Stalin, Ape-Men Hybrids, and Creationism

WE had quite an internet adventure this morning, which began when we spotted a crazy story at WorldNetDaily (WND) — one of the most outrageous, conspiracy believing, creationist rags in this arm of the galaxy.

Their story is titled Planet of the apes: Monkeys taught to shoot Americans? You don’t need to read much of it to get the general idea. Here are a few excerpts, with bold added by us:

Afghanistan’s Taliban terrorists are training monkeys to shoot American soldiers with automatic weapons, according to British and Chinese media agencies.

In the Taliban stronghold of Waziristan, journalists took pictures of some “monkey soldiers” holding AK-47s and Bren light machine guns.

None of those pictures accompany the WND article, although they do have a picture of an AK-47. That’s more than enough evidence for the typical WND reader. Let’s read on:

The Chinese state report also said the Taliban was using the monkeys “to arouse Western animal protectionists to pressure their governments to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.”

Clever! But up to then the article was mere craziness. This is what we found interesting:

Actually, in the 1920s, Russian dictator Josef Stalin ordered his scientists to breed a half-ape, half-man super army that would be impervious to pain and not fussy about rations. “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat,” Stalin was quoted as saying.

The experiment ended in failure as Stalin’s top men could not cross apes and men.

Naturally, your Curmudgeon had to follow that clue. Would you believe that a Google search on “Stalin ape soldiers” produces over 1.8 million hits? We looked at the first page of hits to see if any source seemed reliable. One of those nearest the top was this thread at Free Republic — one of the craziest of all creationist chat sites. We scanned their thread. The comments included pics of Helen Thomas, Michael Jackson, that sort of thing. Typical Free Republic fare.

But wait — returning to Google we found this at Sky News, an affiliate of the Fox News Network: Stalin’s Army Of Mutant Ape-Men. They say:

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin tried to create an invincible army by crossing humans with apes, according to secret documents.The Kremlin chief ordered his scientists to create the mutant species that would be “resilient and resistant to hunger”.

Archive papers quote him demanding the breed should be of “immense strength but with an underdeveloped brain”.

That makes no sense. Stalin already had the Red Army; what else did he want? Hey, this is good:

Secret laboratories and ape skeletons have been found in the Black Sea town of Suchumi in Georgia, by workmen building a playground for children.

The bones are thought to come from apes captured in the 1920s and paid for by Stalin, who ordered scientist Ilia Ivanov to carry out the research.

Now we have a name — Ivanov. This is exciting! Here’s more:

No pregnancies resulted but the next stage was to implant human sperm in female gorillas. Ivanov was arrested in 1930 after his project failed and he died in a labour camp two years later.

Then we hit pay-dirt. There’s a Wikipedia article on Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, and it has a section on Human-ape hybridization experiments.

We’ve found a whole new world of “Darwinian evil” for David Klinghoffer to explore. Not only that, but there are obvious implications for the American “creation science” movement, which mysteriously began with the work of authors who were conceived around the same time as these Soviet experiments. As they say, the timing is suspicious.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Jack Chick on Louisiana’s Creationism Law

FOR your weekend pleasure, we have a flashback to an oldie-goldie from the website of Jack Chick. This one is a 2008 article from that year’s September/October issue of their newsletter: Battle Cry. It’s titled New Louisiana Law Allows ‘Open Discussion’ on Creation.

But first we need to put this creationist relic in its chronological setting. At the end of June in 2008 we wrote: Jindal Signs Louisiana Anti-Evolution Bill. After giving the news we said:

A fool, governing a state of fools, who are determined to remain fools in the generations to come.

A few days earlier, just before Jindal signed the bill, we wrote: Discovery Institute –Spinning Louisiana’s Anti-Evolution Law. The neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids) were babbling about the law’s goofball “fail-safe” provision, which says that it:

“shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.”

