Cribbing completely from Harry Clarke (with a few corrections in the text):

Robert F. Kennedy speech at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, March 18, 1968 - Photo by George Silk, Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images

RFK said this in 1968.  In a speech I heard today it was quoted and it stirred me.

Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP — if we judge the United States of America by that — that GNP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Kennedy delivered these words in an address at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, on March 18, 1968.

Here’s a video production from the Glaser Progress Foundation which includes an audio recording of the speech:

More resources:

• Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights
• Biographical essay of RFK at Wikipedia
• Transcript from PBS’s American Experience, of the film “RFK”
• Text of the Alf Landon Lecture, on Vietnam policy, delivered the same day at Kansas State University

. . . try again, and then quit, Mark Twain said.  “No use being a fool about it.”

All I can say is, I’m happy she is not working to get a license to drive a bus.

(News story:  Woman passes written test for drivers license on 950th attempt.)

President Obama issued a directive ordering all federal facilities to fly the national flag at half-staff from now through Veterans Day (November 11), to honor the soldiers and civilians felled at Fort Hood, Texas.

“It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America,” Obama said. “It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it’s all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims.”

The president said he met Friday with FBI Director Robert Mueller, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others to discuss their continuing investigation into the attack, which also injured at least 30.

Obama also expressed his condolences to the victims’ families and recognized those who helped the wounded after the shooting at the base’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center. The center is where soldiers go to have their teeth checked and medical records updated before deploying overseas.

“These are the men and women we honor today. These are the men and women we’ll honor on Veterans Day,” Obama said. “And these are the men and women we shall honor every day, in times of war and times of peace, so long as our nation endures.”  (from the Virginian-Pilot, in Norfolk, Virginia)

Obama’s directive follows Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s order for flags in Texas to be flown half-staff until Monday.

Flag etiquette reminder: When flown at half-staff, the U.S. flag should be raised quickly to full staff, then lowered slowly to half-staff.

President Obama addressed the tragedy in his weekly radio and television message:

Geography Awareness week is sneaking up — November 15-21.

Got your special lesson plans ready, teachers?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has ordered flags in Texas to be flown at half-staff through Sunday, November 8, in remembrance of the victims of the shootings at Fort Hood.  The statement from Perry’s office follows.

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today issued the following statement regarding the shootings at Fort Hood:

“The Texas family suffered a significant loss today with the tragedy at Fort Hood. Along with all Texans, Anita and I are keeping those affected by today’s incidents in our thoughts and prayers.

“We are deeply saddened by today’s events, but resolve to continue supporting our troops and protecting our citizens.

“To honor those who lost their lives today, I have ordered that all Texas flags be lowered to half-staff until Sunday, and ask all Texans to pray for the victims, their families and the extended Fort Hood community.”

The governor has been in contact with military and state law enforcement officials. To provide support at Fort Hood, Gov. Perry directed the deployment of a variety of state resources to the area, including Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, Texas Rangers and helicopters, to assist in securing the perimeter of the base and provide other support as necessary.

The governor’s flag order applies to all U.S. and Texas flags under the control of the state. Flags will be lowered to half-staff on the State Capitol Building, flag displays in the Capitol Complex, and upon all public buildings, grounds and facilities beginning immediately until sunset on Sunday, November 8th.

Individuals, businesses, municipalities, counties and other political subdivisions are encouraged to fly the flag at half-staff for the same length of time as a sign of respect.

To view text of the governor’s remarks, please visit http://governor.state.tx.us/news/speech/13905/.

Debating the effects  of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring got me wondering about the true influence of that book.  That quickly turned into wondering about the true influence of other writings, books and papers that might be credited with having turned around history in a given field, or in the United States (I’m focusing on U.S. history this year since that’s what I’m teaching).

What books and writings — not events, not inventions — literally changed U.S. history?

