative Christians are really mad about the reboot of the legendary science series Cosmos, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. The complaint? That an ancient myth about creation invented by Hebrews thousands of years ago is not being included in a show that is there to teach science. Christian conservatives have been taking to the airwaves complaining about the non-inclusion of ancient myths in a science program, with Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis whining, “Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them,” and Elizabeth Mitchell of the same organization decrying the show for having “blind faith in evolution.” (She’s just straight up lying here. Evolution is well-established by evidence, something Cosmos covers in its second episode.)
http://www.projectcensored.org/social-economic-benefits-evolution-based-science/