Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In August, Todd Akin—Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri—got into hot water with his party and became the “laughing stock of the planet” for remarks that he made about how women who are “legitimately raped” rarely get pregnant. Akin said the following during an interview on KTVI-TV:
First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. . . But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
Writing for Wired, Brandon Kleim said of Akin:
Aside from the sheer biological ludicrousness of Todd Akin’s ideas on female physiology, one unsettling subplot to the debacle is his presence on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
That’s right: A man who, to put it gently, ignores what science tells us about how babies are made, helps shape the future of science in America. It would be shocking, but for the fact that many of the committee’s GOP members have spent the last several years displaying comparable contempt for climate science.
Kleim also wrote about other Republicans on the committee who seem to show a contempt for science and scientists:
The committee’s chair, Ralph Hall (R-Texas), lumps “global freezing” together with global warming, which he doesn’t believe humans can significantly impact because “I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) thinks cutting down trees reduces levels of greenhouse gases they absorb. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) still trots out the debunked notion that a scientific consensus existed in the 1970s on “global cooling,” which he portrays as a scare concocted by scientists “in order to generate funds for their pet projects.”
‘We ought to have some believable science.’
Dan Benishek (R-Michigan) strikes that climate-scientists-as-charlatans note, dismissing contemporary research as “all baloney. I think it’s just some scheme.” Paul Broun (R-Georgia) says that “Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community.”
For the rest of this post, I’ll focus on Rep. Paul Broun, the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Broun doesn’t just think that the “scientific community” has perpetrated a hoax about climate change—he also thinks scientists have made up lies about evolution, the age of planet Earth, the Big Bang Theory, and embryology…and that those lies come “straight from the pit of Hell.”
During a speech that Broun gave at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th, he said this:
God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
In his speech, Broun claimed that as a legislator he takes direction from the Bible:
And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
He continued:
Our Constitution was written by men that believed that! And in fact, the Constitution’s written on Biblical principles — in fact, the three branches of government come right from Isaiah, Isaiah 33:22, go look it up!
From Wonkette:
In an inexorable speech that is available in full on YouTube (but which we will mercifully summarize), Broun attributes his 2007 election to the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ, shows slides of a Kodiak bear and a lion that he heroically shot, and tells a story about heroically shooting another lion in the face, explaining that “God directed that bullet, because if I’d missed, that lion would have been in the back of the truck with me and I’d have been clawed to death.” He even tells a story about his heroic deployment to Afghanistan for 31 days earlier this year as a member of the Naval Reserve, where he saw an Afghan soldier who’d been seriously injured by an IED but survived somehow. And what those awful injuries reminded him of, said Broun, was that the Bible tells us that human beings are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Broun knows this “as a physician,” and this line from Psalm 139:14 somehow proves that evolution is fake.
But did he learn that in college, or in med school? No. He was taught that
we all came from a ‘Big Bang,’ and we were trained in all this stuff about evolution…what I was taught in college and medical school and even high school that we went ‘from Goo to Zoo to You.’ And I believed that.
Phil Plait of Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy blog wrote in his post The US Congress Anti-Science Committee that Broun sits on the committee with other anti-science legislators—including Akin—whom “the Republican majority placed on that committee. Men who think global warming is a fantasy. Men who think women have magic vaginas. Men who think the Earth is thousands, not billions, of years old.”
Kind of scary, don’t you think, that we have legislators like Broun who have little respect for science serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology?
NOTE: One might think that a man who is so anti-science may not be an educated person—but that is far from the truth. Braun graduated from the University of Georgia in 1967 with a B.S. in Chemistry—and in, 1971, he received his Medical Doctor degree from the Medical College of Georgia.
SOURCES
Paul Broun: Evolution, Big Bang ‘Lies Straight From The Pit Of Hell’ (Huffington Post)
The US Congress Anti-Science Committee (Discover Magazine)
Republican Senate Nominee: Victims Of ‘Legitimate Rape’ Don’t Get Pregnant (TPM 2012)
Todd Akin and the Anti-Science House Science Committee (Wired)
Video shows ‘scientist’ in Congress saying evolution is from ‘pit of Hell’ (NBC News)
Hero Rep. Paul Broun Takes Bible-Based Stand Against Hell-Spawned Lies of ‘Science’ (Wonkette)
Wingnut Watch: Paul Broun Says Progressives Trying to ‘Destroy America’ (Rolling Stone)
Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
I sometimes wonder how far from totally ubiquitous anti-scientific thought patterns actually happen to be.
I happen to have posted some comments that are based on theoretical biology and which have been rigorously tested using null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis methods, the field work findings are the result of very diligent ethnographic approaches to minimizing socially conventional forms of bias traditionally regarded as not biased, only to find some of the brightest folks on the Turley blog rejecting the science on what seems to me to be a-priori prejudice.
