Megan Fox, YEC loon

The marvel of modern technology is that an incredibly ignorant person can be "published" and reach an audience of millions. Kim Kardashian West has at least figured how to legally dupe people for massive piles of money without actually harming anyone.

An even worse imbecile named Megan Fox has risen from a well deserved obscurity to become a national laughing stock. Ms. Fox is a young earth creationist (YEC) and home schooler. Her pivotal moment was a YouTube video where she traipsed about the Field Museum of Natural History while dismissing science. She felt qualified to dismiss scientific terms she could not even pronounce. Do watch it, if you must. I initially was laughing, but as the stupidities piled up on mountains of arrogant ignorance, I found I need beer and a short walk.

However, she has allies. They are also exposed in the supporting comments following her Fields Museum diatribe. Perhaps the 1,207,582 views on YouTube are all not just for cheap amusement afforded by a side-show freak. She teaches her home-schooled children YEC frauds. She is proud of being ignorant and infecting her children with ignorance. Her internet notoriety has lead to a new venue: a far-right internet website called PJ Media. I'll totally understand if nobody clicks their ad-bait. I wish I didn't. But, Ms. Fox claims she was "actually threatened" following her YouTube self-humiliation. She just wrote,

I have personally been threatened by people who say they want to call the state and report me for child abuse because I made a video questioning the validity of some of the evolutionists’ claims at the Field Museum in Chicago. These threats are not to be taken lightly, considering that children have been taken from their parents over idiotic circumstances like a homeschooling father who takes a natural supplement that the FDA doesn’t approve of (like every natural health supplement on the market. But don’t worry, it’s not like the FDA said Vioxx was perfectly fine before it killed 60,000 people. Oh wait…).

Those few sentences alone were enough to stun me. (The grammatical, and typographical irregularities alone are stunning. But I am not a grammerological Fascist that windges at grammar stupidnesies. Oh wit ...).

I count 4 significant gross errors of fact, and logic. That is high even for a YEC nitwit.

First of course is why any sane person worries about the comments to a YouTube video. I get emails from YEC loonies with some regularity that threaten me with Hell Fire and Damnation. (Yawn). Then there is the paranoid delusion that Ms. Fox could lose her children by what she later called "government kidnappings" directed against home schooling parents.

But there are still 4 more interesting errors. They are so densely packed that it took hours to trace them all down.

1) Were the children taken into protective custody because their father home schooled, or that he took "a natural supplement that the FDA doesn’t approve of?" Or was there more?

The "home schooling father" referred to Hal and Michelle Stanley of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Seven of their nine children were living at their home, and were removed to protective custody last January. The Affidavit for the search warrant follows:

The Affidavit clearly states that the concern is that the Stanley children were being purposefully exposed to Sodium Clorite. I'll explain why that is a very bad idea a bit later. There is no mention at all of any objection to Mr. Hal Stanely taking any thing he likes. There is no mention at all about home schooling. So we see that Ms. Fox has lied again. Actually, she lied twice.

2) Does the FDA regulate "natural supplements?"

When a chemical is sold in the US as a dietary supplement, it comes under the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). The linked article has more information, but the key items are;

"Under DSHEA, a firm is responsible for determining that the dietary supplements it manufactures or distributes are safe and that any representations or claims made about them are substantiated by adequate evidence to show that they are not false or misleading. This means that dietary supplements do not need approval from FDA before they are marketed."

and;

... a firm does not have to provide FDA with the evidence it relies on to substantiate safety or effectiveness before or after it markets its products.

and;

Unlike drug products that must be proven safe and effective for their intended use before marketing, there are no provisions in the law for FDA to "approve" dietary supplements for safety or effectiveness before they reach the consumer. Under DSHEA, once the product is marketed, FDA has the responsibility for showing that a dietary supplement is "unsafe," before it can take action to restrict the product's use or removal from the marketplace.

The FDA does not regulate "natural supplements." They can only act if there is solid evidence that the product chemical is dangerous, and/or that the advertised claims made about the product are false. Ms. Fox lied again.

3) What is the supplement "MMS," and why does the FDA object to this as a "nutritional supplement?" Why would the Child Protective Services worry that Mr. Stanley was spreading sodium chlorite around the house?

