#2566: Kirk Blankenship

Kirk Blankenship is Associate Pastor at Meadowview Reformed Presbyterian Church. And Blankenship is a creationist. He wants public schools to “teach both sides” of what he perceives to be the evolution–creation debate, which is not a scientific debate but which he confuses not only with a scientific debate but with a debate over atheism vs theism. In other words, Blankenship maintains a very simple worldview where all distinctions map nicely onto each other. He needs his worldview to be simple.

 

So in his letter-to-the-editor s in The Dispatch of Lexington, North Carolina titled ‘Writers are dogmatic’, he bemoans the narrow-mindedness of freethinkers and recounts his own stint as a … science teacher in public schools and the errors and lies he himself chose to tell his students. For instance, Blankenship quote-mined Darwin by attributing to him a claim admitting that problems (e.g. lack of transitional forms) “would be fatal to the theory.” That of course, was Darwin’s description of an objection, to which Darwin also responded comprehensively (the current status of the record of transitional fossils is also pretty impressive, contrary to what Blankenship told his students). He also repeated a standard, dishonest creationist quote mining of Stephen J. Gould.

 

Even worse, he said “When I was teaching science to sixth-graders, they learned that part of the scientific method is being able to perform a repeatable experiment.” And this is so dumb a misunderstanding of science that you know you are talking to a deranged creationist. No, science isn’t necessarily experimential, and – more importantly – “repeatability” refers to the possibility or repeating the observation, not repeating the phenomenon the observation is evidence for. That other scientists find the same kinds of fossils in the same layers is successful satisfaction of the principle of repeatability! Blankenship, of course, is just parroting the misunderstandings over at Answers in Genesis. He has no real idea about what’s going on about anything.

 

Diagnosis: Denialist moron, supremely unfit for instructing anyone about anything. A minor but harmful figure whose background in public schools is terrifying.

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous Curmudgeon

#2565: Don Blankenship

Donald Leon Blankenship is an American business executive and (unsuccessful) political candidate. Blankenship is most famous as Chairman and CEO of the Massey Energy Company from 2000 until an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in 2010 killed 29 miners, cost him his position and landed him in jail for conspiring to willfully violate mine safety and health standards. He tried to run on the Constitution Party ticket in 2018 on a platform consisting mostly of opposing mining safety and environmental measures, as well as claiming that he was innocent of his crimes and would have walked free were it not for dirty politics and conspiracies. Blankenship is otherwise an absolutely horrible human being, to the point of functioning quite well as a straightforward parody of a cartoon villain.

 

His political campaigns have to a large extent targeted environmental “crazies” and “greeniacs”. Blankenship is of course a climate change denier (“I don’t believe climate change is real”, saying “Why should we trust a report by the United Nations? The United Nations includes countries like Venezuela, North Korea and Iran” – one could point out that these countries also believe in gravity, but that might give him ideas). According to Blankenship “the environmental movement isn’t a great cause, it’s a great business”, as opposed to his own coal industry. In 2018, he modified himself a little, admitting that “climate change is probably a fact” but that American-made climate change is not, it’s just China’s contributions that actually lead to climate change.

 

He also rejects mainstream views on mine safety, arguing against government airheads telling mining companies what to do: mining companies themselves are way better suited to the task and should have less oversight: “Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miners’ safety.” (The quote is from 2009, the year before the Upper Big Branch explosion.)

 

During his 2018 campaign, Blankenship tried to promote himself as “Trumpier than Trump” but complained that the establishment was pushing misinformation about him because they felt threatened. His campaign targeted in particular Mitch McConnell, for instance by stating that McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao was a “China person” (when asked whether the comment was racist, Blankenship said it wasn’t, because the Chinese are not a race: “Races are Negro, White Caucasian, Hispanic, and Asian”. So there you go.) He also got into some controversy over repeatedly calling Mitch McConnell “cocaine Mitch”, relying a conspiracy theory based on conflating an impressive number of degrees of separation (Trump himself endorsed Blankenship’s opponent).

 

Diagnosis: A piece of absolutely putrid rot. One of the vilest pieces of garbage alive today. Absolutely everything, on every possible level, is wrong with this excuse for a person.

#2564: Jeffrey Bland

It’s pretty clear that Christopher Blair, the guy who runs America’s Last Line of Defense, is – whatever he is – not exactly a loon. Jeffrey Bland is. Well, probably.