I have a quick list, not in chronological order, nor any other order, really:

1. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
2. “Common Sense,” Tom Paine’s broadside
3. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
4. Federalist Papers and Antifederalist Papers
5. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriett Beecher Stowe
6. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
7. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
8. Perhaps The Bible, at least after 1880 during the rise of fundamentalism
9. Einstein’s five papers in 1905 (which led to a cascade of events to nuclear weapons, and more)
10. John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory on Employment, Interest and Money (or would his Treatise on Money be the one to look at?)
11. Ludwig von Mises (which writing?)
12. Crick’s and Watson’s paper on DNA in 1953
13. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
14. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in the way it recast the Declaration of Independence

What about Profiles in Courage? Did it have so much influence?  Any influence at all?

I didn’t include Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I wonder if it should be there.  I regard it as the novel in which America came of age, when Huck decides he’ll go ahead and burn in hell by not turning Jim in as an escaped slave, because Jim is a man and a good friend.  (I don’t think a discussion of the validity of Huck’s religious beliefs gets at the issue here, where he does what is right assuming bad consequences, but maybe that’s a greater influence later on.)

Oh, surely I’ve overlooked some very important contribution by someone.  De Tocqueville perhaps?  Were there other books that were greatly influential in their time, that we now generally don’t consider?  Ida Tarbell’s work, perhaps?  Did Edwin Hubble have a fundamental publication we can point to?  How about Alpher, Herman and Gamow and Big Bang?

A follow-on question might be music, plays and movies that had similar results –  not sure of any that qualify, though I wonder about the influence of “Show Boat” in the campaign for desegregation and civil rights, and I wonder about the influence of “Our Town” on our view of civic government and small town life especially given that so many thousands of people participated in local and school productions of the thing over the years.  “Hair!?”

I’m looking for sources to use to provide genuine light to a high school student in U.S. history.  Some of these sources we touch on, but others are completely ignored in all current U.S. history texts for public schools.

What do you think?

Well, no, we haven’t.  Nice little post by a photographer urging people to go look to see what they can find, with a brilliantly concise set of arguments about big things discovered just in the past few years.

Nice photos, too — go see.

Among the more amusing about-faces in conservative knee-jerk politics is conservative criticism of Al Gore for being a successful investor.

No, I’m not kidding.

Back in April, Gore testified to a House Energy and Commerce Committee in April — one of the committees where Gore was a shining star when he was a Member — and he ran into a challenge from Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blakburn who tried to play bad cop in grilling Gore about his investment work.  Since leaving politics Gore has worked to put his money where his advocacy is, backing green industries and energy efficiency projects. Blackburn is a Republican representing Tennessee’s 7th District. Blackburn appears not to understand how cross-examination works.

In most discussions I’ve had on warming issues over the past two months, advocates for doing nothing almost always bring up Gore as as “profiteer” for investing in green businesses.

It’s as if conservatives and Republicans have forgotten how business works in a free-enterprise system, and they think that free enterprise is tantamount to communism.

T. Boone Pickens used to be a favorite witness for Republicans to call at Congressional hearings.  Pickens was, and still is, a staunch advocate of free enterprise, and he advocates a lot less regulation than most Democrats want.  Then Pickens’s investments, especially his vulture investments in dying companies where he’d sell off the assets and put the company out of existence, were touted by Republicans as indication that Pickens is a genius.

A hard look at Gore’s investments shows him to be nothing more than a free-enterprise advocate who leads the way in green investments.  He has made huge gambles in businesses that warming skeptics claim won’t work — and his investments have tended to pay off, to the great consternation of warming do-nothings who understand markets.

This story in the New York Times suggests just how well Gore has done, and how much his leadership in investing might benefit us.  It’s worth bookmarking for your next discussion on what we should do about global warming — because you know somebody will try to make it about Al Gore.  It just galls the heck out of conservatives and anti-science folks that Gore is right so often, and that he is such a practitioner of the Scout Law.

