…What the president was referring to was a 2013 paper by the University of Queensland’s John Cook. In his research, Cook studied 11,994 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mentioned the search words “global warming” and “global climate change.”
Guess what Cook found? Only 32.6% of the papers endorsed the view of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But of that group, 97% said that “recent warming is mostly man-made.”
And so, by a nice sleight-of-hand obfuscation, the great “97% consensus” was born.
Don’t believe me? Check out the actual paper, or the abstract, or the original article. In fact, let’s just say thank goodness that the originals are still posted online. Typically, when someone pulls off a con of such massive, world-wide proportions, they subsequently burn the evidence to cover their tracks.
Still don’t believe me? Here’s the actual, posted statement:
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
Bottom line: In the actual study in question, only one-third of the 11,994 academic papers studied could be construed as arguing for man-made warming. Possibly the other two-thirds were more focused on the unprecedented increase in solar activity seen over the past century.
More below, including Bernie Sanders:
Top MIT Climate Scientist HATES the “consensus ‘lie,'” via The Daily Caller:
Dr. Richard Lindzen is sick and tired of the media repeating the so-called “97 percent consensus” statistic to show just how strong the global warming agreement is among climate scientists. It’s purely “propaganda,” argues Lindzen….
…Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.
Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.
“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author….
The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.
“Political correctness” symbolizes speech codes and censorship. It is largely a myth propagated by the conservative right. The belief in a monolithic and fascist politically correct culture that preys on conservatives and conservative ideology is often accompanied by delusions of persecution, as well as paranoia.
A suggestion in the comments is that New Yorkers can avoid any of these fines by addressing each other as “comrade.” Works for me…
Another story I wanted to highlight from Gay Patriot is this one… and it is GP merely stating a story… and repeating the fascistic point. And mind you… Dennis Prager is right when he quotes David Horowitz:
Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out
Here is Patriot’s excerpt plus a little more via The Federalist:
…When they started Brush and Nib, Joanna and Breanna didn’t leave their artistic and religious beliefs behind. Those beliefs provide their business its very purpose—to use their artistic talents full-time to proclaim their vision of what is good and beautiful.
But shortly after starting their business, Joanna and Breanna discovered that Phoenix law requires them to create art endorsing same-sex wedding ceremonies because they create art for opposite-sex wedding ceremonies. The same law prohibits Joanna and Breanna from publishing statements explaining the artistic and religious beliefs that require them to only create art consistent with their religious belief supporting one-man/one-woman marriage.
If they dare disobey, Phoenix can incarcerate them for six months and fine them up to $2,500 for each day of disobedience. Instead of risking that, Joanna and Breanna chose the only rational option left: ask a court to invalidate the law for violating the Arizona Constitution.
Among other things, Joanna and Breanna object to Phoenix’s law for requiring them to promote same-sex marriage and for prohibiting them from explaining their religious beliefs about marriage. While they happily create and sell their art to everyone—regardless of sexual orientation or any other protected characteristic—they cannot create art for events that violate their beliefs.
If they dare disobey, Phoenix can incarcerate them for six months and fine them up to $2,500 for each day of disobedience.
Remember, these are fascistic leftists that hate freedom… not all leftist or gays subscribe to this pattern. Better know who these freedom loving gays are and support them.
I am updating this post by adding to it by way of older posts AS WELL AS this new example of Google’s morbid honoring of an Islamo-Fascist/Marxist leaning radical, Yuri Kochiyama:
Many of you may not know who this is. Trust me, until I started writing on the Five-Percenters, I didn’t know either. Truth Revolt catches up the uninitiated to the violent culture of the left:
I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire,” said activist Yuri Kochiyama in 2003.
Kochiyama has just been given the honor of having her 95th birthday celebrated with a colorful Google Doodle that attempts to paint her as a great advocate for equality on par with Martin Luther King Jr.
If the above quote alone wasn’t enough to disqualify her from the list of many other Americans who deserve a Google Doodle in their honor, Kochiyama also “admired Mao; supported the black separatist movement; demanded the release of four Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire in the House of Representatives in a terror attack; worked on behalf of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur,” according to Jim Lakely ofHeartland.
Lakely did not have to look very far (nor did TruthRevolt) to discover all this troubling information on Kochiyama, because a mere click on the Google Doodle itself leads to the Wikipedia page that lays it out alongside her work as a “human rights” activists, the same place where her opinions of Osama bin Laden after 9/11 were labeled merely “controversial.”
