The Curious Mr. Robinson

In the last day or so, there has been much ink spilled in the U.S. media over one Rand Paul. Son of Ron Paul, Rand is now GOP candidate for the state of Kentucky's open Senate seat in the upcoming mid-term elections, having ousted the "establishment" candidate in this week's Republican Primaries. On the very heels of his victory, however, Mr. Paul suddenly found himself on the wrong end of some tough questions about whether private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against blacks.

Hey presto, he went from a rising star within the "tea party" movement, and therefore within the GOP, to a ball & chain in less than 48 hours.

Now, presumably, the MSM will go looking for other unexploded bombs in the GOP's "tea party" insurgency.

Which brings us to Arthur Robinson, winner of the Republican Congressional Nomination in Oregon District 4. Arthur Robinson is a climate change skeptic. In fact, he is one of the people behind The Oregon Petition , a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol and similar efforts to mitigate climate change. I've written about Mr. Robinson, his petition, and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which Mr. Robinson founded back in 1980, here.

As part of his work at the Institute, Mr. Robinson has, since 1993, served as editor of the Access To Energy newsletter. Happily, the institute has archived this publication back to 1973. Lets troll through some of the back issues, and see what we find, shall we?

Given the recent BP spill off Louisiana, I thought it would be interesting to learn Mr. Robinson's views on off-shore drilling. These were not hard to discover:

As for oil spills in the open and deep ocean, they amount to far less than natural seeps and river runoff, and any unbiased oceanographer will confirm that they are a boon to marine life, inflicting damage mainly on the oil and shipping companies. For crude oil is a natural, organic, biodegradable product of the earth's ancient plant and animal life, and it is this type of hydrocarbon that marine life in the open and deep ocean is starved for.

In fact, in the same edition of the newsletter Mr. Robinson argues that the "mostly barren" oceans are just crying out for any kind of human waste, nuclear waste included. He gives this article the jaunty title: OCEAN DUMPING? YES!

There are several pieces in older versions of the newsletter decrying "reprehensible" attacks on Aids=HIV Denialist Peter Duesberg . In fact, Robinson has sponsored a Duesberg lecture through the DDP (Doctors for Disaster Preparedness), a group affiliated with the Oregon Institute. These articles tend to suggest that Mr. Robinson himself thinks aids is caused by homosexuality itself rather than the HIV virus. Here's a brief note of his regarding "The Longevity of Homosexuals Before and After the AIDS Epidemic":

Cameron, et al report research results showing that the median age at death for homosexual men dying of AIDS is 39 years and that for homosexual men who do not die of AIDS is 42. By comparison, the value for heterosexual married men is 75. This is evidence in support of the hypothesis that AIDS may be little more than a general classification of deaths resulting from exposure to homosexual behavior.

And the aids denialism gets a bit more explicit here, in which Robinson discusses the AIDS epidemic's role in government attempts at "social engineering".

In addition to editing Access To Energy, Robinson is an energetic promoter of home-schooling, and has written extensively on the topic here. Some of his ideas are quite unique. For example, he prefers home-schoolers be taught geography , history, and government largely from books which were written in the 1950's and earlier, before it became popular to teach overt racism under the rubric of "multiculturalism."

This is just a sample from Mr. Robinson's extensive writings on the Oregon Institute website and elsewhere. I've barely touched on his AGW skepticism, or the many, many articles he's written on Hormesis (which is the the idea that a little bit of radiation is actually good for you).

Hopefully, though, it is enough to give a taste of the man's philosophy