 

Bland is the father of functional medicine, a form of quackery that encompasses a large number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments backed by pseudoscience, anecdotes, hunches and conspiracy theories. Bland even readily admits that there is no evidence base: “Unfortunately, current research models do not have a way to test each individualized, patient-centered therapeutic plan that is tailored to a person with a unique combination of existing conditions, genetic influences, environmental exposures, and lifestyle choices”, says Bland. It is not true that there is noway of testing their claims (and no, human biochemistry really isn’t that individual, even if we all want to feel special, and they could of course just test whether their individualized plans worked … but of course they won’t), and yes: the claim it’s really just a simple and feeble “get out of jail free” card and the same excuse quacks always use to not have to rely on evidence and instead do what they want and making it up as they go, which is exactly what they do. That it also means that they have no evidence for their recommendations is left unsaid.

 

Allegedly, functional medicine focuses on the “root causes”, which is false on any interpretation of ‘root’ and ‘cause’, based on purported interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems … but really based on the opportunity to prescribe a number of useless and expensive tests. As response to whatever they deem to be the root cause, functional medicine proponents develop “individualized treatment plans”, i.e. not based it on cold, hard, impersonal facts, but whatever suits the interests of the practitioners at the moment. There are decent primers on functional medicine here and here.

 

That said, it is really hard to pin down precisely what functional medicine is supposed to be – it’s usually defined in terms of thoroughly vague, largely metaphorical terms like “taking a whole-patient perspective” and “imbalances” in hormones and neurotransmitters – expressions that could mean anything and which functional medicine providers accordingly use to mean whatever they fancy. According to Bland himself, “disease appears real and fixed, just as the earth seems flat, and time and space seem linear and solid.” Apparently that is part of a paradigm-shifting insight. In reality, it is new age guru gobbledygock, nothing else. But that kind of stuff has a rather significant audience.

 

Since 2014, the Cleveland Clinic has despite everything sported a Center for Functional Medicine. Functional medicine remains pure quackery. But there is money in it, and what centers the Cleveland Clinic hosts is not decided by its medical personnel, far less by anyone working in science. It’s apparently been very popular.

 

Bland founded The Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) in the early 1990s as part of one of his companies HealthComm. Bland is not a medical doctor but a former chemist and dietary supplement hawker, whose companies have been fined an impressive number of times by the FTC and FDA and have been ordered to stop making medical claims for their products. At least the Nu-Day Diet Program and the UltraClear dietary program were obvious scams: they were falsely claimed to reduce the incidence and severity of symptoms associated with gastrointestinal problems, inflammatory or immunologic problems, fatigue, food allergies, mercury exposure, kidney disorders, and rheumatoid arthritis. Later, Bland’s company Metagenics got in trouble for falsely claiming that their products UltraClear®, UltraMeal®, UltraInflamX™, and UltraGlycemX™ , promoted e.g. for “Support of Metabolic Detoxification”, were medical foods rather than bullshit. You can read more about Bland’s colorful adventures in the fields of fraud, scam, and con artistry here. The IFM was arguably founded precisely to push the kinds of supplements Bland used to get in trouble for, and the reason it is hard to pin down what functional medicine is, is presumably exactly because it was invented precisely as a ploy for Bland to sell his supplements.

 

Bland was also on the board of directors for Keats Publishing, possibly America’s most prolific publisher of questionable information about health, nutrition, and “alternative” health methods at least prior to the 2000s. He was also on the “medical advisory board” of Healthshop, an online supplement recommending fraud and spam website. Also before he decided to invent functional medicine, Bland was a central promoter of nutritional supplements and gave talks to and adviced a range of rather influential quack cults trying to pose as legitimate medical associations, such as the Council on Nutrition (a chiropractic organization – Bland and functional medicine remains popular with chiropractors, apparently). He is even on the Advisory Board of Julian Whitaker’s lobbying organization known as the American Association of Health Freedom (AAHF). But of course he is. Ask him about his views on vaccines.

 

What’s thoroughly scary, though, is that even in 2015, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education would accredit organizations like The Institute for Functional Medicine, with speakers like Bland, for continuing medical education credits. He is regularly featured as a speaker by organizations and groups that really should know better.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most influential quacks in the US, Bland is most of all a kind of spineless guru who seems to have evolved from cynically employing any scheme possible to push his supplements to becoming something like a true believer in whatever he makes up as he goes along. Yes, it’s hard to believe that he takes his own helpless metaphorical gestures seriously, but he seems to do.

