1434 and all that

Damian Thompson has another well deserved, timely and to the point go at "Gavin Menzies’ drivel" in The Telegraph.

Every bookshop in Britain is presenting a book called 1434 by Gavin Menzies as a major history title. Like the Olympic spectacular, Menzies' book celebrates Chinese history. Its subtitle is: "The year a magnificent Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance." But, like the Beijing firework display, it is not quite what it seems.

In fact, 1434, published by Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins, is not a history book in any meaningful sense of the term. That is because, to put it bluntly, a magnificent Chinese fleet did not sail to Italy in 1434 – or, if it did, not a single eyewitness recorded this amazing event. Did the Venetians have their backs to the water when it slipped past?

Read more about this counterknowledge at... eh... Counterknowledge

A golden myth

The story pops up again and again, especially among economists who want you to invest in gold:

The purchasing power of gold has not diminished since Biblical times. According to the Old Testament, during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, an ounce of gold bought 350 loaves of bread. Today, an ounce of gold still buys 350 loaves.

And of course it is a myth, one of those urban legends that has been debugged to death but still won't lay down.

However, as a Bible scholar, Claude Mariottini is not afraid of the truth:

To say, however, that one ounce of gold in the days of Nebuchadnezzar bought 350 loaves of bread, one must assume several things. First, one must assume that the ounce, a unit of weight in the avoirdupois system, once used in the United Kingdom and still used in the U.S. system of weights, was also used in Babylon. Since the Babylonians did not use imperial units, this statement is false.

Second, we must assume that the value of gold has remained stable in its relative value to the price of bread. If this assumption is correct, then we must also assume that the price of gold and the price of bread has remained relatively the same for the past 2,600 years. It is evident that no one can assume that this is true, therefore, the statement above also cannot be proved.

Read all about it here.

Bloodline bashing

Mania.com has a good review of the latest Da Vinci Code wannabe, the movie Bloodline, written, directed and produced by Bruce Burgess.

Not the least interest has been tied to the DNA test of the alleged Mary Magdalene discovered in a tomb in the Rennes Les Chatteâu area. Discovered by amateur archaeologist Bill Wilkinson, in true Indiana Jones style, by dropping his video camera down a hole in a clumsy moment. No doubt to outwit the local nazis.

How the test went? Not that good.

The central piece of evidence revealed in Bloodline is a mummified corpse found in Wilkinson’s accidentally discovered tomb, wrapped in a white linen mantle emblazoned with the red cross of the Knights Templar. The linen looks remarkably white, well-preserved, and rot-free for having survived a millennium of dampness at the base of a subterranean cave in the French Pyrénnées.

Open boxes of gleaming polished chalices near the body were similarly unaffected by time and oxidation, not unlike the props on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland.

Hairs extracted from the head of the corpse (the extraction was not shown on camera) were sent to the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University (Canada) for analysis. According to Barnett and Burgess, the result of Mitochondrial DNA testing revealed a Middle Eastern origin for the deceased (ergo, this could conceivably be Mary Magdalene, although they seemed to have arrived at that conclusion well in advance).

Well - yes and no. The report from Lakehead was shown on camera and identifies the mtDNA sample as belonging to Haplogroup I, which migrated out of the Near East and into Europe between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago prior to the last Ice Age. It is virtually unknown outside of Europe, but is no stranger to the French Pyrénnées. One major subculture belonging to this haplogroup settled in southern France and Northern Spain 10,000 to 20,000 years ago during the period archaeologists refer to as the "âge du Renne", or Age of the Reindeer.

And, perhaps tellingly, this group is called the "Magdalenian Culture" - the name being derived not from Mary Magdalene, but from an excavation site called La Madeleine in the Dordogne region of southern France where its relics were discovered in the 19th century.

But forget all those bothersome dates and inconvenient details that tend to unnerve alternative historians and spoil a good story - "Renne", "Magdalenian" - close enough, right? Why split hairs?

Indeed, just relax and have a good time. It helps if you leave your brain at the door.

ILN - February 15, 1908: Charlatans and Quacks

A bit late due to a pleasent familiy celebration on Saturday. Still after a hundred years, what are a few days among friends?

Chesterton this Satuday writes on the difference between Charlatans and Quacks. And as always he has serious fun in showing that this is different than commonly presumed.

The truth is there are two kind of charlatans: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you, and the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

In Chesterton's time, the Medical Profession was not quite what is is today. This was before the discovery of antibiotica, and just two generations after Semmelweis had started to tell physicians to wash their hands after attending to each patient, in 1847.

Semmelweis' increasingly rather less than diplomatic letters (a classic case of a scientific genius attacking the establishment, even if he may have been less arrogant and had more proof than Galilei) on the matter to prominent European obstetricians was not received with gratitude, and even his wife believed he was losing his mind. Semmelweis was committed to a mental institution in 1865 and possible beaten to death by guards some weeks later.

People are still washing their hands over any responsibility.

In 1908, stories of bad doctors not curing people, while various "wise women" sometimes did, were more than faint memories.

The really equitable doctrine of what we owe to doctors and what to old women in villages has yet to be stated.
The arguments used by professional men of science that what they call quack remedies are superstitions is really an argument in a circle. It amounts to this, that the herbs used by an old women is untrustworthy because se is superstitious; and she is superstitious because she believes in such herbs. Her method is bad because she is stupid; but the main proof of her stupidity is that she pursues her own method. To put it shortly, the doctor does not believe in the old woman upon the ultimate ground that she does not believe in the doctor.

Chesterton uses this debate to show how much it really is about arguing in a circle.

The people of the East believe in miracles because they are ignorant. How do you know they are ignorant? Because they believe in miracles. Thomas Aquinas believed in Catholicism because he lived in a darkened age. Why was it a darkened age? It was darkened by Catholicism.

And as always it ends with Jones and logic.

Jones tells me that he saw the ghost of his uncle last Tuesday. But, of course, you wouldn't believe a liar like that - a man brazen enough to say that he saw a ghost last Tuesday. In short, the elephant stands on the tortoise and the tortoise stands - on the elephant. By such mental processes it is possible to escape from the narrow methods of deductive logic.

Chesterton's point here is not to say that trained and licenced medical practioners per definition are quacks. He is not slamming science. He is callling attention to something different. It is about the arrogance of professionals when confronted with amateurs. It is about the condescending views of many an academic when meeting the common man.

Today, Medicine is lightyears beyond 1908, not to mention 1865. Even if it now is rather vindicated, the pretense of the profession seems not that different to innocent bystanders. The wise women may not be so wise these days (at least the ones I have met at New Age gatherings are not). Still, it is good advice for skeptics like me, not to mention public figures like Damian Thompson or Michael Shermer, to step down from any arrogant platform.

Jones is still more interested in practice than in pretense.

Next week: Socialism and First Principles

Debunking

Thanks to Bede who made me aware of an interesting blog concerned with myths, particularly political ones it seems.

And as the latest article praises Damian Thompson's latest book, Counterknowledge, and Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, it is easy to recommend the site.

It is no downside that Kamm enjoys Chesterton.

Counterknowledge

Damian Thompson, my fav and not a little candid catholic exposer of Conspiracy Theories and Counterknowledge in general, is out with a new book.

In Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, Damian takes on many of the latest, and a some of the older, claims on what's really going on behind the curtains, who's really in control, what really happened and all that and some more.

He has a big disadvantage, though. The website 9/11, The Bigger Picture and the Quest for Truth now reveals that Damian shares surname with the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson.


Say no more. Or read about it here.

If you check the comments you will also discover the amazing story of Oliver Panic. Even if historians in a millennium or two will presume that the name is pure invention .