However, science marches on, prejudice notwithstanding.
On February 1, 2011, Daubert became law in Wisconsin, such that someone, no matter how sincere, who is not demonstrably competent in my field of bioengineering is presumably no longer properly able to refute the science of my work on the socio-neurology of hatred as a trauma response to child abuse that is mandated by not-quite universal established socialization traditions.
Daubert along did not provide me with what I deemed sufficient legal standing to bring to unambiguous public attention what I have found to be the innermost core of what drives child abuse in, as best I have been able to discern, all extant forms.
What has given me standing that I regard as sufficient to start going very public with my research is the Engineers Section of the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services having effectively validated my work as properly that of professional engineering through having essentially responded, “without objection” to my indicating that the interactive (classroom-like) professional development continuing education hours appropriate for my 2014 license renewal need to be ones which have PDH hour credit for psychologists and psychiatrists.
For those who previously have rejected my bioengineering research into the cause, purpose, cure, and prevention of mental illness, mental illness stems from child abuse of a nature heretofore commonly regarded as intrinsic to human nature and not, as I have found, that mental illness is the consequence of child abuse which has been defined by social consensus as not being abuse.
What is the abuse that my work has unriddled? It is teaching a child that the child made a mistake that the child could have avoided making, and teaching this with enough repeated coercive authoritarian tyrannical abuse that a child finds it wiser to internalize deception than retain the inborn sense of right and wrong of the innate conscience that develops in utero.
I recognize that all scientific theories are properly subject to unending scrutiny and are forever subject to being refuted if actually false. Therefore, the main finding of my work, the one that undermines some of the core doctrines of the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence, is falsifiable if false; and I will welcome its being falsified, should that occur.
However, no scientist, and I have consulted some of the best, has yet been able to find any significant error in the methods or results of my work. One of the possibly most relevant of the results of my work is a null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis based refutation of the validity of the adversarial system notion that avoidable mistake ever happen.
Perhaps the contrast between the adversarial system and scientific biology is simply that the adversarial legal system has legal doctrines and scientific biology does not have have biological doctrines.
Stare decisis, dicta, and holdings also are not aspects of scientific biology. Neither are rules established by tradition that are not subject to challenge from new scientific discoveries.
So, the news, if it be news, is that theoretical physicist, Walter Elsasser (1987 National Medal of Science in the U.S.A recipient), in his privately printed book, “Biological Theory on a Holistic Basis, Second Edition,” 1982, posited that biology is the pinnacle science.
Holism is a word I understand was coined by Jan Christiaan Smuts, and was a key idea in his book, “Holism and Evolution,” Macmillan, London, 1926. Holism is, to me, the functional antithesis of analytical reductionism.
My work is based on holism, and is reductionist only with respect to proper subsets of holistic phenomena.
I state without deception that I have never found anyone who can truthfully describe a mistake, such as an accident, actually made and also truthfully describe any achievable process through the mistake, or accident could actually have been avoided.
In science, and therefore in the science of biology, hypotheticals are merely theories espoused so that the such theories, as hypotheticals, can be properly, scientifically tested.
No decently trained and usefully qualified scientist with whom I have communicated has ever, to the best of my understanding, treated a hypothetical as though it were a fact.
So, I recall a story about someone with a beam in his eye attempting to remove a speck from the eye of someone else. But then, that is a mere hypothetical, of course.
Nothing in genuine science is ever so because a judge says it is so.
“Because I said so,” is, to me the absolute opposite of anything I have ever understood to be scientific as scientific reasoning as a reason for anything.
When a judge in a circuit court ruled that I was guilty of a violation based on a citation in which a police officer, while lying about me, used, as evidence, my having accomplished an absolute impossibility, and the judge, apparently based on that citation, which was never entered as evidence at trial, and no witness at trial said that the violation had occurred, how is that distinguishable from Braun, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” as nonsense and non-science?
In my research, “because i said so,” is at the core of all forms of child abuse…
Malisha,
Congrats to your son!
What does “AS” mean? I haven’t been to a doctor in years. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
My son was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis in 2005. Apparently, he had it for 11 years by the time a doctor named it, although my son was in the group of people, demographically, most likely to get it. We hit the books fast and found that establishment medicine had no cure, but could provide medications that handled pain, decreased inflammation, and subjected the patient to a greatly increased risk of CANCER. Ugh.
My son researched homeopathic responses and rejected almost all of them quickly. Then he found that one set of treatments seemed feasible, because of its ability to make sense with his knowledge of what the body was doing to misbehave in a fashion that constituted AS. He started it off with a diet program which, although rigorous and discouraging (“Mom, nothing on my diet is actually FOOD!”), made 80% of his pain vanish in two weeks. THEN he had 11 different providers, including many holistic and three establishment providers, including two MDs and a DO. (He also had two mental health providers, an acupuncturist, a nutritionist, an exercise physiologist, a massage therapist/advisor, an NP, and a couple of others I can’t even remember.) He still has not effected a “cure” although he has reversed or managed (to the point of not noticing them as long as he keeps up his daily programs) all of his symptoms and now does not say he has AS. He says, instead, “I have a diagnosis of AS.” But he does rock climbing, kayaking, and leads an outdoor adventure club. He looks like a million bucks and has beautiful posture.