At a time when Facebook is being exposed for its suppression of conservative users and ideas on the social media platform, it’s great to see that there’s no leftist bias at Google as well.
Kochiyama also converted to Islam later in life….
You know who else admires Mao? Rachel Maddow… but that is neither here-nor-there, as, those that watch her on MSNBC do not grasp reality anyway. I make this point of “reality in a conversation with a commentator on one of my recent uploads to my YouTube Channel about the Left. Here is the opening comment followed by my response:
Tim said: I have been following the debate and, as a European, I have to say it sends shivers down my spine. If the state can decide what ever it wants, it will…
I respond: …And, if people believe the “States” new definitions/reality (like government can control weather or legislation does away with nature’s “male/female” distinctions), they are [or can be] convinced of anything… violence being the lesser of the reality we experience. “Lesser” in that natural law (whether you think the gender distinction is God given or millions of years of the struggle of species through evolution) is more a law that CANNOT be changed… but is. People who are convinced that they can change THIS are easily convinced [in my opinion] of violent ends to their conviction. This is natural to man’s nature… and so these people scare me. And we have seen this happen in the past — either people convinced to do violence or people convinced to ignore it for the greater purpose.
Sorry for the rant, you got me thinking.
Tim finishes: Never apologize for thinking! Ever :) I live in Belgium which is a social democraty with a mighty state, cruddy economy and backwards infrastructure. Needless to inform you about the terrible state my country is in… I Always considered the USA as a beacon of light, good idea, success and individualism. I share your opinion….
These people and support for radicalism in all walks of life scare me. Not in my soul… I am saved and a child of God, but scares me for the future of our country which has been a blessing for soo many. Here are PolitiChicks input on this Yuri Kochiyama flap:
My default search engine is Google and I use it quite often. I am aware of the Google higher ups and their political leanings and I disagree with them but I’m not usually a boycott person. Honestly, if I boycott everything I disagree with then I will live in a closet with nothing to eat or look at for the rest of my life.
Recently, however, the Google Doodle kept flashing at me every time I opened the browser. Eventually I clicked on the dumb thing, though I rarely do…
[….]
…Clicking on the image I see this at the very top of the page:
“Yuri Kochiyama (河内山 百合 Kōchiyama Yuri, May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014) was a Japanese American human rights activist. She is notable as one of the few prominent non-black black separatists. Influenced by Marxism, Maoism, and the thoughts of Malcolm X, she was an advocate for many revolutionary movements.”
“Influenced by Marxism, Maoism and the thoughts of Malcom X…” Interesting that Google would choose to put a Doodle up celebrating someone who admired murderers and thugs.
I don’t care if she was advocating for “equality,” the fact is, if you are influenced by communist dictators your idea of “equality” is obviously not the kind of equality Webster’s Dictionary defines….
…[Google’s] short summary substantially whitewashes Kochiyama’s career, though. Besides campaigning for reparations to interned Japanese-Americans (which were granted in 1988), Kochiyama’s career included frequent support for Communist revolution, black separatism, and anti-American terrorism.
A convert to Islam, after 9/11 Kochiyama was deeply critical of the U.S. war on terrorism and offered strong praise for Osama bin Laden. In a 2003 interview, she described bin Laden as a leader she admired, alongside Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara.
“I thank Islam for bin Laden,” she said. “America’s greed, aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped.” She argued that America’s goal in the war on terrorism was “taking over the world.”
Bin Laden wasn’t the only violent terrorist Kochiyama had sympathy for. She also declared she “completely support[ed]” the Shining Path in Peru, a violent Maoist insurgency implicated in numerous terrorist actions and atrocities. She participated in an occupation of the Statue of Liberty in 1977 that called for the release of four Puerto Rican terrorists who shot up the House of Representatives in the 1950s. She also solicited support for figures like Yu Kikumura, a member of the Japanese Red Army who was convicted in 1988 of planning to bomb a U.S. Navy recruitment office, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1981.
Besides her sympathy for armed revolutionaries and terrorists, Kochiyama also advocated black separatism, an ideology that seeks the creation of a separate black homeland in the United States. Towards that end, she was one of the few non-black individuals to join the Republic of New Afrika, a seditious group that claimed dominion over five states in the American South.
