Prize for Dishonest Reporting

You can't make this kind of stuff up. The folks at PJ Media are offering a prize for dishonest reporting, and the committee includes Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon.

Let's see, shall we nominate Glenn Reynolds for dishonestly attributing a right-wing columnist's views to the Kansas City Star? Or the time he misrepresented economic figures to blame it on Obama? There are just so many examples to pick from.

For Roger Simon, how about his recent interview of uber-fruitcake Jack Cashill about a meaningless error in a 20-year-old biography of Obama?

Or how about PJ Media's own Andrew Klavan for this dishonest commentary?

We could also nominate the Discovery Institute "News & Views" section, for having the most consistently dishonest reporting about evolution. There are so many DI lies to choose from, it's hard to know where to start. I'd nominate Denyse O'Leary, too, except the prize is for reporting, and it's hard to call what she does with that name. "Reprinting" would be a better word.

Net Neutrality = Fairness Doctrine?

Here is a commentary with equal parts smugness, lies, and ignorance, delivered by Andrew Klavan:



It's truly fascinating how moronic it is, and how un-self-aware. One minute he's saying that liberals are evil because they call the far-right "fascist" or "worse than Hitler"; the next minute he's displaying the term "net neutrality" written in pseudo-cyrillic script, with the clear implication that somehow it is Communist.

He also makes the claim that bailing out banks and big corporations is a "radical attempt to destroy our free-market system". I wonder what a real attempt to destroy it would look like?

There are good arguments both for and against net neutrality (and the Fairness Doctrine, for that matter). But they're not even remotely related. One is about a national public resource with very limited access and bandwidth, controlled largely by corporate interests. The other is about a global network and peer-to-peer communication with near-universal access in North America, and essentially unlimited bandwidth. There's simply no way that net neutrality could "force conservatives to shut up online as well".

Klavan claims "leftism has failed everywhere". Yet in the European social democracies, such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, people live longer, healthier lives, and they have less crime. Furthermore, "leftist" policies like the minimum wage and Medicare haven't failed -- they have become standard practice in democracies.

I wonder if Klavan is more or less stupid than his audience? Is he a moron, or actively dishonest?

Stephen Meyer - More Honesty Problems?

At Christianity Today, Stephen Meyer repeats the falsehood that "We know that information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal—always comes from an intelligent source." It's simply not so - for example, in the Kolmogorov theory, any random source produces information. Even in Meyer's own idiosyncratic definition of information, natural systems produce information - such as when you stick your head out the window to see if it will rain that day. Where did you get that information? Not from any intelligent source.

And he adds some new falsehoods: "My recent book on the subject received enthusiastic endorsements from many scientists not previously known as advocates of ID, such as chemist Philip Skell, a National Academy of Sciences member..."

As is well-known to anyone who follows the creation-evolution debate, Philip Skell is a longtime evolution opponent. His anti-evolution activity dates from at least 2000, and he has been quite active since then.

Meyer also claims, "those who reject ID within the scientific community do so not because they have a better explanation of the relevant evidence, but because they affirm a definition of science that requires them to reject explanations involving intelligence—whatever the evidence shows". Scientists don't reject explanations involving "intelligence"; they simply don't find "intelligence" alone to be a useful explanation for most phenomena. No archaeologist finds a potsherd and exclaims, "Intelligence must have been involved in the creation of this pot!" To do so would be regarded as moronic. Rather, archaeologists spend their time figuring out who made an artifact, what they used it for, and how it fits into a larger understanding of the human culture it was a part of. Contrary to Meyer's bogus claim, fields like archaeology have no problem incorporating human agency into their studies. But no scientific field incorporates agency without some evidence of the agent actually existing - something Meyer has yet to provide.

If ID wants to be taken seriously, ID advocates have to distance themselves from spokesmen who are more interested in public relations than scientific truth.

Discovery Institute Busted

It seems the clowns at the Discovery Institute just can't stand being criticized - so much so that they issued a bogus DMCA takedown notice on a youtube video. The DI says it's all about the unauthorized use of their logo, and they say they don't "contest right [sic] of this user to publish satire, parody, or criticism", but that's about as believable as their other claims.

Discovery Institute Fellow Accused of Making Stuff Up

And in a really huge surprise, a fellow of the Discovery Dishonesty Institute, Benjamin Wiker, is accused by a young-earth creationist of making stuff up.

Why, I am simply speechless!

To be fair, Wiker has a Ph. D. in "theological ethics". You know, as distinguished from real ethics, where fibbing is considered to be in bad taste.