Neither of us “believes” in homeopathic medicine or “believes in” establishment medicine. We USE them, both at times, one rather than the other at times, and neither at times. That seems to work. If we had to declare a party and vote, we might both abstain.
From Huff post article this guy has o opposition in the coming election. Why in the world do the dems not have someone in this race?
The medical profession is a lot like the legal profession.
We read a lot about bad examples in the legal field on this blog, but it is difficult to find such Earth shaking revelations at “NIH, Mayo Clinic, CDC” … surprize …
You will have to go to Dredd Blog for some of that medical shock:
(Terrorism We Can Believe In?, on JAMA article). The American
DreamTrance prevents lots of folks from constructive criticism.I didn’t do a blind search for the links I posted. I have known the person who maintains the website for several years. She has spent many years studying homeopathy, including years in England. She is well qualified to teach. She has also been studying the vaccine scene for many years and knows that arguments pro and con. Most of those advocating vaccines are tied to the pharmaceutical companies one way or another ($$$$$) or they are people who just believe what they are told.
I have used homeopathy for some time now. Have had no need for mds who believe the big pharma propaganda and the sales reps who peddle pills and vaccines that have not had true independent double blind tests and that are approved by corporate hacks who have moved to the FDA for the purposes of approving their poisons.
I’ve been through some rough times health-wise and it wasn’t until I started using homeopathic remedies for acute difficulties and nutrition to improve my immune system that I began to get healthy again.
When I was caring for my mother the best advise from within the so-called medical profession from the nurse practitioner. Her advice kept my mother out of the hospital.
Haven’t had the flu since I stopped getting the flu shots. Anecdotal but it works for me.
bettykath,
Thank you for the comic relief. The course description which you cite includes a start date which is, tragically, in the past.
I would truly be interested in taking a course that guarantees “You will end up knowing more than 99.99999% of doctors on this planet.”
How many doctors would that be? Would there be any difference between, say, 99.99999%, and 100%?
I see a 2010 estimate of 8,747,790 doctors, worldwide.
http://chartsbin.com/view/gcu
That means I’d end up knowing more than all but 0.87 doctors. So there’s 0.87 doctors on the planet that already know all this? Would an educated person speak of “99.99999% of doctors”?
I also note that the page includes autism as a hazard of vaccination. The research that panicked thousands was discredited years ago.
Vaccinations don’t really work? Did we wish away smallpox and polio? Just a coincidence that people were vaccinated before these diseases were conquered?
I confess to a bias. When I see ‘holistic’ or ‘homeopathy,’ I question the judgement of a person who self-associates with the practice of magic.
Bob,
“Authoritative” does not include most blogs. It includes sources that provide citations to legitimate research. If we can teach people to question and verify, we’ll lose a lot of our mythology. But verification is more work than most of us are up to.
*****
I agree. While there may be lots of good information available on the Internet–there’s also a ton of misinformation. When I’m looking for medical information, I usually go to sites like NIH, Mayo Clinic, CDC.
Dredd,
Thanks. Yes, I over-simplified. To deeply understand the effects of DDT, and the mechanisms behind vaccination, one would need courses in general biology, microbiology, immunology, pathology, toxicology, and virology, perhaps more. Those courses probably helped in my understanding. We usually need a biology course before tackling microbiology or the rest.
I realized, immediately after writing my comment, that I had over-simplified.
However, even a general biology course, with labs, could offer an opportunity to develop judgement regarding biological issues. As in, “C’mon, that doesn’t sound very likely. I should look that up in an authoritative source.”
“Authoritative” does not include most blogs. It includes sources that provide citations to legitimate research. If we can teach people to question and verify, we’ll lose a lot of our mythology. But verification is more work than most of us are up to.
Overall, a fine display that reading and comprehension are not the same thing as integrated knowledge and understanding in context.
http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/
excerpt of index:
Conditions Linked to Vaccines
Allergies
Autism
BSE/Mad Cow Disease
Diabetes
SBS (Shaken Baby Syndrome)
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)
Vaccine Deaths
Ingredients
Aborted Fetal Tissue
Aluminum
Contamination of Vaccines
Mercury
Other vaccine ingredients
Calling global warming, or climate change (or impending disaster) a hoax is just garden-variety (using the word “garden” in such a quaint way) denial. It is no different from other forms of denial and no more efficient in the long-run, but the long-run is more than a generation long, and therein lies a major problem. Nobody who denies it will have to pay the price personally. They say if a dog does something you want to discourage, you have to react AT THAT EXACT MOMENT so that he sees the connection between the activity and the negative response. That’s an important principle.
