Republicans and anti-knowledge- Ben Carson exposed!

"Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam."

Dr. Ben Carson is a compendium of imbecility writes Moyers and Company: ".....overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment- 'educational' complex, makes it now possible for (zealots) to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation, without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact." 
Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

Josh Billings was the pen name of 19th-century American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (April 21, 1818 – October 14, 1885). He was a famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States, perhaps second to Mark Twain, during the latter half of the 19th century. 

Well, Billings may have immortalized his own memory by succinctly describing the unscientific beliefs of many in the American Republican political party- including Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon.  In other words the Grand Old Party has morphed into a group of "grumpy old politicians" who suffer from an anti-science syndrome of unknown orign.  

The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge as posted by journalist Bill Moyers provides more insight:
October 29, 2015 by Mike Lofgrenrt.

This post was first published at Consortium News.

In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemeology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America. (In my opinion, it's an "everybody is an expert!" - syndrome.)

Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance (I believe the author  here is referring to ingorance of completely not knowing,  rather than of stubborn or bull-headedness) is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas (on the other hand) ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish, waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.

Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.

There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.

At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. 

Moreover, a person can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum, but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old.

Today, a person may never have read the US Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause,, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.

It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all themore for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes.

Why the Ignorance?

Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people, after making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field?

“Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board.”

Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor rates roughly comparable to a doctor).

We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals come from?

Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?

Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.

The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans.

An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism

Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. 

From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation.

Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck.

Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. 

This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.

The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.

We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market, the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio.

The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience, however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus nearly had a (ruptured) aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.

State-Sponsored Stupidity

When forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done. 

Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s political agenda.

Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. 

A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War).

This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. 

The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.

It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist, should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as fundamentalists. 

Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz (aka"Cruz to loose"), Mike Huckabee (aka "Huckabee-wannabee") and Rick Santorum (aka "Little Ricky"), who are also notorious for making inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald Trump is sui generis).

In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. 

Nevertheless, Carson will have left his mark, as the others did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem, unmoored to a stubborn and profane thing called facts.

Atlantic reports on the Dr. Ben Carson Mannatech problem

As a neurosurgeon (physician), Dr. Ben Carson has no reason to advocate for any particular nutritional supplements, because most of them, quite frankly, are snake oil.  Dr. Carson knows this. Yet, Carson's relationship with Mannatech is lengthy and well-documented, which makes his denial of support bizarre.

In fact, Dr. Carson supported one particular brand of supplements and now he's being asked to be accountable for his involvement with the company. Rather than take the "Haliburton" approacch, used by Dick Cheney, when he was confronted with his position on that company's board, instead, Dr. Carson denied his involvement. Cheney admitted to his support for Haliburton. Yet, Carson flatly denied any affiliation with Mannatech, all the while, until recently, his picture was featured on the company's website.

Mannetech is a marketing firm that promotes plant generated sugars - ie "snake oil".

Mannatech, Incorporated, is a multinational multi-level marketing firm engaged in research, development, and distribution of "glyconutrients," the company's name for blends of plant-sourced saccharides. In other words, "snake oil". (What are "plant-sourced saccharides"?  These are plainly stated "sugars" derived from plants.  A a nurse, I have virtually no idea about the health benefits of taking sugar derived from plants.  In fact, "sugar" is a plant it's called "sugar cane" and it grows wild in countries. Nevertheless, without seeing a price list, I'm willing to bet Mannatech products are expensive and I doubt they produce curative results of anykind. It's likely they're as efficient as taking sugar pills.)

During Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado, CNBC moderator Carl Quintanilla asked Ben Carson, a leading GOP contender and an accomplished pediatric neurosurgeon, about his relationship with a controversial nutritional-supplement company named Mannatech.

Dr, Ben Carson is a neursurgeon and presidential candidate who should know better than to support nutritional s“There’s a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a ten-year relationship,” Quintanilla asked. “They offered claims that they could cure autism and cancer. 

They paid $7 million to settle a deceptive-marketing lawsuit in Texas and yet your involvement continued. Why?”upplements that are plant sugars aka "snake oil".

An article in The Atlantic is reporting on this unlikely affiliation between Dr. Carson and Mannatech.  

Physicians should know better!

“Well, it’s easy to answer,” Carson quickly replied to Quintantilla. “I didn’t have an involvement with them. (Pinocchio!) That is total propaganda and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.” He then backtracked a little. “I did a couple of speeches for them. I did speeches for other people, they were paid speeches,” he told the crowd before switching back to a full denial. “It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them.” Then he again acknowledged a role. “Do I take the product? Yes, I think it’s a good product.”

Presidential candidates frequently stretch the truth. Some of them have made fantastical claims about President Obama’s birth certificate, for example, or their ability to construct a giant wall on the Mexican border that Mexico will pay for. 