WOW!
Needless to say I stopped using Google for most of my searches years ago. I support Bing with as much bandwidth as I can. Here are some previous posts I have on the issue… “enjoy”
E A S T E R
First I want to note the “Easter Example” of choices between Bing and Google. Google first followed by Bing:
Here is the posted “doodle” [art] on Easter by Google:
Now, here is Bing’s Easter display:
This erupted into a an issue on the WWW… here are a few examples:
…The timing is oddly appropriate; as Dennis Prager has written, “You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion,” and one with its own sources of mythology. Back in 2006 at Tech Central Station, Lee Harris described French Marxist Georges Sorel (1847-1922), and the concept of the Sorelian Myth:
Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism — if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual’s lives. Thus for Sorel there was “an…analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.”
…Google frequently honors important figures or dates with its popular “doodles,” but the decision to honor Chavez while many around the world were marking Easter sparked an intense reaction from some on social media. The search engine Bing decorated its homepage with Easter eggs.
Still, a search of Google’s past doodles shows they have honored Easter just once in the United States — in 2000 — and tend not to recognize specific religious holidays. While they regularly post special logos for Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Earth Day and other dates, certain doodles tend to be more esoteric….
Dennis Prager explains this odd choice, via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit: “You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion.”….
…Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was an informal adviser to both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns, a member of the Obama White House transition team in 2009 and a onetime prospect for an Obama Cabinet post during the president’s second term.
As The Daily Caller has reported, Schmidt is also a steadfast climate-change activist, and has advocated for the complete termination of the oil, natural gas, and coal industries, and predicted that Washington, D.C. will soon be completely underwater due to climate change. (RELATED: Schmidt’s influence in the Obama White House)…
Fox News
Wow. At any rate, Caesar Chavez does not fit the mold of the modern Left. see my post “Comedian Paul Rodriguez Strays from CNN’s Script,” for some examples of just how “xenophobic” he was.
C H R I S T M A S
I lost my Christmas graphics and post for this one… so I will merely show the graphics from a couple of years via Google, followed by an example of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day by Bing:
I wonder who these angels pictured below would be heralding?
Are you getting the picture? It is worth a thousand words.
E C O – D E A T H Memorial Day ~ Google vs. Bing
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Yesterday Google barely acknowledged Memorial Day, with a tiny little flag that contrasted sharply against the sea of flags on display on Bing’s homepage. But today is a holiday the Google people can get behind. It’s Rachel Carson’s birthday:
Rachel Carson was an environmental extremist best known for the book Silent Spring, a work of alarmist propaganda that led to the banning of the most beneficial substance ever created in terms of saving human lives, DDT, which was instrumental in largely ridding Western countries of malaria.
Malaria continues to be a very serious problem in Third World countries, which Western moonbats of the sort who consider Rachel Carson to be an admirable character have leaned on heavily to stop using DDT. The result has been by some estimates as many as 50 million unnecessary deaths.
Among Carson’s fellow progressive luminaries, only communist dictators Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin can top her body count…
The above (audio) and below are Dennis Prager explaining more about DDT and other issues:
Go on to Google today and you’ll see a charming illustration celebrating the life and work of environmentalist Rachel Carson. There’s a turtle and a pelican and a crab and a delightful seal in an idyllic landscape of flowers and trees and water. But what are missing from the picture, for some bizarre reason, are the dead bodies of the millions of people who died of malaria thanks to Carson’s principled campaigning against the insecticide DDT.
Will Google be paying similar tribute to any of the other mass killers of the 20th century? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? Probably not. But then, none of the others have had the benefit of having their images burnished by a thousand and one starry eyed greenies. Nor, unlike Carson – as I note in The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism – do they have named after them a school, a bridge, a hiking trail, three environmental prizes and an annual “sustainable” feast day (at her birthplace in Springdale, Pennsylvania)…
…How many people died as a result of Carson’s scaremongering? We cannot be sure. But in 1965 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that over the two previous decades DDT had “prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.”
…These are the people who coerced nations worldwide into banning DDT. It is generally estimated this ban has led to the deaths of about 50 million human beings, overwhelmingly African children, from malaria. DDT kills the mosquito that spreads malaria to human beings.
