#806: Bobby Jindal

Piyush “Bobby” Jindal is the current governor of Louisiana (he chose the nickname “Bobby” based on The Brady Bunch), hardcore nut and close ally of fellow creationist Rick Perry. For our purposes his most important qualification for an entry in this Encyclopedia is his zealous and continuous war on science. Part of the reason he continues to combat science (and reality) is that he is unable to distinguish it from politics; thus volcano monitoring, for instance, is for  Jindal a form of political work.

In 2008, Jindal signed into law the Louisiana AcademicFreedom Act, a rather blatant attempt to introduce creationism into the classroom (also here; it is worth mentioning that it was bipartisanly sponsored by Democrat Bill Nevers and Republican Frank Hoffman, and that one of its most vocal opponent was Republican representative Dan Claitor). Under the law, teachers are protected from “discrimination” or job loss if they independently decide to introduce material on controversial topics, specifically (explicitly) “evidence” against evolution and global warming (and “human cloning”, which isn’t exactly properly characterized as a scientific theory). There is a good website devoted to this bullshit here.

The bill has already produced its intended results. In 2010 The Livingston Parish School Board, for instance, took steps to insert creationism in their schools. Board member David Tate said: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in Creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach Creationism?” Fellow board member Clint Mitchell responded, “I agree … Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom.” That it is unconstitutional apparently doesn’t matter that much to the zealous wingnuts of rural Louisiana, as long as it’s Jesus. As Jindal himself said: “Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution, let’s teach them – I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’” In other words, the “best facts” are hardly a selection criterion. (One also wonders what the “less good facts” might be - those facts that don't fit Jindal's preconceptions?)

More recently, Jindal backed a voucher program intended to allow students to transfer to private schools from underperforming public, which was implemented in a manner that deliberately encouraged students to choose schools that emphasize creationism. Instead of funding public schools, Jindal directed the money toward private religious schools. Of course, there was a backlash when the dimwits of the Louisiana Congress discovered that Muslim schools would also be eligible for the funds intended for religious schools (you can see representative Valarie Hodges be absolutely shocked that the bill she signed but didn’t read first would allow anything but Christianity to be taught in publicly funded schools here).

It is also worth mentioning that Jindal was key advisor on education reform to Mitt Romney (also here).

Jindal claims to have personally battled a demon while a student at Brown University. When a member of his prayer group suffering from emotional distress and a skin cancer diagnosis collapsed during a prayer meeting, Jindal and his fellow students did not seek medical aid but began to perform an exorcism instead. The victim tried to flee but was physically restrained by the group. Jindal claims that the exorcism was successful and also miraculously cured the woman’s skin cancer.

There is a decent Jindal resource here. To really blow your irony meters, here is Jindal expressing his concern about the future of the Republican party: “We’ve got to stop being the stupid party.” Words fail, but this is worth a read.

Diagnosis: A wingnut’s wingnut and fundamentalist denialist, who has already abused his position to win a few battles against civilization and reason. Extremely dangerous.

#805: Paul Jehle

Paul Jehle is, quite simply, a frothingly mad fundamentalist lunatic, and an occasional associate of the late, insidious D. James Kennedy. To take an example of where Jehle is coming from, one may take a look at his contribution to the 2006 conference “Reclaiming America for Christ”, a lecture called “Evaluating your Philosophy of Education”. In the lecture Jehle argues that everything is either Christian or non-Christian and that you cannot mix pagan stuff with Christianity and get something Christian. This idea he then applies, in all seriousness, to mathematics. If mathematics teaching is not distinctively Christian, it is pagan, and hence bad. Indeed, he appears to think that math is not explicitly Christian, and therefore bad. The talk also featured some spectacular fallacies of composition and division (you can sort of guess what they would be), but I am not sure those were the most serious problems.

Jehle’s dayjob is being Executive Director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation (and tea party activist). At their website you can read Jehle’s newsletters. They are … to put it simply, David Barton’s revisionism looks pretty modest by comparison. Interestingly, Barton seems to be influenced by Jehle, in particular Jehle’s argument that the famous phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was taken, word by word, from the Bible by the founding fathers (they were not ideas of the Enlightenment, but “revealed truths”). Jehle’s argument?

“The charter that God made with Adam was threefold. First, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ which is mankind’s basic right to life. Second, ‘fill or replenish, the earth.’ The Hebrew word fill or replenish involved the scientific method, meaning to take something that we observe, then break it down to its essential ingredients and reform it into a different form. It is a concept that requires the right to liberty. When we have liberty, we can take natural resources and then refill the earth with the same natural resources in different forms through invention and technology. Third, ‘subdue the earth and rule, or have dominion, over it,’ which is the right to own private property. Dominion of the earth simply means we have a parcel of land that is our exclusive possession that we steward before God.”