MMS (Miracle [Master] Mineral Solution) is sodium chlorite dissolved in distilled water. Sodium Chlorite, NaClO2, is a starting chemical for releasing a gas, Chlorine dioxide (ClO2). It is a powerful industrial bleach, and also has some use in treating waste water and sewage. If you are a chemist, I recommend the EPA fact sheet (PDF). The first link above was to Wikipedia which has most of the same information in a slightly less technical presentation.

In the bare bones version, this chemical reacts with acid to release several highly toxic gasses. If there is hydrochloric acid in the mix, chlorine gas as well as chlorine dioxide are released. Stomach acid has hydrochloric acid (HCl) concentrations from 0.5%, to as high as 0.1 M. Sodium dioxide can also be released from sodium chlorate (NaClO3) mixed with concentrated hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and an acid (industrially sulfuric acid (H2SO4) is preferred, but stomach acid works just fine). H2SO4 AKA battery acid is easy to come by). This also set off alarms when we read the results of the search warrant on the Stanley house.

Read the items carefully. Item #1 is a gallon bottle of 35% hydrogen peroxide, H2O2. The solution you can buy at the market, or drug store for an antiseptic is a maximum 3%. Hal Stanley had a "partially full" gallon bottle of H2O2 that was over 10 times stronger than can be sold in drug stores. Now remember that the adult children of Hal Stanley were worried he had used some process that "piped vapors" from sodium chlorite into rooms where the small children were doing school work. Industrial concentrated hydrogen peroxide, any suitable acid, and the "miracle solution" of sodium chlorite would produce a gas dangerous to anyone. Hal Stanley had all of these readily available.

Ms. Fox cited (by link) a website for "alternative health" that "feature(s) stories on alternative healing methods that are NOT approved by the FDA." They claimed that the poor poor man selling Sodium Chlorite was persecuted because he sold a product that "saved tens of thousands." I wish they would go back to finding Elvis and Bigfoot. Here is a quick item on how this really turned out;

Seller of “Miracle Mineral Solution” Convicted for Marketing Toxic Chemical as a Miracle Cure

May 28, 2015

A federal jury in the Eastern District of Washington returned a guilty verdict yesterday against a Spokane, Washington, man for selling industrial bleach as a miracle cure for numerous diseases and illnesses, including cancer, AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, lyme disease, asthma and the common cold, the Department of Justice announced.

Louis Daniel Smith, 45, was convicted following a seven-day trial of conspiracy, smuggling, selling misbranded drugs and defrauding the United States. Evidence at trial showed that Smith operated a business called “Project GreenLife” (PGL) from 2007 to 2011. PGL sold a product called “Miracle Mineral Supplement,” or MMS, over the Internet. MMS is a mixture of sodium chlorite and water. Sodium chlorite is an industrial chemical used as a pesticide and for hydraulic fracking and wastewater treatment. Sodium chlorite cannot be sold for human consumption and suppliers of the chemical include a warning sheet stating that it can cause potentially fatal side effects if swallowed.

So far Ms. Megan Fox has racked an impressive list of lies.

But, there is more!

4) What is the real story about Vioxx?

Remember a few minutes ago when we looked at what the FDA can, and cannot do? On thing they also cannot do is independently test drugs. It is the responsibility of the drug manufacturer to propose, implement, and report their own drug trials. In the case of the pain medication Vioxx, the drug company Merck lied. They lied, and they lied. And then they lied some more.

If you want the details use the link. I think that for this post, the fact that Megan Fox is a raging liar, and hypocrite is more to the point. She first attacked the FDA as a terrible gang that tried to prevent a highly toxic chemical from being sold to nitwits as a "miracle cure" for AIDS, malaria, and acne. Then Ms. Fox whines that the capitalist pharmaceutical industry was not stopped by the FDA. The Merck corporation bribed so-called independent industry scientists, and lied to the FDA, and published faked studies. When the FDA tried to stop the sale of Vioxx, the industrial lawyers went to work to keep the drug in the market, and to keep their bosses out of jail.

A final end note to the persistent inability of Ms. Fox to grasp simple facts is the asinine lie supposed to support home schooling that, "Meanwhile, 79% of Chicago’s public schooled 8th graders can’t read."

She even gave a link to The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

There are just a few massive problems with Ms. Fox, and her inability to read a simple table.

If you look at the data that Ms. Fox couldn't read, you will see that Chicago 8th grade students in 2011 were the 12th highest in children who were not fluent in English reading for major cities. This is not to say they were not able to read. Reading in German or Spanish is reading. The NAEP tests are in English.