#2563: Gus Blackwell

Gus Blackwell is a former member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, from 2002 to 2014, representing the 61st district, after having spent 20 years with the Oklahoma Baptist General Convention – he is also a Campus Minister with Baptist Collegiate Ministries. (His tenure, by the way, ended precisely one of the ways you’d expect from someone like him). During his tenure, though, Blackwell campaigned ardently to destroy Oklahoma public education and, in particular, to replace science with his own favorite religious views in science classes. For instance, in 2012 Blackwell resurrected Sally Kern’s House Bill 1551, which would encourage students to “explore alternative theories on controversial areas such as evolution and global warming”, topics that are, of course, not scientifically controversial at all, but on which wingnuts don’t like the facts for religious reasons. The measure passed the Education Committee on a 9-7 vote (this is Oklahoma, remember) and headed on to the House floor before, apparently, dying.

 

Blackwell was at it again in 2013 and 2014, this time with House Bill 1674 (with Kern, Josh Brecheen and Arthur Hulbert), which was closely modelled on the Discovery Institute’s Academic Freedom Act designed, explicitly, to provide a wedge for teaching creationism in public schools. The bill (more here) even explicitly employed “strengths and weaknesses” language and did, of course, focus heavily on critical thinking, something neither Blackwell nor the bill’s supporter has any real familiarity with – just like evolution or climate change, really. Blackwell clearly wouldn’t wish for Oklahoma students to become good critical thinkers. It passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives on a 79-6 vote before dying (from inactivity) in the Senate – though it had supporters there, the bill was also obviously unconstitutional, and the job of the Senate is, after all, in part to ensure that the State doesn’t get embroiled in legal battles that the State will lose.

 

Diagnosis: To quote the Sensuous Curmudgeon: “A creationist politician usually falls into one of three categories: (1) he does what he does because he fears the Lake of Fire; (2) he’s a hopeless imbecile; or (3) he has no beliefs, but he would cheerfully support creationism, sell his mother, or do anything else to win an election.” Blackwell would fall in all three categories. And he’s not alone: Oklahoma has a long, long history of introducing such bills. There is something wrong with Oklahoma.

#2562: John Biver

John Biver is a columnist for Barbwire, and a fine and representative sample of that particular species.

 

Biver is particularly notably for daring to voice his staunch opposition to gay rights, even going so far as to describe advocates of gay rights and marriage equality as  “homo-maniacal” (apparently he borrowed the phrase from fellow BarbWire commentator Jeff Allen), calling for gay rights to be defeated like Nazi Germany (complete with Churchill quotes): “if we too remain united, can beat the ‘gay’-stapo today!”, said Biver, and added a rainbow swastika flag to his column for emphasis. Part of the reason it’s so urgent is that “the homo-fascists” would “love to sadistically” punish anti-gay activists – yes the common trick of projecting how he would like to treat those who disagree with him, because he is an unapologetic fascist, onto those he disagree with – and would probably “throw in the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of the Independence for good measure, as a little more fuel on the ‘gay rights’ fire” and put good Christians in “cattle cars”, because paranoia.

 

Later, he warned that marriage equality will lead to legal protections for bestiality and the letter Z being “added to the LGBTQIA (etc.) abbreviation.” The claim was based on a law review article by a Cornell student that Biver admitted he only skimmed the beginning of and has “no idea what his argument is.” The article in question in fact argued for strengthening laws against bestiality, but to Biver it was primarily written by an egghead academic and that’s proof enough for him that there will be “a future well-funded marriage ‘equality’ effort for zoophiliacs.”

 

Diagnosis: It has admittedly been a while, and we don’t know what John Biver is up to these days. It’s unlikely to be anything good.

#2561: Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton is a journalist, author, and filmmaker, until 2016 a columnist for the NYT, and special correspondent at Vanity Fair. He is actually a bit of a deal, though Gawker called him the “worst columnist at the New York Times” for the general level of inanity in his commentaries. He is also a promoter of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and idiotic fear-mongering. In particular, he has promoted the debunked idea of a link between cell phones and cancer, judiciously overlooking the evidence, which consistently shows no link – except for a couple of questionable studies from one single research group in Sweden. Bilton didn’t overlook those. In the process of describing how he interprets the situation, he distorts conclusions from major research organizations (like this; guess what Bilton’s take was), quotes legitimate authorities out of context, and even tries to liken current opinions among those who know something about the topic with the myth that doctors thought cigarettes were safe in the 1950s (a beloved crank gambit). He even quotes Joe Mercola as an authority. There is some fair and even-handed discussion of Bilton’s column here and here.