Commenting on that language, which is virtually the same as section 7 of the Discoveroids’ Academic Freedom Act (from which the Louisiana law was copied), we said:

If a freak is molesting children, will anyone be impressed if he insists that he’s not a pedophile? What if he actually told his victims that his actions “shall not be construed” to be pedophilia? Well, we may be impressed by the absurdity of his legalistic gyrations, but that wouldn’t matter — he did what he did. It’s not up to him to tell us how to construe his actions.

So Louisiana had distinguished itself by enacting a creationism law copied from the “model” that the Discoveroids were actively promoting all over the country. The moment was one of the creationists’ brief triumphs, the likes of which they have rarely enjoyed in the 150 years since Darwin first published Origin of Species.

That’s the historical setting for Jack Chick’s 2008 “Battle Cry” article. Here are some excerpts, with bold added by us:

Evolutionists are up in arms over a bill signed into law by Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal. Called the Louisiana Science Education Bill, it passed the state legislature unanimously and creates a level playing field in the discussion of the origin of life and other controversial subjects in the state school system.

Yes, the bill creates a level playing field, giving Oogity Boogity equal billing with science. Let’s read on:

Prior to Jindal’s signing the law, the [New York] Times tried ridicule, insults, and untruths to pressure the governor. It even belittled his education: “As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle of modern biology.” On the contrary, this background probably went a long way in helping him understand how little evidence supports the evolutionary theory.

Jindal’s biology background merely emphasized his complete lack of integrity and the enormity of his political sellout to the forces of ignorance. We continue with Jack Chick’s article:

No longer is evolution an “unchallenged” principle. The Creation Research Society is just one organization with over 600 members with at least a master’s degree in a recognized area of science. … Even the Korean Association of Creation Research has 150 Ph.D. scientist members and 300 other scientists with master’s degrees.

It’s true, the creationists have several hundred supporters with science degrees of one sort or another — although many are proctologists and dentists. That’s to be contrasted with what must be millions of scientists worldwide with university degrees who think the creationists are crazy. Here’s more:

Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, has been one of the most successful organizations promoting intelligent design theory in opposition to evolution’s random mutation idea. It is only one example of many organizations pressing for open discussion on evolution’s weaknesses. A Google search for “intelligent design” delivers over six million hits.

Chick mentions the Discoveroids, but he’s too much of an embarrassment for the Discoveroids to ever return the favor. The reason is that Chick doesn’t have the discipline to maintain the Discoveroids’ false facade of science. Indeed, in the very article we’re discussing, Chick then lapses into disclosing the true motivation for Louisiana’s law:

Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2 that “…for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth.” Can there be any question that evolution is one “strong delusion?” The “natural man” would rather believe this lie than admit there is a God he would have to obey.

Actually, the title of Chick’s article (“New Louisiana Law Allows ‘Open Discussion’ on Creation”) gives the game away. That must have infuriated the bill’s sponsors, who insisted that it wasn’t about creationism at all. See: Louisiana’s Ben Nevers: Creationist Doublethink.

So there’s your nostalgia for the weekend — a flashback to when the dumbest state legislature and the most unscrupulous governor conspired to enact the nation’s worst law for science education.

Now that we’ve given you a taste of Chick’s thinking, for those who may not have seen this material we”ll repeat our list of Chick’s creationist comics which you can read online: In The Beginning, followed by There Go The Dinosaurs, and you must see the very influential Big Daddy? Here’s another one about teaching evolution: Apes, Lies and Ms. Henn.

Click over there and take a look at what informs millions of people about evolution. Then you’ll know why The Controversy between evolution and creationism continues to rage.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Academia in the Closet on Texas Creationism

YOU are all aware of the important campaign for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education. In District 5, the creationist-theocrat incumbent, Ken “Cat-Dog” Mercer (a cat-dog is his idea of evolution) is being challenged by Rebecca Bell-Metereau. We’ve written about this race a time or two before. See, e.g., Beauty & the Beast.

There’s a publication calling itself the Chronicle of Higher Education with an article about that contest which might be worth reading — but you can’t read it. You’re not classy enough. The Chronicle describes itself as:

… the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. … and is the top destination for news, advice, and jobs for people in academe.