Next, the data show that 36% of Chicago 8th graders were "below Basic" in English reading. That does not mean they "cannot read," or even that they cannot read English. It meant they were below the National expectation for English reading at the 8th grade level. The home of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching was Chicago in the early 1900s. The first language was Polish.

One problem with the insanity of the far right is that under current standards, 25% of American students fail in every category. One problem few people are well informed on was that the The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) arbitrarily changed "proficient" from a 50/50 ratio to a 60% fail 40% pass. This was pulled off by the "standardized test" mafia. I was a member of the prototype committee of the NAEP Science Panel. I resigned in protest. But beyond that, Ms. Fox was still grossly incompetently wrong. This is not even close to the lie that "79% of Chicago’s public schooled 8th graders can’t read." She copied this particular lie from any of several radical right-wing websites. The link is to just one example. Even they could tell the difference between "proficient" and "cannot read." Since the average news paper is written for an 8th grade level, we have every hope that average 13 year old will soon surpass the FOX News audience in their English reading.

Ms. Fox clearly has failed repeatedly.

Gallop numbers on Creationism: 2 more years, and 3 more data points.

I last reviewed the Gallop organization poll on creationism two years ago in "On Reading a Graph."

There is new data from Gallop.


2019 data from Gallop.

The question representing the Young Earth Creationists was, "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

This is a very "soft" question. Phrases like "pretty much" and "the last 10,000 years or so" don't pin down the response, particularly regarding the original human form. It allows the respondent to make arbitrary judgement of what is "human." It also excluded a faith group known as "old earth creationists."

The "old earth creationist" was supposed to be captured in the statement, "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process." But, this misses the majority of "old earth creationists" who believe that the earth and universe were as old as the sciences indicate, but that their god "inserted" modern humans at an appropriate time as per the biblical chronologies. The statement comes closest to the "theistic evolution" position. This might be paraphrased as, "Creation, and Evolution have occurred as discovered by science, but it is God's will that this is so."

The "young earth" data (percent agree "God created ...") 44, 47, 44, 47, 45, 45, 46, 43, 44, 40, 46, 42; mean 44.4, s.d. 2.06. This is a small data set, but we see that the most recent data are a full standard deviation lower than the mean. At the same time, the last time the poll hit the mean was 2008. Since then the data are very volatile running 2 s.d. down, or 1 up. More interestingly, the trend is toward the negative variation showing a probable weakening of support.

Compare this with the "theistic evolution" data; 38,35,39,40,37,38,36,38,36,38,32,31; mean 36.5, s.d. 2.7. Here the scores have rarely ever been low until the last two surveys. As an alternative with small data sets, we drop the extreme high and low scores and get a mean of 36.7, and a s.d. of 2.05. This suggests that the most recent years have seen an actual drop in support for the "theistic evolution" position.


Compare these both with the data for the secular position. First the cue statement, "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process." There is nothing that distinguishes it from the "Theistic Evolution" position other than the phrase, "God had no part in this process."
Percent agree; 9,11,10,9,12,13,13,14,14,16,15,19; mean 12.9 s.d. 2.96. Trimmed, m. 12.7, s.d. 2.2.
There is a nearly perfect "hinge" in the data when they switch from a negative, to a positive trend. This was first securely seen in 2004.

What about the "no opinion" group. They are often ignored in substantive terms. (Percent agree) 9,7,7,4,5,4,5,4,5,6,7,8; mean 5.9, s.d. 1.67. Trimming the extremes gives; mean 5.8, s.d. 1.4. The combined data shows an interestingly strong parochial trend with "no opinion" numbers below the mean between 1999 - 2008. They then move slightly above the long term average in 2010 with that trend increasing.

The Theistic Evolution population has also declined just over a standard deviation. Obviously there is no difference between the secular and theistic evolution position on many of the more contentious aspects of creationism - denial of evolution, denial of geology, denial of chemistry, or physics - when compared with the YEC. If we combine the data, there are ~58% of the American public able to face the fact that life has evolved over the last 4.5 billion years since the origin of the solar system. A narrow majority, but a majority.

The apparent declines in the creationist numbers I suspected 2 years ago seem real, and to have shifted strongly toward the secular, or weakly toward the "no opinion" positions.