US News and World Report writer Carrie Lukas reported in 2010, “Fortunately, in September 2006, the World Health Organization announced a change in policy: It now recommends DDT for indoor use to fight malaria. The organization’s Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah explained, ‘The scientific and programmatic evidence clearly supports this reassessment. Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is useful to quickly reduce the number of infections caused by malaria-carrying mosquitoes. IRS has proven to be just as cost effective as other malaria prevention measures and DDT presents no health risk when used properly.'”
Though Lukas blames environmentalists for tens of millions of deaths, she nevertheless describes environmentalists as “undoubtedly well-intentioned.”
I offer two assessments of this judgment.
First, in life it is almost always irrelevant whether or not an individual or a movement is well intentioned. It is difficult to name a movement that has committed great evil whose members woke up each day asking, “What evil can I commit today?” Nearly all of them think they’re well intentioned. Good intentions don’t mean a thing.
Second, while environmentalists believe they have good intentions, I do not believe their intentions are good.
Concern for the natural environment is certainly laudable and every normal person shares it. But the organized environmentalist movement — Lomborg specifically cites Greenpeace, Naomi Klein and the New York Times — is led by fanatics. The movement’s value system is morally askew. It places a pristine natural world above the well-being of human beings.
The environmentalist movement’s responsibility for the deaths of tens of millions of poor children in the Third World is the most egregious example….
Mark Levin speaks with Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network about Donald Trumps “telegraphing” of his Supreme Court [possible] judicial nominees.
I am somewhat ambivalent to his dedication to and for such picks… but in speaking to the Heritage Foundation as well as the Federalist Society he is showing some commitment to get conservative to vote for him.
The idea that Behe’s flagellum motor has been answered is wishful thinking at best, and corrupt science at it’s worst (scientism: which is an insertion of a metaphysical principle stating things like “the only quantifiable reality known is the one made up of atoms, and, science [thus defined] is the best means to understanding said reality”). Really, then, it is an “evolution-of-the-gaps” type thinking.
✿ Ken Miller’s challenge can be read here; ✿ Responses to it and derivatives to it can be found here.
But as one can see… these giants of I.D. did truly wipe the floor with their critics [full exchange].
“Biology today is at a crossroads. The molecular paradigm, which so successfully guided the discipline throughout most of the 20th century, is no longer a reliable guide. Its vision of biology now realized, the molecular paradigm has run its course.”….
The cells we know are not just loosely coupled arrangements of quasi-independent modules. They are highly, intricately, and precisely integrated networks of entities and interactions. … To think that a new cell design can be created more or less haphazardly from chunks of other modern cell designs is just another fallacy born of a mechanistic, reductionist view of the organism.
The neo-Darwinian view of biology is being undermined by the emerging evidence in quantum mechanics (QM). Now, I do not accept the QM as many atheists do… however, the deterministic view of QM is giving theism a boost in an area atheists once thought they had a new foothold. One of my favorite critics of Darwin notes as much in his referencing a 2004 article and commenting on it:
As Carl Woese explained in 2004:
The cells we know are not just loosely coupled arrangements of quasi-independent modules. They are highly, intricately, and precisely integrated networks of entities and interactions. … To think that a new cell design can be created more or less haphazardly from chunks of other modern cell designs is just another fallacy born of a mechanistic, reductionist view of the organism.
In a previous uploaded audio and commentary of the many QM models to choose from and the one’s theist see as beneficial to scientific discovery delineates the chasm between fruitful views of science and unhealthy views in scientific modeling and their subsequent impact on scientific apologetics. The first paragraph below notes the philosophical naturalist default (so-to-speak), followed by two points related to this discussion:
…These oddities prompt some observers to conclude that QM overturns natural law and rationality, leaving us with an incomprehensible, uncreated universe. Standard physics says matter can be neither created nor destroyed by natural means, but some scientists (falsely) claim that quantum particles naturally pop in and out of existence. From this, leading atheists claim the whole universe “sprang” into existence naturally. No Creator necessary. Furthermore, they say that even if God exists and created the universe, QM shows He made a world He cannot control. Once He uncorked this world, not even God knows what will come of it. Theologians who favor science fads over Scripture conclude the same thing: QM implies God cannot govern creation or know the future….
[….]