My son’s kind of an expert in this field and an environmental engineer. He tells me that the term “hundred year storm” was coined to describe a storm of such dimensions that it was expected only once in a century. We have had about a dozen of these storms in the past decade. This, in the common parlance, is an UH-OH! ❗
This guy, Broun, should shoot a rocket up his Butt to see whether it comes out of his ear……
Hubert Cumberdale 1, October 7, 2012 at 2:31 am
I remember in the not too distant past where the “global warming” hoax was exposed. The leftwingers even had to change the catch phrase to “climate change” as an attempt to differentiate between something that was shown to be fraudulent to maybe something else that isn’t now. Seems like some don’t want to let go of this mythology. Furthermore, the same group wants to label this guy an idiot. Before the liberal spinmeisters took off with his comments, I understood him to say “legitimate rape” as in cases where there was an actual rape instead of a false report. “Professing to be wise, they became fools”
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The political use of the term “climate change” was created by a republican strategist named Frank Luntz:
(The Exceptional American Denial). The scientific reality of global warming induced climate change began to emerge in the mid 1800’s.
Denial of it began when The Marshall Institute lost its propaganda campaign for big tobacco (“smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer”) and they then were hired by big oil to deny via propaganda that oil is a green house gas generating pollutant (ibid, video).
Indeed, “Professing to be wise, they became fools”.
Bob Kauten 1, October 6, 2012 at 7:14 pm
bettykath,
…
Take a biology course.
=================================
A modern up-to-date microbiology class would be even better, because most of the biology textbooks will be the last to be updated with the revolution taking place in our understanding.
For example, the concept concerning “what a human being is” has radically changed in recent years (On The New Meaning of “Human” – 2).
That new understanding has lead to our being able to talk to the microbes within us, now that we know words in their language.
Thus, the vaccines will now be made of microbial words rather than toxic chemicals (Microbial Hermeneutics – 2).
bettykath 1, October 6, 2012 at 3:52 pm
ah, nick, vaccinations don’t prevent disease…
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Doesn’t it depend on the disease of the meme complex and on the vaccime developed to treat it?
Different strokes for different meme complexes, so different vaccimes too.
No?
nick spinelli 1, October 6, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Speaking of vaccinations, all you 60 year olds out there …
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The old folks steeped in establishment mythology need to get their meme complex vaccime to protect them against dementia.
Here are instances of twilight zone quotes from other loonies in the neoCon party:
(News about Yahoos). Thanks Elaine M for re-focusing on the neoCon epidemic.
They need their Civics 101 booster shot.
I see, Hubert Dumberdale
I remember in the not too distant past where the “global warming” hoax was exposed. The leftwingers even had to change the catch phrase to “climate change” as an attempt to differentiate between something that was shown to be fraudulent to maybe something else that isn’t now. Seems like some don’t want to let go of this mythology. Furthermore, the same group wants to label this guy an idiot. Before the liberal spinmeisters took off with his comments, I understood him to say “legitimate rape” as in cases where there was an actual rape instead of a false report. “Professing to be wise, they became fools”
“I remember in the not too distant past where the “global warming” hoax was exposed. The leftwingers even had to change the catch phrase to “climate change” as an attempt to differentiate between something that was shown to be fraudulent to maybe something else that isn’t now.”
Hubert,
If you’re not getting paid to spread lies like this, then you have a serious learning deficit. There has been no hoax exposed because the predictions aren’t hoaxes. The CEO of EXXON-Mobil has recently admitted that the climate change phenomena is real, but he suggests the solution is simply to find other spots on the globe more conducive to farming, which I’m sure will be just fine for folks in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. The whole denial thing is only about profits and not people. If you have children or grandchildren as I do, then the your lack of concern about climate change only shows you are merely a self-centered person.
Now it may be that you don’t care because you are expecting Jesus will return in your lifetime and make the world better. If this is the case then it only shows that you have no understanding of the Bible you read and prefer listening to hucksters pretending to be prophets, rather than think for yourself.
By the way, though new information is lost on you, when the original models of climate change started to appear in the 50’s, the predictions were for the atmosphere to warm and then create a new “Ice Age”. In that nuclear weapon threatened era the phenomena was known as “Nuclear Winter”. Luckily people like you weren’t around in power then or the bombs would have fallen. Global Warming is only the first condition of the effects of destructive climate change. The terms have had to be changed because low-information people like yourselves couldn’t wrap themselves around the concept of global warmig and so disparaged it with the first heavy snow storm.
All I know is that with someone like you every time you tell your kids, or your grandkids I love you, you are lying.