Happy Birthday, Charles

America's Darwin problem is only one component of America's science problem. As Kenneth Miller notes:

Significant numbers of Americans have come to regard the scientific enterprise as a special interest group that rejects mainstream American values and is not worthy of the public trust. Governor Rick Perry of Texas spoke to this view when he claimed that "There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data" to their own benefit. Why? Perry was clear about this. It's personal greed. Scientists cheat "so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects."

Unfortunately, Governor Perry is right, just not in the way his remarks imply. Scientific data is indeed being manipulated, but it is almost always done in the service of some financial interest. Andrew Wakefield, for instance, the widely discredited originator of the vaccine-autism canard, had his own treatment racket in mind when he concocted the bogus link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And pain researcher Scott Reuben faked dozens of studies to keep research grants from Pfizer rolling in. FDA "fast-tracking," agri-pharma profits and Americans' piss-poor science education have combined to create a perfect storm of scientific mistrust, which is what is at the heart of our rejection of Darwinism. If we hope to catch up with the rest of the developed world, let alone surpass it, we must take the profit motive out of science.

And when data falsification isn't the culprit, peer bullying is. A PR firm called The Bivings Group formed an army of sock puppets to impugn the reputation of a UC Berkely researcher named Ignacio Chapella who had published a paper showing that GM corn had cross-pollinated with conventional corn.

And when PBS programs FRONTLINE and NOVA teamed up to address the issue of GMOs in a program titled "Harvest of Fear," they were forced to post the following caution regarding their online opinion tally:

In late May 2004, thanks in part to the vigilance of several outside readers who phoned in, we discovered that some person or persons had tampered with this feature's tally. Specifically, on May 16-17, 1,540,016 "Yes" votes and 33,641 "No" votes were cast via just four IP addresses. (Prior to May 16, a total of roughly 124,000 votes of any kind had been cast since the feature launched in April 2001.)

Deeming the credibility of the tally to have been compromised, we made this page unavailable for several days while we decided how best to address this problem. In the end, we threw out these suspicious votes and recalculated the remaining response numbers and percentages. Then we did a more thorough scouring of votes from before May 2004.

It appears that a lesser degree of multiple voting has been going on for some time, so we have decided to temporarily remove the final vote and tallying options from this feature until we can put a more secure system in place. The feature itself remains unchanged, and we encourage you to challenge your stance on GM foods by reading it. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your readership.—The Editors

The upshot is that Americans' rejection of Darwinism and distrust of climate data and of science in general is the result of decades of educational dumbing down and the intentional scientific misconduct of researchers starving for grant money, which, increasingly, comes from corporations and not government subsidies.

And GMO defenders like David Tribe and Pamela Ronald, among others, have cleverly manipulated this phenomenon in order to portray suspicion of corporate greed as scientific ignorance, so that if you question Monsanto's or Syngenta's motives regarding the promotion of genetically modified crops, or if you make note of the many instances of pharmaceutical research fraud, you are lumped in with global warming and evolution deniers.

I kind of feel the same way towards the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex as I do towards President Obama. On the one hand, I am forced to defend the president against imbeciles who think he's a Kenyan Marxist with a fake birth certificate, but on the other hand, I'm forced to point out to his legion of defenders that he's a neoliberal stooge of the corporate feudal state. Similarly, I find myself reluctantly defending the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex against attacks from the likes of Jenny McCarthy who think vaccines cause autism or Sean Hannity, who thinks global warming is a hoax, but on the other hand, I feel compelled to expose Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Golden Rice as the scams that they are.

Somehow, we've got to find a way to restore integrity to the scientific community, and at the same time, we must remove the barriers of intimidation that prevent public schools from imparting scientific knowledge. Until we accomplish these two goals, we will slip further and further into a new Dark Age.

UPDATE: As the Guardian reports, the ignorati have launched a fresh assault on science: 

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education.

       [...]