Anti-pollution is good business.  Reducing the dumping of poisons into the air and water makes sense, and it makes a better economy in the long run.  Sometimes it makes a better economy in the short run, too.  Gore stepped into the marketplace, a very capitalist act.  His investments paid off, demonstrating that markets do work, and demonstrating that green business is smart business.  What are Republicans and conservatives thinking in taking after Gore’s business success?

Oh — Boone Pickens? He used to have an office in Trammell Crow Tower when our offices at Ernst & Young LLP were a floor or so away.  We shared elevator rides many times, and he is in person as gracious and smart as he appeared in those Congressional hearings years ago.

His money today?  He’s investing in wind power, because he thinks we need to act now to reduce dependency on oil imports.

Maybe Republican anti-green politics is coming home to roost.

Unless things really drop off the table, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub will have its 2 millionth reader sometime this month, probably between the 14th and the 20th.

Gee.  Thanks.

Leave a message when you drop by, would you?

Veterans Day Poster, 2009, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs - Click on poster for link to high-quality version

Get ready to fly your flag on Veterans Day, November 11.

Information

• Gen. Shinseki designated 41 model Veterans Day celebration sites
• VA works to help World War I veterans get France’s Legion of Honor
• Non-government site with information on Veterans Day

KERA Television has a marvelous short film profile of Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel in physics for his invention of what we now call “the computer chip.”

Teachers should check out the film and use it — it’s a great little chapter of Texas history, science history, and U.S. history.  It’s an outstanding explanation of a technological development that revolutionized so much of our dailylife, especially in the late 20th century.  At 8 minutes and 37 seconds, the film is ideal for classroom use.

Alas!  My technology won’t allow embedding the video here, and so far as I can tell it is only available in broadcast on KERA and at KERA’s website.  So, go there and look at it!  If you can download it for use, more power to you — and let us know in comments how you did it.

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of Kilby’s filing for a patent on an integrated circuit.  He’s been honored by the Inventor’s Hall of Fame.  Despite the stupendous value of his invention, Kilby’s name is far from a household name even in North Dallas, home of Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who came up with almost exactly the same idea at almost exactly the same moment, is similarly ignored.

Shouldn’t today’s high school students know about Kilby and Noyce?  Not a class period goes by that I don’t use a device powered by Kilby’s invention; nor does one pass that I don’t have to admonish at least one student for misuse of such a device, such as an iPod, MP3 player, or cell phone.  It’s difficult to think of someone whose invention has greater influence on the life of these kids, hour by hour — but Kilby and his invention don’t get their due in any text I’ve seen.

It’s a great film — original and clever animation, good interviews, and it features Kilby’s charming daughter, and the great journalist and historian of technology T. R. Reid.  Don’t you agree that it’s much better than most of the history stuff we have to show?

Texas history standards require kids to pay brief homage to inventors in the 20th century.   Kilby is not named in the standards, however, and so he and his invention are ignored as subjects of history study.  You ought to fix that in your classroom, teachers.

(Kilby was born and grew up in Great Bend, Kansas — Kansas teachers may want to take note.  According to the KERA film, Kilby was a Boy Scout, making it at least to First Class.)

TI company video on Kilby featuring interviews from the 1990s, prior to his 2000 Nobel Physics Prize

Additional Resources

• The History of the Integrated Circuit (nobelprize.org)
• Jack Kilby mini-autobiography (nobelprize.org)
• Jack Kilby information page (Texas Instruments – ti.com)
• Jack Kilby wins Nobel Prize: press conference at TI @ Yahoo! Video
• Video of interview with Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the computer chip
• Patent application for “miniaturized electronic circuit,” at Google Patents
• Need a date to celebrate?  Kilby was born on November 8, 1923.  His birthday is a week away.

TI company video on the 2008 50th anniversary of the chip

On the one hand it’s nice to see cool heads and wisdom prevail.

On the other hand, the Orly Taitz, Stumbling and Bumbling Bros., Barnyard Bailout Circus provided belly laughs for everyone who watched it.  How can such outstanding legal pratfall comedy possibly be replaced?  “Boston Legal” can’t hold a candle to Orly Taitz.