I suggest the following starting points for the Christian response: First, for all the wild attributes that may hold true in QM, we note that macroscopic reality behaves in a predictable, law-like fashion and everywhere presents us with evidence of its fundamentally rational construction and operation. So even if quantum particles could do lawless things like pop in and out of existence naturally, no such thing happens in the realm of everyday objects. Quantum oddities, whatever you make of them, are detained at the door to the larger realities we experience.
Second, many of the astounding behaviors attributed to QM occur only in highly artificial laboratory settings. There is no certainty that these things can actually happen in real-world settings. Thus, we are justified in casting an indifferent eye on many of the zany headlines coming from physics laboratories….
The very non-deterministic models are the ones liked by atheists and they support the idea of randomness. The other “orderly” — if you will — models show an order on the quantum level that is “supra-ordered,” and thus, the theistic view of QM is emboldened by the evidence.
In other words… order and function in the DNA is guided also by laws being discovered on the quantum level… that without these strict mechanical rules life would be impossible… something “randomness” cannot account for. In other words there seems to be more going on here that the simplified “DAN to RNA to Protein” quip. And this increasing complexity equals hard-times for atheism.
While Philip Cunningham may be hard to listen to at times… I love his slow, methodical contributions to this field of learning/debate:
Again, to note the idea here:
The other model that show rules and order on the quantum level is being supported by these discoveries, and thus, the theistic view of QM is emboldened by the evidence. In other words… order and function in the DNA is guided also by laws being discovered on the quantum level… that without these strict mechanical rules life would be impossible… something “randomness” cannot account for.
Here is the posted text under Phillip’s video on his Facebook:
First, a little background on protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that become biologically active only when they fold into specific, highly complex shapes. The puzzle is how proteins do this so quickly when they have so many possible configurations to choose from.
To put this in perspective, a relatively small protein of only 100 amino acids can take some 10^100 different configurations. If it tried these shapes at the rate of 100 billion a second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to find the correct one. Just how these molecules do the job in nanoseconds, nobody knows.
[….]
Today, Luo and Lo say these curves can be easily explained if the process of folding is a quantum affair. By conventional thinking, a chain of amino acids can only change from one shape to another by mechanically passing though various shapes in between.
But Luo and Lo say that if this process were a quantum one, the shape could change by quantum transition, meaning that the protein could ‘jump’ from one shape to another without necessarily forming the shapes in between.
[….]
Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins. That’s a significant breakthrough. Luo and Lo’s equations amount to the first universal laws of protein folding. That’s the equivalent in biology to something like the thermodynamic laws in physics…
Bottom line! What has been a buttressed hideout/club of evolutionary thought — biology in general — is now in it’s early throes of bowing it’s knee to intelligent design, i.e., it’s Creator!
This television tirade would be of no matter had it stayed in the dystopic universe that is Hollywood, but alas, the [I]nternet has pushed the statement across borders and time. The temptation to go line by line and deconstruct this outburst will be resisted, and would do little but add credence to the inanity. It is, naturally, what is not said that is more important, more enlightening, and more reasonable. (U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT)
A thorough slap down and rebuttal to Jeff Daniels’ viral anti-America Newsroom scene, in which he claims that America is not the greatest country in the world. Here are a few examples of the “bait-n-switch” associated with the Newsroom rant:
TWO QUICK EXAMPLES
“Seventh in literacy”
The CIA’s World Factbook has literacy estimates for the nations of the world. Wikipedia presents those statistics in a form that allows for easy interpretation. The literacy estimates actually put the U.S. back in the pack numerically, but taking ties into account allows for putting the U.S. at No. 7. The nations in the top 40 are all pretty close, well above 95 percent literate. Andorra, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg all report 100 percent literacy.
In other words, we are statistically tied for the front spot. Here is another great example:
“Twenty-second in science”
McAvoy’s speech offers few clues about what measure backed this claim. Scimago Lab ranks the U.S. a clear No. 1 in peer-reviewed science publishing. A study released in 2010 dealing with 15-year-old students from 65 nations placed the U.S. at No. 22 in scholastic science achievement.
We are, as a country, leading the way in science for the world. Now, I agree that public schools are part of the problem, as the stat used for the Newsroom rant suggests. And just as a note, many “independent” schools that are in the top percentile are not “religious” strictly, but are the fruition of religious people in the community following a classical educational (Trivium) philosophy from the Middle-Ages via the Catholic Church. So, for instance, Trinity Classical Academy in our valley is following a Trivium model founded by religious people… but the school would not be considered “religious” like a Baptist school.
