Things You Find In The Logs
Here's an interesting little tidbit that came up in the Sitemeter logs today. Word Around the Net did a wee bit of debunking back on Tuesday. It is a very, very thorough dismantling of a column by Australian Terry Lane that appeared in The Age.
There is a factoid on the Internet that pops up once in a while on message boards and blogs about the Grand Canyon and the park service. Recently, it became part of an Australian columnist's latest work:
There is a good America. A great America. But it is not Bush's America. Or his father's. Or the America of Reagan, Nixon and Kissinger.
Here's an amusing example of the divide between good and bad America. A recent press release from the organisation Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility draws attention to the fact that rangers in the Grand Canyon National Park are forbidden to answer visitors' questions about the age of the canyon because the truth will upset Bush's fundamentalist supporters. However, Bush's National Parks Service refuses to withdraw from sale in the park bookshop a book that explains how the canyon was formed by Noah's flood.
Mr Rudd might care to explain how it is in our national interest to have an alliance with a government that is a self-evident force for stupidity as well as cruelty.
I've read this several places, always asserted without the slightest effort to support the position. Sometimes people even claim they just came back from the national park, breathless from the run and had to dash to a keyboard to type in this horrible fact. Now, given that this is by columnist Terry Lane, who was so willing to believe the sad tales of Jesse MacBeth that he didn't bother to take the slightest effort to research the validity of these tales he wrote about it in a previous column.
When caught short, he offered to resign because he'd failed to do his job as a journalist and study the case before presuming it was true - a case of confirmation bias, where you believe something because you want it to be true or it fits what you believe to be true, rather than based on any study. It confirms your opinions, so you figure it to be accurate. Terry Lane's way of putting it was "I fell for it because I wanted to believe it." The Age, the paper Mr Lane writes for, refused to accept the resignation, and Mr Lane plugs on.
Go read it all, Christopher Taylor did a lot of legwork - or phone work - and debunks this one completely. But there's more interrelated posting going on from Tim Blair today as well. Which includes a rather firm smackdown of the lamentable trainwreck that Gary Trudeau has become. I have an indirect story about Gary Trudeau I'll tell some time. His father was my grandmother's doctor for many years. In fact, old Doc Trudeau treated me now and then back in the day, my mother told me.
UPDATE: I know Christopher Taylor referenced this as did Tim Blair, but it is, I think, worthy of pulling out seperately. Skeptic magazine has formally retracted it's claims about the National Park Service and has distanced itself from PEER, the group that made the fraudulent claims that kicked this whole thing off. Michael Shermer does a thorough, if very belated, effort to get to the bottom of PEER's accusations, but comes up empty. There is no there there, so to speak. If you read it, it is quite evident that PEER, or the director of the group (which may well be one and the same for all we know) appears to have outright fabricated the entire accusation. He certainly did not - at all - prove the validity of the charge. Shermer, however, diminished what should have been - and could have been - an exemplary retraction by taking a cheap shot right at the start.
UPDATE: Others: Ed Driscoll, Clayton Cramer,
Blogosphere, Left Wing | Gaius Friday, 19 January , 2007
By Luther McLeod, Friday, 19 January , 2007 @ 8:09 pm
I wrote to my local fishwrap editor on this, yesterday, I am still waiting for a reply.
By Gaius, Friday, 19 January , 2007 @ 8:35 pm
Every, single paper that ran Doonesbury needs to retract.