Fact-Checking the "PRT Boondoggle" Blog
A project of the PRT NewsCenter

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

He has a dream

More of a feverish delusion, really. Anti-PRTeabagger Ken Avidor observed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday yesterday by linking a PRT consultant to the suicide of a teenage girl in India:

Source at PRT Moondoggie

The King of Klass is trying to make you think Peter Muller (PRTGURU) was somehow celebrating the rumor and the tragedy. But
Avidor is making that up.

Muller's link, http://bit.ly/4HKfpp, was not to the Telegraph or the BBC, rather to a webpage that quotes an article about LHC originally carried by Business Week.

The article isn't on Business Week anymore, but you can read about it:
Carrying the Republican War on Science to previously unplumbed depths of human stupidity, Kevin "Dow 36000" Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute calls for the USAF to bomb both France and Switzerland, hoping to get the scientists in their tunnels before they can destroy the earth...

Business Week should be deeply, deeply ashamed of itself.

I know that the American Enterprise Institute is not shamed by anything, but even an organization that is not shamed by anything should be ashamed of this.

Let me just say that, IIRC, Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson the "God particle" as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody had ever seen it in the flesh--not because it was in any way powerful or dangerous or numinous or terrifying.

Source

I want you to read Muller's tweet, and decide for yourself: was there anything in the tweet that overtly endorsed the Hassett fearmongering?



Muller could just as easily have meant
'get a load of this idiocy'. The site where the article was copied is the website of a Richard J. Wagner, computer science PhD and Democrat -- maybe Muller meant to agree with Wagner's viewpoint. We don't know what he meant, we don't need to: the point is that Avidor doesn't bother to find out, and just goes ahead and gives it the most horrific of spins.

I would give
Ken Avidor the benefit of the doubt on this, that he's still just an ignoramus who doesn't understand Twitter.

Except that he has falsely smeared and slurred before, linking an innocent man to a multi-fatality train accident. Now he's linking a respected consultant to a suicide; which according to the BBC article happened in September 2008.

And what did Ken Avidor mean by:


"Polish PRT?"

Ken Avidor (@Daily Kos)
read the PRTJJ coverage


And just to emphasize the point: I've decided the following tweet means Ken Avidor was a delegate to the 2008 Republican National Convention:



gPRT

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