But Carson's outright denial seems egregious even by that standard. His relationship with the company is lengthy and well-documented, which makes his response even more bizarre.

Carson first spoke out in favor of Mannatech products over a decade ago when he claimed that the Texas-based company’s “glyconutritional supplements,” which included larch-tree bark and aloe vera extract, helped him overcome prostate cancer.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Carson’s relationship with the company deepened over time, including “four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings, most recently one in 2013 for which he was paid $42,000, according to the company.” 

The company disputes that Carson was a “paid endorser or spokesperson,” according to the Journal, and claims his financial compensation went to charity.

National Review also highlighted Carson’s connections to Mannatech in January and how Carson’s team went to great lengths to distance themselves from the company. Some of his video appearances have been removed from the Internet, but those that remain appear to show a deeper affiliation than Carson claimed during Wednesday’s debate.

In one video for Mannatech last year that remains online, Carson discusses his experiences with nutritional supplements while seated next to the company’s logo. “The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us, He gave us the right fuel,” Carson explained. “And that fuel was the right kind of healthy food … Basically what the company is doing is trying to find a way to restore natural diet as a medicine or as a mechanism for maintaining health.”

Carson stopped short of making substantive medical claims about Mannatech’s products. “You know, I can’t say that that’s the reason I feel so healthy,” he said. “But I can say it made me feel different and that’s why I continue to use it more than ten years later.” (Obviously Dr. Carson forgot his pharmaceutical studies about the placebo effect.)  

Apparently, seven years before Carson appeared in the promotional video, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who was elected governor of Texas last year, sued Mannatech for running an illegal marketing scheme under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Abbott claimed that the Dallas-based company and its sales representatives repeatedly exaggerated the medical efficacy of their products.

Logically, Dr. Carson is unqualified to be president of the United States. He is a physician, trained in science, who was somehow lured to believe plant sugar was a miracle cure for some cancers. Nevertheless, he then goes on to deny that he had any involvement in supporting the snake oil he admited to taking.

How, in the world of possibilities, can he be qualified to be elected leader of the free world?  To put it simply, anybody who thinks Dr. Carson is qualified to be President of the United States should think about investing in Mannatech. As a matter of fact, I understand the company may be looking for another spokespersonn. 

Republicans 2016 candidates can't formulate a message- except for John Kasich

Applause to the CNBC moderators who obviously rehersed trying to keep the mob of GOP debate candidates on October 27th, accountable for providing answers to questions. (I especially applaud Rebecca Quick.)

Only John Kasich's answers provided a glimpse of hope for America's future. Some said they were looking hopefully to America's future, but they wasted most of their debate time tearing down policies of the past. In other words, no new ideas.

John Kasich R-Ohio

Unfortunately, the candidates came prepared with stump speeches. Therefore, their answers were evasive. When the candidates became particularly stressed, they turned their anger on the media. 

Marco Rubio has no credibility. He wasted his own money while getting paid as a US Senator; but he can't even show up to vote for his Florida constituionets. The Sun Sentinel is even calling for his resignation! Unfortunately, even with this disclosure, Governor Jeb Bush was unable to use the issue to his debate advantage. Sadly, Jeb Bush is like a "no show" in this GOP debate.

Dr. Ben Carson was exposed as a man who didn't know his name and face were being associated with snake oil supplements. Moreover, Dr. Carson can't defend the outrageous rise in big pharmaceutical cost gouging.  Carson needs to go back to school and get a degree in public policy, rather than misrepresent his "political" resume, when he has no political experience.

So, here are my take aways from this GOP chaotic debate:

1.  Republicans, who hate Social Security, now say they're all about saving it? 

2.  Dr. Carson will cut government by 40 percent without any evidence whatsoever about how this will stimulate the nation's economy.

3.  Carley Fiorina lives in a fantasy world. Somehow, she thinks she's qualified to be the leader of the free world and the first female President of the United States; but she can't even explain how or why she was fired as the CEO of Hewlett Packard. She simply can't formulate a response to that very problematic fact.

4.  Governor John Kasich makes good sense! He's the only candidate who can articulate a message that seems to solve problems without creating fear among the electorate! Also, Governor Kasich has proven political leadership experience!

5.  And "taaadaaa" my final take away is this. (There are days when I actually become nostalgic for Governor Romney!). Republicans must remove their support from non-qualified candidates. This current band of wanna-bees are an embarrasment.  Take another look at Governor John Kasich.

Although I applaud Governor Kasich's debate responses for being message driven, focused and, therefore, understandable, he still doesn't have the stature of Secretary Hillary Clinton.  Nevertheless, the contrast between Secretary Clinton and Governor Kasich would provide an issues driven 2016 presdential campaign.