But when these independent or even “Baptist” students take their SATs, they do well above the public school child, often times with less money spent per pupil. In fact, a direct correlation can be made since the founding of the Dept of Education… and it is as more money is spent on education in the public arena, the worse the outcome. Again, to be clear, money is not the issue. Another myth is that we spend more on the military than education… also not true. It is philosophy.
STARTING POINTS
The right approach
Statistically judging the greatest nation ought to involve looking for a nation that ranks consistently high in favorable categories and consistently low in unfavorable categories, with each category weighted as to relative importance. Important categories might include the size of the economy, worker productivity, quality of the education system, contributions to scientific research, charitable contributions, economic freedom and median income.
The U.S. ranks highly in each of those categories, even ones mentioned by McAvoy. And the U.S. ranks No. 1 in another category that speaks to the U.S. standing among the nations: net migration. More people come to the U.S. than to any other country.
We won’t seek to make the case that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world. But McAvoy said, among other things, that no evidence supports the claim that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world. To the contrary, the U.S. consistently ranks high in desirable national statistics and consistently low in undesirable ones. One can easily make a reasonable case for ranking the United States No. 1.
Here are a couple of “Deconstructions” via In the Margins: [Checking links…. this site is gone, so here below is all that exists on their post on this]:
Assertion #2: “We lead the world in only three categories. Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults to believe angels are real, and defense spending.”
False. The U.S. leads the world in a number of categories. Here are a few:
GDP. The U.S. has the largest economy in the world.
Military capability. As McAvoy points out, the U.S. spends a lot of money on its military. What he fails to mention is that those dollars haven’t been completed wasted, and that the country does possess considerable military might. One can easily argue that this isn’t a measure of a nation’s greatness (it’s obviously not on Zack’s list of criteria) but this isn’t what McAvoy is claiming. He’s asserting that the U.S. is only number one in those categories he lists. Now, if Sorkin wanted us to look upon McAvoy as a moron, it would be fine for the character to make a claim that’s so obviously false, but this doesn’t seem to be the intent.
Nobel laureates. The U.S. has the greatest number of Nobel laureates by far (350). Only a few countries mage to break the 100 mark.
Number of patents. At nearly 160,000, the U.S. leads the pack. It has almost as many patents as the #2 and #3 countries (Japan and Germany) put together.
Number of immigrants. At 46 million, the U.S. has almost four times as many foreign-born citizens as the next country on the list (Russia).
Number of Olympic medals. The U.S. has twice as many (about 2700) as the runner-up (Russia).
Foreign aid donations. The U.S. gives $24 billion, almost twice as much as the runner-up (the UK).
Assertion #4: We No Longer Explore the Universe
This part of McAvoy’s rant is perhaps the most nonsensical. The character seems to hearkening to the day when millions of Americans spent the evening glued to their TV sets, watching U.S. astronauts set foot on terrain never before traversed by humankind. While it’s true that those days are gone—for the time being, anyway—the country continues to explore the universe as aggressively as ever. A few examples:
Mars. Of the nine successful Mars missions this century, seven were launched by the U.S. Several are ongoing.
The Solar System. The NEAR spacecraft explored the asteroid Eros. The Cassini-Huygens mission has performed over one hundred flybys of Saturn and Titan, returning specular photos and massive amounts of data.
The Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor, will be able to observe the formation of the first galaxies.
The fact that the general public knows little of these accomplishments makes them no less remarkable, and the notion of McAvoy being ignorant of them—given the manner in which the character is otherwise portrayed—simply makes no sense.
I partly agree with this one in the sense that our current administration has changed the philosophy of NASA:
…One of the more notorious of the administration’s outreach attempts was the failed NASA-Muslim outreach initiative. In July of 2010, NASA chief Charles Bolden said in an interview with Al-Jazeera,
“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
Former NASA chief Michael Griffin, who headed the space agency during George W. Bush’s second term, called the Muslim outreach initiative a “perversion” of the mission of NASA:
“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”…
(TRUTH REVOLT — Tapson, Mark (March 7, 2018). Announcement: TruthRevolt Closing Shop. Truth Revolt. Retrieved April 15, 2018. WESTERN JOURNAL has the story)
And really this circles back around to public education as well. Since the teachers unions and the Dept. of Education are increasingly worried about aspects of education that have more to do with art and social engineering rather than reading, writing, math, science, of course they will fall from scholastic grace.
