There has been a bit of a storm brewing in the reality based scientific community, Darwin division, since Ben Stein was named to be the commencement speaker at the University of Vermont. Stein was the front man for a film called Expelled, which was ostensibly about the victimization of Darwin doubting scientists, but which was, in reality, a screed on behalf of the fantasists who insist that we teach religion as science. Along the way he stopped to blame Darwin for the holocaust. I wrote about the movie some time ago.
Several prominent scientists, among them Richard Dawkins, wrote to the president of the University president. Stein is no longer going to speak, for reasons unclear at the moment.
As I’ve noted, here and here, in addition to at the above link, Stein is an irritating know nothing about a lot of subjects. Among other things, he purports to be an expert on economics. Perhaps he is, in the BIll Kristol sense of being so reliably wrong that you can just go with the opposite of whatever he says. So I was somewhat amused when I read this portion of the email from the president of the University of Vermont to Richard Dawkins:
Although we have recently learned that Mr. Stein will be unable to receive the honorary degree here or to serve as Commencement speaker, please know that it was our expectation that his remarks would address the global economic crisis and that he would speak from his widely acknowledged area of expertise on the economy. (Emphasis added)
It would be interesting to know who, besides Stein, has acknowledged his expertise. This is the guy who, back in 2007, told us not to worry. Everything was going to be just fine. He repeated himself in July of 2008. Just recently, in an attempt to show us that he understood our pain, he oozed sympathy for a woman who is paying $12,000 a month on an interest only mortgage on a 2.7 million dollar house. The poor dear is about to see her alimony/child support cut in half to a mere $10,000.00 a month, and she’s about to ditch her sugar daddy who has been paying all her bills. She’s never held a job in her life. Only a Republican, which Stein most definitely is, could proffer such a story as emblematic of the current hard times.
There must have been a time when a person was considered an expert only if they actually knew what they were talking about in a given field. Only in our corrupt and declining age could people such as Kristol and Stein be considered experts. What’s shameful is that the economists of the world did not protest Stein’s speaking engagement as vigorously as the scientists.
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