The Heartland Institute – which has received funding in the past from oil companies and is a leading source of climate science skepticism – also lobbies strongly for school vouchers and other forms of "school transformation" that are broadly aimed at undermining the current public school system. The Discovery Institute – a leading voice for intelligent design – has indicated its support of exactly the same "school reform" initiatives.
If you can't shut down the science, the new science-deniers appear to be saying, you should shut down the schools. It would be a shame if they succeeded in replacing the teaching of science with indoctrination. It would be worse if they were to close the public school house doors altogether.

Well, we're fucked.

THE LONE NUTS ~or ~ How Insane Radicals Keep Helping the Right Wing

Once upon a time, a lone nut assassinated a somewhat liberal president without any assistance from anyone. Then, a few years later, a different lone nut assassinated a prominent liberal black leader without any assistance from anyone. Then, a few months after that, yet another lone nut assassinated the even more liberal brother of the somewhat liberal president who had been assassinated a few years earlier. Yes, that's right. Inexplicably, not one, not two, but three lone nuts emerged from the recesses of society to take out only liberal leaders, all over the course of about five years.

Time passed.

Then one day, 19 lone nuts hijacked some jetliners and flew them into some prominent buildings they felt symbolized the belief system that was keeping them down, except for one plane, which crashed harmlessly due to the heroic actions of its passengers. Two of the buildings that had been hit by the airliners, plus one building that hadn’t been hit, collapsed just like those controlled demolitions you see all the time on TeeVee. However, despite the fact that fire had never before (and has never since) caused a skyscraper to collapse, that was precisely the explanation offered repeatedly by trusted authorities. A shocked and saddened nation accepted this explanation with the same alacrity with which they accepted their leaders’ proposed response to the assault, which was to invade and occupy two nations that had nothing to do with the attack, but which, coincidentally, had lots of oil and/or natural gas.

Again, the lone nuts had altered the course of history without any assistance from anyone.

Gradually, with the assistance of Very Smart People and despite the efforts of of a few malcontents, the shocked and saddened nation resigned itself to the knowledge that we would always have lone nuts and that they would always coincidentally help achieve the aims of right-wing ideologues and multinational corporations.

The end.

You Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Here Before?

The flags those protesters are waving represent the Libyan Republic, which was the ruling entity before Gadaffi (or however you spell it) took over 42 years ago. It made me wonder: Where did all those former Libyan flags come from? Were they lying around somewhere in Libya for the last half-century? Then I remembered an article called "The Man Who Sold the War" that ran in Rolling Stone Magazine a few years ago. That article was about a guy named John Rendon, whose PR firm, The Rendon Group, helped market the first Gulf War.

From the article:

After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American - and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

How indeed did those Kuwaitis get those flags? And how did the Libyans get theirs? Then as if on cue, Eman al-Obeidi manages to provide this war's humanitarian crisis to Western TeeVee audiences, just like good ol' Nayirah al-Sabah did back in 1990. Of course, we have since learned that Nayirah al-Sabah was the daughter of Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud bin Nasir al-Sabah, and that her testimony was written and arranged by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton. So then one wonders which PR firms are responsible for the flags and for al-Obeidi's performance.

UPDATE: Oddly enough, The New York Times spells it all out for us:

WASHINGTON — In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya’s oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country’s $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks.

If the companies did not comply, the Libyan officials warned, there would be “serious consequences” for their oil leases, according to a State Department summary of the meeting.

And Russ Baker has a quiz:

Embattled Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi: Good or bad? How about GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt?

Ah, the good ol' days

This must be what the teabaggers mean when they say they want their country back.

Robert Newman's History of Oil

As shown on Ch4 and repeated several times on More4, available at IndyBay on the web and many other places, now on Google video (not great video quality) Robert's stand-up act examines the history of the last 100 years or so but putting oil center-stage. Brilliant!

Radical Islam is a Neocon Invention

History of the Boom Box