STATS IN MOVIE SICKO
This is nothing new mind you… this “bait-n-switch.” For instance in Michael Moore’s Sicko he talked up Cuba’s infant mortality rate as better than most countries in the world and attributed that [laughably] to their great health care. But here we notice some number fudging:
…Although Cuba claims to have low infant mortality rates, doctors have said the data is misleading because when there might be indications of problems with the fetus, there is a widespread practice of forced abortions.
Julio Alfonso said, “We personally used to do 70 to 80 abortions a day.” Yanet Sanchez, a Cuban exile, said she was simply told to submit to an abortion. “They told me I should end the pregnancy,” said Sanchez. “It was my very first pregnancy. I wanted to have the child.”
Other doctors have said that if a child dies a few hours after birth, they don’t count it as ever having lived, which ultimately makes infant mortality in Cuba look better than that of the United States…
This small statement by RESTORING LIBERTY on the poverty example from the Newsroom rant is another example of how the “War-on-Poverty” is a sort of “War-on-the-Poor,” like the minimum wage is:
…“War on Poor People,” that’s what we have? If so, blame the class warfare and welfare state created by those that Sorkin supports and adores as heroes on the left. You want to start a “War on Poverty,” then deregulate, and reduce the tax burden on those doing the work and those starting the businesses that employ people. Make a competitive environment for business, instead of casting them as the enemy, and you will have jobs and prosperity, and sense of self worth instilled in your citizenry.
You don’t “fight” poverty anyway, you increase prosperity…
Yep, that is a distinction leftist Democrats do not get:
(Above video) Larry Elder gets the Lo-Down of where we stand after we spent 22-trilion on fighting poverty from Robert Rector, a leading authority on poverty, welfare programs and immigration in America for three decades, is The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow in domestic policy. See HIS ARTICLE ON THIS.
WAGE GAPS
I will end with another example of how gender equality at the World Economic Forum is misused to make a political point rather than a factual point:
The “Global Index of Peace” works in similar fashion to the Global Gender Gap Study sponsored by the World Economic Forum. Professor, scholar, and feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers explains where such endeavors go wrong:
We can see that the idea that women are paid less than men (.76-cents for every man’s dollar) is a FALSE STAT MISUSED by the like of Hollywood AND Democrats.
I want to preface this excerpt from Moonbattery with a quote from Tammy Bruce:
….What a difference treatment makes! As researchers succeeded in developing ever more effective drugs, AIDS became—like gonorrhea, syphilis, and hepatitis B before it—what many if consider to be a simple “chronic disease.” And many of the gay men who had heeded the initial warning went right back to having promiscuous unprotected sex here is now even a movement—the “bareback” movement—that encourages sex without condoms. The infamous bathhouses are opening up again; drug use, sex parties, and hundreds of sex partners a year are all once again a feature of the “gay lifestyle.” In fact, “sexual liberation” has simply become a code phrase for the abandonment of personal responsibility, respect, and integrity.
In his column for Salon.com, David Horowitz discussed gay radicals like the writer Edmund White. During the 1960s and beyond, White addressed audiences in the New York gay community on the subject of sexual liberation. He told one such audience that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” And did they ever. Then, getting gonorrhea was the so-called courageous act. Today, the stakes are much higher. That red badge is now one of AIDS suffering and death, and not just for gay men themselves. In their effort to transform society, the perpetrators are taking women and children and straight men with them.
Even Camille Paglia, a woman whom I do not often praise, astutely commented some years ago, “Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from heaven—absurd. We must face what we did.”
The moral vacuum did rear its ugly head during the 1960s with the blurring of the lines of right and wrong (remember “situational ethics”?), the sexual revolution, and the consequent emergence of the feminist and gay civil-rights movements. It’s not the original ideas of these movements, mind you, that caused and have perpetuated the problems we’re discussing. It was and remains the few in power who project their destructive sense of themselves onto the innocent landscape, all the while influencing and conditioning others. Today, not only is the blight not being faced, but in our Looking-Glass world, AIDS is romanticized and sought after….
Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values (Roseville: Prima, 2003), 96-97.
It’s the ultimate in extreme sex – parties where one person secretly has HIV, and everyone has unprotected sex without knowing who it is.