That should settle things, I suppose – you have to take confirmation bias rather far into the realms of delusion to feel the force of that argument. Despite being an unrepentant theocrat Jehle did, however, give the commencement speech at Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally.

Apparently Jehle also reviews movies, and has not been impressed by the paganisms of Harry Potter (worth reading)

Diagnosis: As angrily insane as they get, Jehle’s Taliban-envy and revisionism in the name of the Old Testament seems to be influential enough to make him a real and significant threat to everything good.

#804: Warren Jeffs

Warren Steed Jeffs is the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a  polygamist (he is said to have at least 85 wives) and child-molester who made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List in 2006 when he tried to escape prosecution for arranging illegal marriages. According to himself he is a prophet, of course. More here.

In August 2011 he was convicted of two counts of sexual assault on a child and was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison. During the court case – in which he represented himself, of course – he threatened the judge and jury with divine punishment, but to his dismay they didn’t budge (he also unsuccessfully tried to get the judge to recuse herself on the grounds that God had told him that she should do so). His defense was primarily based on claiming that his arrest was an attack on his religion, and that presenting evidence of his erotic antics was “breaking a sacred trust”. The case was an easy one since Jeffs tended to tape his sexual encounters with minors (though Jeffs and his supporters employed some rather scary strategies in their defense work). Once in jail, he stepped it up a couple of more notches, threatening a variety of countries with divine punishment, and went on a hunger strike, again with rather feeble results.

Diagnosis: Since his church had some 10,000 members the process of healing may take some time. At least the deranged figurehead seems neutralized. 

#803: Ross Jeffries(?)

A.k.a. Paul Ross

A pick-up artist (PUA) is a man (or rarely, a woman) who systematically studies ways to hopefully improve their success rate with women, and they have come to constitue a kind of loosely knit subculture, the seduction community, with their own lingo and terminology. Ross Jeffries, a former Californian comedian who currently terms himself a “flirtation guru”, is a central character, who has made millions from his masterclasses in “courtship skills for the modern man.” (He currently (well, at least in 1999) has something like 60,000 “pupils” who pay vast sums of money to learn body language and one-liners). Of course, it’s gotta be woo, and sure enough – Jeffries’s advice is a mixture of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP – the particular brand is called “speed seduction”) and cargo-cult psychology – though it is admittedly a little unclear to what extent Jeffries would actually defend his advice if he somehow got interested in sticking with truth and evidence.

According to Jeffries, his is a system that would enable lonely men to meet and get into bed with absolutely any woman they want within minutes of meeting them. All men, he says, have an inner James Bond, and Speed Seduction can help you break him out of his shell. His approach mixes basic common sense advice with verbal techniques called “patterns,” which are basically rehearsed NLP-ish speeches employing “trance words”, which supposedly hypnotize women and make them more sexually receptive to you. The first steps in his advice package is the common sense stuff – the hypnosis and psychobabble comes later. And as in all pseudoscience, if the patterns don’t work, then it’s the men’s fault for not applying them correctly. It’s a win-win game for Jeffries, and his evidence is, rather obviously, anecdotal.

Diagnosis: Though less blatantly wooish than some, perhaps (and one does wonder how committed he is to the truth of the pseudoscientific claims in his package), Jeffries is yet another self-help guru who, with a seller’s skills and plenty of woo, preys on groups of people with low self-esteem. It is hard to judge how dangerous it is, but it is not unlikely that his advice will help foster misogyny, at least.

#802: Nathan Jastram

Rev. Dr. Nathan Jastram is a professor of theology at Concordia University (and their theological seminary, the Cranach Institute), and member of the Creation Science Society of Milwaukee. He is most notable for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which he claims “demonstrate the extreme accuracy of the copying of Biblical manuscripts,” primarily because he wants them to be and uses motivated reasoning as his methodological principle to reach that conclusion. Indeed, as it is so candidly put on the Creation Science Society’s webpage, the results of his research are clearly “contrary to the assumptions of evolutionary scholars and others.” Clearly, this is an epic battle between those evil scientists and God.

His screeds (e.g. “Does it matter if you believe in evolution”) can also be heard at e.g. Christ-Centred Cross-focused Talk Radio.

Diagnosis: A fairly typical, lowkey proponent of crackpottery and denialism in the name of religion – and for the claim that religious commitments somehow validate confirmation bias as a research strategy.