CNN and other sources report that Judge Carter booted the suit late Thursday, noting that the question is one for Congress, and Congress’s earlier decision sticks.

The lawsuit represented the claim by the so-called “birthers” movement that Obama was not born in Hawaii – despite a birth certificate to the contrary – or that if he was, his citizenship was invalidated by living overseas as a child.

In a 30-page ruling, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of California said his court lacked the jurisdiction to rule on a case intended to unseat a sitting president.

Carter’s ruling said the plaintiffs were trying to persuade him to “disregard the constitutional procedures in place for the removal of a sitting president.”

“The process for removal of a sitting president – removal for any reason – is within the province of Congress, not the courts,” the ruling said.

Carter’s ruling also noted that the plaintiffs “have attacked the judiciary, including every prior court that has dismissed their claim, as unpatriotic and even treasonous for refusing to grant their requests and for adhering to the terms of the Constitution.”

“Respecting the constitutional role and jurisdiction of this court is not unpatriotic,” the ruling said. “Quite the contrary, this court considers commitment to that constitutional role to be the ultimate reflection of patriotism.”

Will Orly Taitz go quietly?  How can she replace the daily adrenaline rush of knowing she’s earned the official ire of judges from Chesapeake Bay to Long Beach Harbor?

It may be unrelated, but sketchy early reports say Orly Taitz has climbed aboard a mylar balloon shaped like a flying saucer . . .

More information:

• Short story in the Los Angeles Times
• Link to the decision in the case, courtesy the Los Angeles Times
• If by some sad twist of fate you missed the earlier comedy, you can check out an almost-running comedy commentary at Dispatches from the Culture Wars here, here, here, here, here and here.  Oh, heck, Ed Brayton has more — but you get the general idea.  Taitz doesn’t.
• Now here’s a genuine dilemma:  Orly Taitz goes after Bill O’Reilly.  How does one bet?  How does one cheer?
• Questionable Authority:  “Orly Taitz gets slapped around by another judge”
• Wonkette has a few words
• Politics Daily adds a few more
• Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog

You can view, and read, the winners of the 2009 Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder contest at the website of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

2nd place photo, Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder contest, 2009 - by Patricia, age 70, Peggy, age 47, Maggi, age 16

Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder 2009 contest winners

EPA’s Aging Initiative, Generations United, the Rachel Carson Council, Inc. and the Dance Exchange, Inc. are pleased to present the winners for the third annual intergenerational photo, dance, essay and poetry Sense of Wonder contest. All entries were created by an intergenerational team.

The categories are Photography, Essay, Poetry, Mixed (Photo, Essay and Poetry) and Dance.

Drop over to EPA’s site and look, and read.

2010 contest rules are already up.  You can get the entry form there, too.  Links to the 2008 and 2007 winners and finalists also reside there.

This photo caught me a bit off guard, bringing back wonderful memories.

Bill and Christian explore outdoors, photographed by Gina - Gina, age 36, Bill, age 64, Christian, age 1 - 3rd place photo, 2009 Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder art contest - EPA

Gina, the photographer, described the photo:

My father has been a good role model to me as I grew up with plenty of time outdoors. The red plaid shirt became a sort of symbol, and it was an honor to get a matching shirt myself when I was in college. Now, at just one year old, my son is continuing the tradition of wearing the red and black shirt outdoors. It was fun to photograph the two together in our rural wooded backyard, and helped illustrate that my father can continue to pass along his sense of wonder and love of the outdoors to my son, his first grandchild.

My father, Paul Darrell, wore an old jacket for my entire life — a once-fuzzy buffalo plaid red-and-black woolen jacket.  No one in the family can remember a time he didn’t have it.  The jacket was probably at least 30 years old when I was born.  He wore it when it was bitter cold — one story was that when it was well below zero one wintry morning in Burley, Idaho, it was the only coat he wore to walk to his furniture and appliance store to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen, a walk of about a mile each way.  It was too cold to start the car.