I forgot to mention two books that give a historical perspective on creationism in America;

Numbers, Ronald L.
2006 "The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism" Berkeley: University of California Press

Scott, Eugenie C.,
2005 "Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction" University of California Press

Creatocrap from James Nienhuis, Article 1, part 2

Link to Part 1

Nearly all cultures surveyed by ethnographers have a creation myth. They have some common features. They delineate a "time" before the creation of humanity when the universe was populated by magical beings, and then some reason these gods decided to create humans. They give some explanation for death, for another example. When the creation took place is either left open (long long ago, etc.), or ignored altogether. The creation story in Genesis is of the latter type actually making no temporal references at all.

Humans need reliable freshwater. Nearly all humans live where there are rivers. Even in tropical regions, rivers and the bays at the mouths of rivers are preferred living places. We see the same thing in archaeological site locations. Nearly all Mesopotamian agricultural societies relied on irrigation following the major drying trend from about 6,000 years before present, to about 3,000 years B.P. There is an interesting geological correlation here, 6K YBP is about when the sea level raise from the end of the last major glaciations stabilized to current average pool levels. The Neolithic origin of agriculture was about 2,000 years before that. It seems obvious that as declining rainfall, and then declining river flow reduced available water for crops, irrigation was developed as a substitute. The oldest recorded creation myth from Sumeria, the Epic of Atrahasis, rationalized the creation of mankind as workers used by the gods to maintain their irrigation canals.

It is a simple, and obvious fact that even during long term droughts, rivers will flood eventually. To a Neolithic farmer the flood that washed away her crops, house, and perhaps most of her community was one that did destroy her whole world. To people who had no idea how large to world really was, the "whole world" was just a little larger than the distance they had walked. It should be obvious to the most naive observer that all cultures will have a flood story about the "big one" that destroyed the world. And if everyone had died there was nobody to tell the tale, so there will always be a hero protected by the gods.

Mr. Nienhuis spins the notion in the last of his first article that all the creation myths, and all the flood myths originated from the biblical account in Genesis 1-11. This isn't original. I suspect that as agricultural populations expanded these myths of floods, and gods, and paradises expanded. The declining nomads, and hunter and gatherer populations under physical and cultural assault, retreated to marginal habitats while replacing their old origin stories with those of the more powerful invaders. But, the Genesis flood stories were themselves derived from the Sumerian, and Babylonian myths we know today as the Epic of Atrahasis, and of Gilgamesh.

Mr. Nienhuis also ventures into the weirdness with unsupportable claims that Einstein's General Relativity, and "the deterioration rates of cosmological entities" are supports for a thousands of years old creation. He then scattered a slew of falsehoods about the "scientific support" for a global flood, lack of transitional fossils, and the "recent dispersion from the Mesopotamian region" of all humanity. We finally reach the end of his sermonette with his pitch to "READ MY BOOK." Always a classic. After all he presents "extremely compelling information" that "science is severely in error regarding earth and cosmological history."

On Reading a Graph

Long ago, I taught a course on statistics, and math modeling to medical students and faculty (the faculty refused to do their homework). One lecture set was on "how to read a graph." This is apparently still a mystery to many people.

In the Gallop poll data, the number of people who could be broadly called creationists were about 82% in 1982. This includes nearly anyone religious who thought that God either created Adam and Eve less than 10,000 years ago, or that God allowed/directed evolution to do the work. That year, only 9% accepted the fact of human evolution without any divine intervention. This left 9% undecided. The data are remarkably stable until 2000. Then, a trend lasting until today appeared. In 2001, about 3% of the "undecided" became acceptors of evolutionary biology regarding the origin of humanity. Was this a "post millennial" bounce for rationality? The number of creationists did not increase. From 2001 to 2006, the undecided fraction shifted another 1% to the evolution column. More significantly, from 2007 until today, there has been a decline in the percentage of creationists, and an increase in the number of Americans who agree that, "humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process." The number of "undecideds" dropped, but the deficit also went to the creationists, particularly those who believed that, "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." This was clarified in the 2008 data which showed a restoration of the "undecided" percentage, and continued decline in creationists.

In the most recent Gallop poll, 78% of respondents could be said to be creationists, at the extremely broad criteria used earlier, and 7% are undecided. A mere 1% (within polling error) of "evolutionists" has shifted to "undecided." The only striking observation is that the "creationists"- most loosely defined- have not increased! In fact, there is a 4% deficit from the ~82% which had been essentially stable from 1982 until 2007, and additional weakness since 2008. On the other hand, the ~6% increase in pro-science thinking seems stable.

The question then arises, "Should theistic evolutionists be lumped with the young earth creationists?" I'll argue the negative in a new post.