Well, that’s all very nice, but we can’t read their articles without registration, and for most of us that’s sufficiently annoying that we simply don’t bother. Ordinarily we don’t care about that sort of thing. Let the academics chat among themselves if that’s what they want. We respect their privacy.

But today they have an article that should be of interest far beyond their ivory tower. The best we can do is show you the few scraps that the Chronicle has tossed our way.

We present to you, dear reader, some excerpts available to the general public from an article titled A Professor-Politician Stumps for Votes in Texas. We’re grateful that the subtitle is visible without registration: “An English scholar campaigns for a seat on the controversial state education board.”

Here’s the rest — what little can be seen, with bold font added by us:

Rebecca Bell-Metereau was troubled when she read that the State Board of Education had introduced questions about the validity of evolution in its revisions of Texas’ pre-college science curriculum.

You can see what we mean when we say that this article deserves wider readership — but that’s not going to happen. There’s only a little more that’s freely visible:

She was even more disturbed when her district’s representative wrote, in a newspaper editorial, that the board had given a group of schoolteachers a “well-deserved spanking” when it rejected an English review committee’s proposed curriculum.

Intrigued? Let’s go on to the next paragraph:

As an English professor at Texas State —

That’s all there is. After that the Chronicle‘s website says: This is an article for subscribers only.

Well, okay. We’re not only for free speech, but also for property rights. If the Chronicle chooses to conceal this article from the general public, that’s up to them. We, however, have our rights too, and this is what your Curmudgeon thinks of the Chronicle:

You people are behaving like a bunch o’ maroons! If you think it’s important for Rebecca to be elected, thus purging the Texas SBOE of the theocracy and creationism promoted by her opponent, Cat-Dog Mercer, then why don’t you say so out in the open? Keep your other shop-talk private if you wish, but let this article be freely read and copied. For a bunch of educated people, you’re behaving — in this instance — as if you have no brains at all.

That’s it. End of rant. We hope we haven’t embarrassed Rebecca.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Olivia Judson Takes a Sabbatical

Dr. Olivia Judson

… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

THIS is the last time for quite a while that we’ll be able to discuss a column by the splendidly-evolved Olivia Judson — an evolutionary biologist and a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London. She’s giving it up, at least for now.

Our very first post about Olivia was two years ago: Olivia Judson, or … Springtime for the Curmudgeon. In that embarrassingly adolescent bit of writing we said:

EVERY blogger is going to make a fool of himself at some point, and this is your Curmudgeon’s moment.

[…]

Your Curmudgeon is smitten. There’s not much else to say, but we will gather what remains of our Curmudgeonly powers of concentration and attempt to describe Olivia’s article.

[…]

Nice article, Olivia. You’re a biologist of whom we’d like to see more.

Since then we’ve posted 22 more articles about Olivia’s columns in the Times, and this is the 23d. She had become a weekend regular around here.

But now we bring you what seems to be the last of Dr. Judson’s series in the New York Times. It’s titled: So Long, and Thanks. Here are some excerpts:

This is my last column for the time being: from today, I’m taking a year’s sabbatical.

Nooooo! But we shall bear our sorrow in manly fashion and bravely read on:

Writing in this space is the most gratifying job I’ve ever had, but also the toughest. It’s like owning a pet dragon: I feel lucky to have it, but it needs to be fed high-quality meat at regular intervals . . . and if something goes wrong, there’s a substantial risk of being blasted by fire. And so, to ensure a supply of good meat in the future, I’m taking some time off. Part of this is to work on a book project. But I will also be reading, reflecting, and replenishing my stash of ideas.

She’ll be “reading, reflecting, and replenishing.” That’s fine for Olivia, but what about us? Let’s skip down to near the end:

Before I go, I want to say thank you — to everyone who has read the column, commented on it or written to me, whether with enthusiasm, ire, suggestions or questions.

But, but … Olivia, how about a personal word for your most devoted fan?

So, until the next time — goodbye, everybody! And thanks again.

Aaaargh!! Ah well, as Rick said to Ilsa:

We’ll always have Paris. … But I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. … Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

Brave talk, but for your Curmudgeon it is the winter of despair.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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