After he moved to Utah it was his usual gardening and yard-work coat on cold mornings.  I know he took it on a few campouts with my Scout troop, and I’ll wager it went along on camping trips with my older brothers and sister 20 years before that.  I remember my father sitting warm in that jacket on cold mornings around the campfire.

We had a peach tree in the back yard in Pleasant Grove, Utah.  Frosts would come on those mountain slopes when the peaches were just ripened.  I have memories of my father picking peaches in the jacket.  He’d slice the peaches for our breakfast.  No peach has ever been sweeter or more flavorful (but I keep searching).  I remember my father in his buffalo plaid jacket, his arms full of ripe, cold peaches, coming through the kitchen door, and the smile on his face.

The red buffalo plaid coat was so much a symbol of my father that, at his death in 1988, it was one of those objects we nearly fought over.  My niece Tamara ended up with it.

I have one, now.  It’s a good L. L. Bean version, with the wool much thicker than my father’s well-worn version.  After 20 years it still looks new, compared to his.  I suspect it always will.  It could never be warmer than his.

Special tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Pamela Bumsted.

I really like this project, and I wish I’d come across it about a month ago:

The Gilded Age Class Documentary Project

The Gilded Age – Class Documentary Project

Instructors:  Rachel Duffy, Marc Ducharme

May, 2005

Adapted from:  The Gilded Age WebQuest – Documenting Industrialization in America

By: Thomas Caswell and Joshua DeLorenzo

What do you think?

You probably have gotten the e-mail that claims Michelle Obama has the largest staff of any First Lady.  Either you dismissed it as great sour grapes, or you may have given it a moment’s consideration before hitting delete.

Did you wonder whether the charge is true?  Mudflats, the great blog from Alaska, tracked down the sources.  Mudflats’ discoveries are well worth the read.  You may want to bookmark that site for the next time you get the e-mail.  You know there will be a next time.

Wall of shame:  Sites that pass on the gossip as fact

• Daily Liberty Research; who then inexplicably defends the error
• NorCal Blogs
• The Big Feed, who then shamefully claims children guests in the White House garden are child laborers

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Bumsted.

Bob Moser says they can.  He’s talking about how to do it at SMU this week.

Can’t make it?  Buy the book.

The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies
and the Geurin-Pettus Program in the Department of Political Science
at Southern Methodist University
invite you to

Bob Moser, editor of the Texas Observer and an award-winning political reporter for The Nation, has chronicled Southern politics for nearly two decades.

In Blue Dixie he argues that the Democratic Party needs to jettison outmoded prejudices about the South if it wants to build a lasting national majority.  With evangelical churches preaching  a more expansive social gospel and a massive left-leaning demographic shift to African Americans, Latinos, and the young, the South is poised for a Democratic revival. Moser shows how a volatile mix of unprecedented economic prosperity and abject poverty are reshaping the Southern vote. By returning to a bold, unflinching message of economic fairness, the Democrats can in in the nation’s largest, most diverse region and redeem themselves as a true party of the people.

Books will be available for purchase.

THURSDAY, October 29, 2009

Noon to 1 pm
Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
6404 Hilltop Ln. & McFarlin Blvd
Bring your own brown bag lunch!

Better, make it to the lecture, buy the book, listen to Moser and let him autograph it for you.

For more information, please call 214-768-2526 or email carberry AT smu DOT edu

Invite a friend to a brown-bag lunch:

George Orwell (Eric Blair) on cover of Time Magazine, Novmber 28, 1983

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

— George Orwell, 1984

Tip of the old scrub brush to Kate at The Urban Primate

If Big Brother is watching, why not let him watch all of us? Spread the word:

Millard Fillmore’s bathtub came out of a hoax story written in 1917 by one of America’s greatest cynics and writers, H. L. Mencken. Mencken lived to regret that he ever wrote the piece, after it was cited as fact by encyclopedias and critics of Fillmore’s presidency.