Doctors in Barcelona have claimed that ‘sex roulette’ parties taking place, usually among gay men – and it echoes previous reports of such parties among wealthy people in Serbia.
The ‘thrill’ comes from knowing you might be infected, people who claim to have attended such parties say.
Once you manage to acquire the virus that causes AIDS, you can move on to the thrill of deliberately spreading it to others.
(What Gov. Johnson proposes requires a VERY large and intrusive bureaucracy/government)
A friend (True Free Thinker) reminded me of the following story in the comment section of my question for Gov. Gary Johnson. Here is the story:
In light of recent court decisions regarding bakeries and photographers, this story is beginning to make the rounds once again: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez was dropped from her gay hairdresser’s client list in 2012 due to her stance against same-sex marriage.
Darden told a local news station that he cut the governor’s hair three times, but won’t do it again as long as she continues to oppose gay marriage.
“The governor’s aides called not too long ago, wanting another appointment to come in,” he told KOB-TV. “Because of her stances and her views on this, I told her aides no. They called the next day, asking if I’d changed my mind about taking the governor in and I said no.”
Martinez isn’t the only person to be subjected to a refusal of services due to her beliefs about marriage. Alan Sears, the CEO and lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group against gay marriage, was turned down by a photographer who refused to shoot a Christmas card for his family due to his anti-gay marriage stance.
Six months ago, a Southern California photographer turned him down flat when he asked her to take a Christmas card photo of his family, explaining in an email, “I oppose the goals and objectives of your organization and have no interest in working on its behalf.”
That was fine with Mr. Sears, CEO and general counsel of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, who is leading the legal battle on behalf of photographers, florists, cake decorators and others sued for refusing to create products for same-sex weddings.
Like Sears, I am fine with these decisions by private businesses….
Some years ago in Johnson’s very own New Mexico a homosexual cosmetologist refused to cut the hair of Governor Susana Martinez due to her views on same sex “marriage.” Do you recall the nation-wide outcry, wall to wall 24-hour national news coverage and boycotts? No? Right, because she did something radical: she simply went elsewhere.
Well, this hairstylist MUST BE forced to cut hair of those they disagree with.
Gay Patriot points out the obvious for the end result of such policies by Gov. Johnson. If a musical star cancels a show to North Carolina, he should be forced to perform. Apologist FRANK TUREK agrees:
When Bruce Springsteen refuses to do a concert in North Carolina for moral reasons he’s a hero to the liberals and the media, which are the same thing.
Imagine what would have happened if Bruce had a wedding band that refused to perform at a gay wedding? He’d go from hero to zero!
Yet, when a conservative band, florist, or photographer refuses to work at a gay wedding for moral or religious reasons, the left and the media bully those folks mercilessly as intolerant bigots. And they do so while claiming to be against bullying and for “tolerance”! (As Ryan Anderson pointed out, if it wasn’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards.)
In America, a gay T-shirt maker should not be forced to print up anti-gay marriage T-shirts. And a Christian or Muslim photographer should not be forced to photograph a gay wedding.
If Bruce has the right to deny service, so does everyone.
Springsteen explained his decision in a lengthy statement to fans.
“As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the ‘bathroom’ law. HB2 – known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act – dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments.”
The rocker added he felt it was not the right time for him and the E Street Band to perform in North Carolina.
I don’t think he did anything wrong; a business owner ought to have the right to refuse service to people if he finds their views offensive. Right, Bruce Springsteen? Right Michael Moore?
Here is my question (I called in) to Gary Johnson when he was on the Michael Medved Show:
Michael Medved had Gary Johnson on his radio program to interview him and I was able to get in with a question during his 15-minutes of airtime. Medved telegraphed “quickly” so I knew he were up against a break, so I shortened my question and it gave Medved time enough to finish out the interview with the Barronelle Stutzman example.
I still think Gay Patriot’s position on Gary Johnson is correct, he is a “cake fascist.” But GP continues to point out that “so are Hillary, Bernie, and Trump… so it really doesn’t matter” weighs in on my choice that is so far leaning towards the Libertarian Party candidate. I have posted a date the CFA will endorse a candidate.
I hope Gary will look into this matter more over time, but I know as of now that he understands better than Trump of Hillary what the Executive branch can-and-cannot do Constitutionally, his non-sequitur in regards to the Civil War and baking cakes aside.