 

Bilton’s response to legitimate criticism was as feeble as you’d expect from someone like him.

 

Now, it is perhaps not entirely clear that Bilton is genuinely committed to the nonsense he writes. Perhaps his promotion of FUD was just an attempt to garner some attention that the inanity of his other columns struggled to get him. That would possibly make everything worse.

 

Diagnosis: Inane

#2560: Moses Turkle Bility

Each December, RealClearScience goes through the worst examples of fraud, woo, and bullshit in the world of science over the preceding year. In 2020, a notable entry was a paper published in Science of the Total Environment with the impressively technobabble-laden title “Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis”. Now, this is the sort of title you would expect on whale.to-inspired blogs, but this particular example – shorter version “Jade Amulets Can Prevent COVID-19” – was signed Dr. Moses Turkle Bility, an Assistant Professor in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Most commentators immediately suspected a prank, perhaps to test whether Science of the Total Environment was a journal with minimal academic standards (it evidently isn’t). The pseudo-jargon-stuffed gobbledygook is precisely what one expect from an elaborate hoax, and the contents of the article follow the title’s example with some incoherent stream-of-consciousness ranting that would make hardened Timecube fans blush. However, it turns out Bility was quite serious.

 

Yes, Bility really does think that COVID-19 is related to magnetic fields, and that jade amulets can potentially prevent the disease through magic. He also denies the germ theory of disease in favor of some pseudogeology and handwavy appeals to geomagnetic fields. Oh, and nowhere did he actually test whether jade amulets do anything. There is a decent summary of the science involved here.

 

Experts dismissed the paper as the laughable nonsense it is, but when Bility was politely challenged about it, he was immediately defensive and claimed racism was at the root of the objections: “I am not surprised that this article has elicited angry responses [as a matter of fact, it primarily elicited laughter]. Clearly the idea that a black scientist can provide a paradigm shifting idea offends a lot of individuals [...] You neither understand quantum physics nor spin chemistry; you are making a hasting [sic] decision based on your knowledge of the classical theories that dominate the biological sciences,” wrote Bility. The article has since been “temporarily removed” from the journal.

 

Bility’s co-authors were not particularly happy about being affiliated with the paper, and Bility admitted that “the inclusion of the co-authors in this manuscript was an error in my (Moses Bility) judgment.” It would, one thinks, be a relatively easily avoidable error.

 

Bility apparently has several other, novel preprints out there, too, including

 

-       “Stonehenge as a public health intervention device for preventing lithospheric magnetic field-induced emerging diseases and megadeath during periods of severely weaken geomagnetic field”

-       “The spatiotemporal relationship between geomagnetic perturbations and Ebola Viral Disease outbreaks and civil strife in Equatorial Africa: A reexamination of the interpretation of clay burning by Iron Age African tribes during severe geomagnetic perturbations”

-       “Are rises in the Lithosphere-Magnetic Field in the United States, interacting with vaping aerosols-iron in lungs, the tipping point for the outbreak of vaping-associated acute lung injury?”

 

There is also “The theory of everything: Reconciliation of quantum theory and gravitation via redefinition of the concept time in a non-discrete compressible fluid model of the physical universe with interactions governed by the framework of the Wheeler-Feynman-Cramer-Mead transactional (handshake) theory”, in which he suggests that “the structure and dynamics of the social-political polarization of The United States in the late 1960s to the late 1970s is symmetrical to the structure and dynamics of the lithosphere-magnetic field polarization of The United States in the late 1960s to the late”, and therefore – apparently related to “polarized ‘brain’ electromagnetic interactions (brain activity) in high-risk decision making” – that “the symmetrical relationship between the social-political polarization and magnetic field polarization of the lithosphere demonstrate that humans exist as a demarcated compressible fluid with “quantum” electromagnetic interactions (human interactions) govern by the framework of the Wheeler-Feynman-Cramer-Mead transactional (quantum handshake) theory.” Betcha you haven’t seen that hypothesis in published research before.

 

Oh, yes. He has even written a book, Equilibrium Theory: Unification of Newtonian Physics and General Relativity using the wave equation.

 

Diagnosis: In fairness, Moses Turkle Bility is mostly a colorful fellow, and even though he didn’t intend to do it, his efforts might actually work to identify journals with poor academic standards or insufficiently rigorous peer reviewing. It is, on the other hand, hard to imagine his ideas initialized any sort of denialist movement worth taking seriously (a cult may be conceivable). That’s something, we suppose.