Mencken’s story holds a moral, a lesson for all critics of the American scene, and especially anyone who comments on political figures:  Verify everything.

Ernest Hemingway put it best, if crudely:   “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”*

If a writer or reporter doesn’t have one of those devices built-in, he is likely to find himself up to his chin in it after having failed to detect it in time to avoid the plunge.

Rush Limbaugh is in it up to his chin right now, after following Michael Ledeen off the dock.

Faithful readers here — all dozen of ‘em — may remember last January when we spotlighted a hoax at a blog called Jumping in Pools; the author claimed President Obama had ordered members our armed forces to take an oath of allegiance to Obama in place of their regular oath to the nation.

Orson Welles was on to something with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast.  In fact, after that first night of panic, the same script was used on other occasions, and people still got suckered in.  (Listen to the RadioLab feature on this phenomenon — it’s wonderful.)

It’s almost as if people were going around with signs on their backs that say “Lie to me, baby!”  Only, the people put the signs on their shirts and blouses themselves.

For whatever ill-thought, malicious reason, somebody invented an absolutely unbelievable hoax that President Obama asked the Pentagon to have military people swear allegiance to him, instead of the nation. Jumping in Pools posted it.

Jumping in Pools also listed it as satire, in tags.

But the hoax sucked in the gullible all over the web.

Limbaugh?  Ledeen?  Y’all would do well to read this blog, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.  You might have recognized the name of the blog, Jumping in Pools, that carried that phantasmagorical story about Barack Obama’s student essay, finally being released in part to Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Yahoo!’s Buzz Up explained the story, with links you ought to check out:

It must have seemed so perfect. An obscure blogger unearths some pages of President Obama’s college thesis. The report supposedly comes from big-time journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine. And the thesis has some real gems: like Obama’s disdain for the Constitution.

The whole thing was nothing more than a satirical post on a humor blog. But Rush Limbaugh, who quoted from the supposed thesis on his radio show, sure wasn’t laughing. Here’s how it went down.

An unknown blogger picked up on a made-up post meant as a joke, which claimed that Joe Klein had gotten his hands on 10 pages of student Obama’s college thesis. Rush Limbaugh jumped on it, which immediately sparked Web searches on “obama thesis.”

Supposedly titled “Aristocracy Revisited,” the excerpt revealed the president had “doubts” about the “so-called founders.” Juicy. Except not true. Limbaugh discovered halfway through his show that he’d been had, but defended himself by saying basically the thesis felt true. Listen in to Rush’s mea sorta culpa.

Joe Klein finally jumped in, and called the report “nonsense” on his Swampland blog, and the blogger who thought the hoax was real also apologized.

Michael Ledeen writing at Pajamas Media was that “blogger who thought the hoax was real.”

Ledeen had the good grace to apologize (and in doing so reveal that he really should have been much more en garde):

The hoax/satire was written in August, so it’s not connected to any current event.  I cam across it on Twitter, read the blog, found it interesting, and posted on it.  I failed to notice that one of the tags was “satire.”

So he got me, and lots of others. It worked because it’s plausible.  I’ve done satirical pieces myself, and I know how they can take off.  I once wrote one that said that Bill Casey did not die, and was hiding in a bunker under the St Andrews golf course from which he was running Mikhail Gorbachev.  I thought it was obviously satirical, but it went like wildfire all over the world.  And that was in the days before the Internet.

So I should have picked up some hint, but I didn’t.  Shame on me.

But Limbaugh?  He railed on for more than half an hour on the evils of Obama revealed in the completely fictional essay; and then when he was alerted to the fact that it was a hoax, he didn’t apologize.  He said he was suckered in because the hoax was plausible, and Obama might have done such a thing.

“I know Obama thinks it,” Limbaugh said, purporting to channel the guy he despises only too openly.

I’m trying to suppress it, but Limbaugh’s actions remind me mightily of an old Cheech and Chong routine.  One wonders what Obama’s more rabid critics would not grant credence to.

Wall of Shame

• American Thinker, host of a thousand neuroses and great lack of judgment, jumped right on it
• Fox Nation also fell victim
• Tundra Tabloid
• Mercifully short Wall of Shame this time, no?

What would Hemingway have reported?

Other thoughts:

• Jonathan Last’s article for the Templeton Foundation’s In Character Journal wonders about how we choose what to believe, and whom.  The Dallas Morning News carried the article in the “Points” section this morning, but it’s not up on their website; look at the article at the Templeton Foundation site.

________
* I’m convinced he said it. I’m relying here on Elizabeth Dewberry’s contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, “Hemingway’s Journalism and the Realist Dilemma,” on page 25.  She cites to an interview, but I’ve misplaced the rest of that note for the moment, and for some odd reason the page with the citation isn’t included on Google Books (the pain of internet research, to get to the information you need out of the haystack, and find that particular needle has been intentionally removed).  Read Dewberry, though, for a much longer and informative discussion about hoaxes and fakery in journalism, which is the problem discussed in this post.

Don’t let your friends be bamboozled, pass the word:

No kidding.  Some group in North Carolina plans to burn Bibles on Halloween.

Funny part, or ironic part:  It’s a church doing the burning.

And in case you’re hungry, “We will be serving Bar-b-Que chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.”

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dispatches from the Culture Wars — great comments there, including this one, a favorite of mine:  “I’m going to have to address the menu, however: Chicken is not even mentioned in Leviticus.“

You can get your kilosteve t-shirt here.

Why would you want one?

Every scientist named Steve should have one -- and so should you! (Front)

Because it puts you in the company of distinguished scientists who stoutly defend the teaching of good science to children, so they can go on to become great scientists themselves.

Plus, it’s a poke in the eye to the Texas State Board of Education, none of whom are named Steve, and few of whom would be invited to sign on if they were.

Here’s the back of the shirt:

KiloSteve t-shirt, back side. 1,099 total Steves. (Back)

A kilosteve is a thousand Steves.

Creationists fondly distributed a list of scientists who, they claimed, question whether the theory of evolution is accurate.  The anti-science Discovery Institute in Seattle distributed the list starting in about 2001, with a few hundred names.

To claims that many scientists opposed teaching evolution, NCSE created a list of scientists who support teaching evolution theory — but limiting that list to scientists with the first name “Steve,” or a derivative of Steve.  About 1% of people in the English-speaking world have such a name — so the fact that more scientists named Steve sign the list supporting evolution, than those of all names who sign the list denying it, means that the Discovery Institute list represents less than 1% of all scientists.

A comparison of the lists is always instructive.  In 2003 I started phoning people listed on the Discovery Institute list; of the first 20 I called, ten denied having signed any petition against evolution.  One demanded his name be removed.  Five made a modest defense of being skeptical of evolution, but none of them were biologists, and none had any publications which questioned any part of evolution in any way.

NCSE started the project in 2003, not long after the death of Stephen Jay Gould, the staunch defender of science and evolution who was the main witness in the first creationism trial, in Arkansas in 1981.  It’s a fitting memorial to a fine teacher.

Eugenie Scott heads up NCSE.  In an e-mail this week to members of Texas Citizens for Science, who were discussing the kilosteve shirt, she noted it has already spread overseas.

Just wanted you to know that when I gave my talk at Cambridge University Tuesday, Steve #800 walked into the lecture room wearing his kilosteve shirt.

A proud moment!

(Of course I threw open my arms and said in a cheery voice, “STEVE!!!”)

It almost makes one wish one’s name were Steve.  (One also may wonder, who is Steve #800?) The shirt’s a great buy, especially considering that for the price of a kilosteve, one actually gets 1.099 kilosteves.  (As of today, there are 1,118 Steves who have signed the list.)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula, which noted the achievement of the kilosteve when it actually happened, and to Texas Citizens for Science, just for the heck of it..

You came to this blog, and all you got was a plug for a lousy t-shirt; share your displeasure: