I'm often struck by the "denier researcher got paid"! articles. The people that push the warming agenda don't get paid? Are Al Gore and Michael Mann street people? Are government, university endowments and other foundations, grants, etc provided by wealthy donors, the UN, etc somehow "not money"? Is a Nobel Prize for taking a certain position not an award?
We all need to maintain awareness of bias on every front -- the very way our senses and brains work is a giant "fish studying wetness" bias that goes with us every second of every day. To be human is be motivated by money, influence, status, intellectual validation, security, popularity, and a whole host of other subtle and not so subtle items.
As we age and experience the myriad motivations and biases of people, at least many of us learn to at least be a LITTLE careful of the "hey, the other guy is BREATHING over there"! sort of little kid taunt. Does the NYTs really not realize that ALL sides of EVERY issue have at least many of the same motivations? For people with a TINY level of intellectual maturity that are not complete zealots on an issue, it would seem completely incredible that they could not realize that, and in fact not realize that BILLIONS of dollars around the planet are being spent, granted, tax incentivized, etc on wind, solar, batteries, etc on the hypothesis that the planet is warming due to human causes.
Or are they actually aware of that reality and are consciously attempting to smear the "other side" for having the very same motivations.
How many times have you seen the "hockey stick" chart or some other version showing "massive warming" ... along with predictions of "many feet of sea rise in 100 years", "droughts, storms, heat waves", etc, etc
How often have you seen this chart of what temperature has been doing for the last 10K years? The far right of the chart is where we are -- it indeed might be warming. If you REALLY want to worry, notice how much shorter the warming periods are getting and how much longer the Little Ice Age was than the previous cooling periods! Hmmm ...
In the linked article, BO confidently asserts "No religion is responsible for terrorism, people are responsible for terrorism".
That must mean that people are NOT motivated by what is in their heads nor hearts, since religion certainly involves both. This is the inverse of the truth -- IDEAS motivate people, and religion is certainly at least in part a powerful idea.
Is it not strange that BO is confident that guns, an inanimate object, DO cause violence, but that religion, does NOT!
Remember that BO is a confirmed Statist -- he believes in the advance of state power which ultimately means the subjugation of people by FORCE. What does or does not motivate people really matters not once they have no property, no means to defend themselves (right to bear arms), or no method to speak out. Statists don't believe in motivation, they believe in CONTROL!
The other fact to remember is that Statism **IS** a religion -- it is just godless. The godless religions of communism and socialism killed over 100 million in the 20th century -- THAT is certainly a religion that kills!
The use of words by a Statist are purely a means to power -- as are all their political activities. See Orwell or Hayek books like "Road to Serfdom" to understand this in more detail. Always look with much suspicion at any label choices of a "liberal" or "progressive" -- the words are quoted because even the names they call themselves are lies and misinformation.
The commonly used (stolen) name "liberal" is a complete lie -- Statists are bent on having controlling power over others and false naming is one of the weapons they use to gain control. After which they use violence, imprisonment and death. In their desire to gain control, Statists are fine with aligning with any other totalitarian form of ideology -- no matter how evil.
BO and the MSM find themselves drawn to defend Islamic killers because they find common cause with at least the ultimate totalitarian control aspect of the Islamic State, if not total agreement with specific methods like beheading and immolation in cages. Does it ever seem the least bit odd that the people who make the CLAIM that they are "liberal" find no problem with a religion that treats women as personal property, kills homosexuals as well as women who have sex outside marriage? Perhaps the libertine nature of it's founder in "marrying" a 9 year old "wife" (Aisha) is what impresses them?
Violence has and likely always will be a tenet of Islam, because the founder was a warrior that approved of using force to gain converts and land and wrote violent action against any holders / attackers of "Islamic Lands" into his "holy book", the Koran as a guaranteed ticket to eternal sexual favors. It is the ultimate "works righteousness" for angry young men.
Statists have no problem naming their friends and enemies in ways that suit their cause. They really never did find a "Racist Tea Partier" although they sure tried -- making up a "spitting incident" in DC as well as others. "Tea Party = Racist" was an excellent association. Back in the late '80s-'90s, "Religious Right" was a favorite label. "Right Wing Militia", "Christian Right", "The 1%" ... the Statists always have their enemies, and they completely enjoy applying negative labels to them with extreme frequency. In fact, the BO administration ranks "Right Wing Extremists" as a major terrorist threat!
Note how they totally avoid applying ANYTHING negative to their friends in ISIS -- the ones that cut off heads! Getting "terrorist" in the same sentence with "Islamic" causes their tongues to freeze. Statists ultimately seek raw centralized power and they seek it by ANY MEANS. Which is why it can be confusing as to how they choose friends vs enemies, UNLESS you realize that "Left" means CONTROL, and "right" means CHAOS (it's a Get Smart World). The US was founded as a CENTER RIGHT nation and we have consistently drifted leftward.
The USSR, National Socialist Germany (Nazi) and Sharia Law were/are all based on highly centralized control with "motivation" being at the point of a gun. People tend to defend those that agree on their most basic values, thus BO defends Islam.
Somehow I really don't think that Dana Milbank EVER considered Scott Walker to be REMOTELY qualified for the presidency. Thank, goodness -- if Milbank had thought such, then I certainly would NOT want to consider Walker for president either!
So Walker was IN THE ROOM when Giuliani, the former New York mayor, said “I do not believe that the president loves America.”
Not defending Obama makes Walker a "COWARD"! ... and worth a full WaPO column!
I'm going to waste any time going out and trying to find the likely 100's of cases where lefty politicians were in the room when far far nastier things were said about W or some other Republican president. We know that Milbank would not even notice, since to him they would be FACTUAL statements, and 90% of the MSM would feel the same way.
One can know of someone's character and potential by their enemies. The amazing early level of hatred for Scott Walker from the left shows that he is likely someone that has great prospects as both candidate and president.
We can point out Obama saying that W was unpatriotic and maligning a W record on deficits that BO would take a sefie of himself with were he to come within a few TRILLION of doing as well!
I grew up in a fundamentalist church where someone could always find a way to be just a bit more righteous -- no TV, movies, rock music, dancing, Christmas ornaments -- and of course no smoking, drinking, gambling. Skirts could always be a bit longer, dresses a little drabber ... less jewelry, no makeup. The many manners of reaching total self righteousness shift a lot, but they have been endemic to the human condition since well before the scribes and the pharisees.
It matters not what religion we are, your natural desire is toward self righteousness by the manner of the creed that we choose or fall into.
The environmental "church O the Green" (no doubt with Irish heritage), in this case, the Oregon Diocese (to have just a bit of word fun) is profiled a bit in the linked article.
In the end, the Kitzhaber-Hayes conflict-of-interest scandal may prove small potatoes (organic), but a general point needs to be made. In our republican system of government, we don’t assume virtue. We insist on checks and balances. We require competitive bidding and similarly transparent procedures to reduce discretion and the chances of corruption. We subject regulations to cost-benefit analysis to make sure the public is really being served.
We don't assume virtue? They must mean our FOUNDERS didn't assume virtue and ATTEMPTED to have checks and balances! The Statists from TP (The Party-D) have totally taken over and the virtue of their ilk is assumed at every front. The IRS is run entirely by TP union hacks, as is the media, legal system, education and vast swaths of industry. Of course they assume virtue -- of their own, and naturally assume malfeasance from those not of their flock.
As was covered in the article linked from another blog post not so long ago, today most parents care not what religion their offspring marry into (or none), but increasingly they shudder in horror at the prospect that their beloved children would marry someone from a different political party. My guess is that with 70% of Republicans being religious, the reason their concern is higher is because the child going TP would likely indicate a loss of faith as well, so thus a double whammy if you are not of the TP religion!
There is no more perfect measure that the national religion today is Statism -- with it's stations of the anti-cross: environmentalism, abortion, "gay" marriage, redistribution, free sex (love has gone out of fashion), and sundry other sects and cults.
Don’t get us started on Google and its callow “don’t be evil” sloganeering. When it comes to proving Mr. Obama’s prayer breakfast point, however, give the prize to Putin's alleged funding of Western green groups to lobby against fracking.Environmentalism, alas, is a church with its reformation nowhere in sight.
Jesus provided his followers the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector to guard against sanctimony. The greenies will have to admit corruption is possible before they can do anything about it.
Guess what, Islam has not had it's "reformation" either, and an even bigger problem is that while your most likely really fundamental Christian is something like the Amish, or at least in really dark suits trying to be very loving and forgiving, the fundamentalist Islamic is looking to kill or convert you -- and the is about all the freedom they think you need.
As of now, the fundamentalist TPer is just looking to convert you -- they may fine you, audit your taxes, fire you, sue you for "hate speech" if you don't worship one of their tenets like "gay marriage", but at least as of the moment they aren't in the killing business, or even generally in the incarceration business unless you get really crotchety. But these things have a way of only going one direction UNLESS you have some tenets like "love your neighbor", "first shall be last", "he who would be first must be a servant", etc, and even THEN, the Reformation was far from civil.
Thou shalt worship -- the issue is really only what.
As readers of this blog know, what I see from many data sources with time scales a lot longer than "warmest since 1880"... periods of many hundreds, or even better, hundreds of thousands of years are a better benchmark for "climate" in my book.
The attached article is a good summary of some of what we know of solar climate -- we have actually been looking to some extent at solar activity since at least the 1600s ... this is a good chart from a site that the Australian government maintains that lets you look at the cycles in some detail and gives you some ideas of how much variation there is ...
Solar Cycles are quite interesting -- the article touches on the "Maunder and Dalton Minimums" and the "Little Ice Age" from about 1550 - 1850. The fact that we warmed from the "1880 on" is not very surprising if you show a temperature chart from say 10K years rather than "100 or so". Somehow the Mann / Gore "hockey stick" just isn't so interesting on THAT scale !
The current popular "settled science theory" is that CO2 created by humans largely drives the planets climate -- or at least has swamped all other effects since 1880. A short glance at a longer term chart will really make you wonder about Roman and Medieval Co2 production, and if you are not a fully "settled" warmist may even make you look at a few of those spikes and ponder if there isn't just possibly SOMETHING else out there that might account for such variations.
Then, maybe at noon some day on the beach, you look up and go EUREKA! THE SUN!!! OMG, the **SUN** affects temperature on earth!!! ... but then, if you are a "smart person" and want to stay recognized by your peers as such, you take a deep drink of cocktail and say "never mind ...
Conservatives generally give about 30% more of their income to various sources and I have a strong suspicion that they are both too trusting, AND that watchdog agencies are WAY less likely to do any investigations if someone is sucking money out of conservatives.
IN GENERAL:
Don't give ANY money to organizations that call over the phone unless you REALLY know about them. A huge percentage of such fundraisers are just "using a name", and a TINY percentage of what they raise actually goes to the organization!
NEVER given any money to the "National Republican" anything -- figure out what candidates you like and give it to THEM!
Make sure you vet any places you want to give money and find out what percentage goes to the actual "cause / candidate / etc"
The bottom line is BE SUSPICIOUS -- even if it has the name of a person you like / trust, It's a nasty world out there!
Burlington Vermont is powered by "100% renewable energy" -- oops, the ELECTRICITY is all renewable, BUT that is because it is HYDROELECTRIC -- as in DAMS, which in environmentalist speak are DAMNED BAD! -- or to play on words, "Dam Bad".
So why are they applauding? Because they are liberals and they don't know the difference between electricity and energy, and also because ... well, they really don't like to think that much about much of anything.
The US uses about 100 "Quads" of energy a year. As in quadrillion BTUs -- ONE "quad" is 6 BILLION gallons of diesel! Try to pay that bill even at lower prices!
This article has a nice chart that shows how much is solar and wind. Drum roll !! Wind and solar combined are TWO QUADS .... as in 2% !!!
Hydro and Nuke combined are 10% -- but environmentalists want to SHRINK those!
The linked PL article is excellent. Asking environmentalists or NPR to tell you anything about energy is embarrassing -- and scary when you realize how much stuff these people are in charge of!
This graphic shows up out on Facebook from time to time -- it makes me wonder if velociraptors are smarter than humans.
The linked article shows that raising cigarette taxes works to reduce smoking, especially in lower income people -- the people who pay the highest percentage part of their income to smoke.
Taxes are the sledge hammer of anti-smoking efforts. The federal tax hike helped push tobacco use down to 18.9% in 2011, the lowest level on record, according to the CDCsurveys. Even smokers who don't quit light up less. In the 1990s, one of every 20 high school students smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day. Today, one out of 71 students smoke that much.
This ought not be surprising -- when prices on something rise, consumption of it goes down -- "how much" is a function of how "elastic" the demand curve for it is. Raise the price for something, people buy less of it, lower the price and they buy more -- to a point, at which the market is "saturated". The "marginal utility" is no longer deemed to be worth the marginal cost.
Income works the same. The marginal utility of the first dollar is high and then goes down as income goes up -- the next $10K of income for a person making $40K is high, for someone making $400K, it is quite low -- the "marginal utility" of the first burger you eat can be quite high if you are hungry, if you were forced to eat a half dozen of them, the last few would be a lot less. If you make $400K, the amount of time/hassle it takes to make another $10K may well not be worth what you could do with that time on your own. NOT even considering the tax effects!
You can of course use "infinite money" better than infinite hamburgers, but you can bet a $100 bribe or a $100 fine is going to have a lot less effect on Bill Gates than on someone making $10K a year. The relative nature of utility still holds.
The simple rule "If you want less of something, tax it, and if you want less of it, subsidize it" still works, and we consciously use the first half of it with cigarette taxes, yet, try to ignore the effect for income.
But you might say "you HAVE to have income, you don't have to have cigarettes". Due to the wonders of subsidy, not even this is true -- the government subsidizes sloth through all sorts of programs, and your standard liberal/socialist believes that everyone ought to have their "basic needs" covered by the government. There is some argument about what those needs are, but food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education are almost always included -- and now usually some level of "entertainment". Cell phone, internet, tv, etc.
A major objective of "liberal/socialist" thinking is that income ought to be "basically level", so they subsidize the low end, trying to remove the "need" to work. On the high end, there is no limit to the amount of taxation they want to put on ... 100% taxes for incomes over a given amount have been suggested many times from the left.
Especially with all it's income leveling desires though, the government really does NEED money. The rational solution would be to have a flat tax on ALL purchases (sales tax) that covered federal, state and local governments. Right now that would be about 35%, because that is the percentage of GDP in total government spending! Going off to that link shows "the march to socialism" as the percentage spent by the government continually rises.
What the chart can't show is the effects that income taxes working the same as cigarette taxes have long term on our economy so it's overall output is reduced. The TOTAL GDP is reduced because of the disincentives to higher income earners in the same way as cigarette taxes reduce smoking. A tax is a tax and the effects are the same -- for good and ill.
The ultimate result of socialism has to be slave labor (or revolution/freedom) -- those that would be likely to earn higher incomes start writing books, blogs and rabble rousing rather than creating wealth for the elite to distribute, and the elite gets really TICKED! First they start with little efforts -- use the IRS against groups they don't like, do a little "harassment" with extra regulations / etc on those that make too much money and can't shut up. Eventually though, it's always the Gulag for those that have too much gumption and don't want to go over to the socialist side.
I love articles like this. A couple underlying "liberal" assumptions come through quickly:
1). I'm a liberal, therefore I'm "better" -- smarter, more in tune, "in the know", etc, etc.
2). I'm very modern -- and the latest information is ALWAYS best (therefore, there is no such thing as "truth", because tomorrow's truth will always trump todays!
A good working definition of Philosophy is "footnotes to Plato" ... something that a "liberal" can't subscribe to because of their underlying assumptions -- it's more modern now, Plato MUST be wrong!
But again, Plato calls the ball perfectly and they even quote it in the article!
Theorists have been trying to explain humor as far back as Plato. The ancient Greek philosopher said humor got its power from the pleasure people get when they feel superior over others, laughing at their foibles and flaws.
"Search your heart Luke, you know it to be true!" So given the assumptions of liberals that I just listed above, and Plato's words, it is easy to understand why "liberals" are a better market for political humor!
Political humor, in particular, might have an inherently liberal bias. Alison Dagnes spent years looking into this question for her 2012 book.
It does have a liberal bias, but she didn't get it. If she had managed to understand Plato, she would understand that people want to FEEL superior to SOME group. Feeling is definitely not related to any objective reality, and it is irrespective of your actual power state. Satire makes fun of a group you CONSIDER yourself superior to, there is no requirement at all for you to actually be more powerful than that group in any objective way.
I'm pretty sure the British made fun of the Americans during the Revolutionary war, soldiers make fun of officers, prisoners make fun of jail keepers, southern whites made fun of southern blacks prior to "1968", and as evidenced by Jon Stewart, the dominant political and media evidenced by "The Party (D)" makes fun of conservatives today. Americans were objectively FAR less powerful than Britain during the revolution (they quit because we weren't worth the fight), certainly blacks in the south were less powerful that whites, ditto conservatives in the US today. Humor is an equal opportunity thing -- it depends on perspective, but ALL people like to feel superior!
Seinfeld apparently understood Plato, as have many black comedians -- people LOVE to laugh at groups that they feel superior to -- down through time, Jews, Italians, Blacks, etc. When you are REALLY dominant, as whites were in the south, or liberals are today, you get to make fun of the other group, rather than having to BE one of the less powerful groups to be allowed to make the jokes, as blacks are today in comedy. In this wonderful Seinfeld sketch about a guy that converted to Judaism so he could do Jewish jokes, Jerry isn't offended as a Jew, he is offended as a COMEDIAN!
Certainly, if you are "with your own folks", one can make fun of the allegedly more powerful -- again, it is about FEELING superior, not any actual reality.
Young began to wonder whether this might explain why liberals were attracted in greater numbers to TV shows that employ irony. Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?
As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking.
"Irony" and "ambiguity" are in the eye of the beholder -- or maybe in this case, they are just uncomfortable cover for the truth. When audiences felt inherently and securely superior to Blacks or Jews and that was allowable, the jokes were funny to them. When that superiority started to be called into question, the laughs became uncomfortable, then disappeared, and then the jokes became hate speech.
Anyone watching Colbert KNOWS that he is making fun of conservatives, that is the role he plays on the show! There is no "ambiguity" there at all -- to claim it exists is incredible. When people do not clearly "get the joke", they are not amused -- they are confused! Conservatives, don't laugh for the inverse of the reason that liberals laugh -- conservatives know EXACTLY what he is saying/being.
He is playing the part of a "stupid obnoxious conservative" -- and the Colbert CHARACTER is "joking" -- AS a conservative. He poking fun AS a conservative (character)!
Real conservatives who are skeptical about Global Warming DO use the "won't warmer weather be grand" line, typically during unseasonably cold weather. Liberals HATE that -- and they consider it to be a sign of stupidity. No matter how cold it is, or how long a "pause" there is in warming, they must believe -- and feel superior to the conservative using the line. So they laugh at the Colbert character -- either naturally because they are real warmist believers, or they laugh because they know they are supposed to. To not laugh would not be appropriate to maintain standing in their belief system.
Conservatives have yet a further reaction -- they know that humans in reality DO prefer warmer weather! Given a choice between it being 2 degrees warmer in a winter 100 years from now and it being two degrees colder, humans ACTUALLY prefer the warmer.
BUT, liberals find themselves in a situation similar to people forcing themselves to not laugh at a racial joke, even though everything in the "humor program" of their brain might be firing.
Strangely, "suppressing the natural" is a major part of "liberal" behavior -- most liberals find gay sex disgusting too, it is naturally wired into our brains to react that way -- but they are forced to act like they don't to stay in good graces with their peers.
Conservatives know that the liberals are actually lying -- they are still human, they actually DO prefer slightly warmer to slightly colder temperatures. The scary part is that conservatives also know that "liberals" MUST NOT admit that they actually prefer warmth in order to stay in their group! They are forced to do their best to laugh "heartily and naturally" even though their very being is in disagreement with the position they espouse to stay in the dominant group!
This is where this fairly simple thing gets more than a little spooky and conjures images of religious zealotry, Nazism, ethnic hatred, etc. -- covered in a lot more detail in "The Righteous Mind".
I won't go to ground on this here -- it comes up quite a bit in this blog. Human nature has a whole set of elements that all have "light and dark" sides -- say "greed / envy". Capitalism works to use greed to achieve good things, socialism uses envy to try to make things "equal".
Part of "civilization" is the channeling of our basic drives and weaknesses -- lust to monogamous marriage, competitiveness to sports, material comparison, wars, ... the list is long. For a couple thousand years, in the West, the Christian religion was the overarching set of morals / values that gave a broad agreement on many of these. We accepted human nature as fixed and imperfect, needing to be moulded by the Holy Spirit on the right hand, and by the state from the left.
That balance is now gone. The State, and it's party -- TP, seek to cow the masses into following ONLY the authority of TP. THOU SHALT bow before Global Warming, "Gay Marriage", "Government Healthcare", "Government Education" ... and ultimately GOVERNMENT!!
Making fun of people that don't agree with that might lead eventually to some "mirrorish" image of what happened to Blacks::
Productive free working Christian majority --> productive working Christian minority --> regulated Christian voting bloc --> oppressed minority --> slaves ????
In case you need a laugh after all that seriousness, here is some fairly equal opportunity political satire that at least OUGHT to be funny to both sides! (but likely isn't)
Isn't it wonderfully exciting to see a media braced for battle, leaving no stone unturned relative to the 2016 race?
Let's do a minor comparison to 2008 using the internet to take a little look at how these veritable Sherlock Holmes of focused detective work made sure that we knew EVERYTHING about the current cipher that occupies our highest office!
First of all, his name when he went to at least Occidental was BARRY -- not "Barack". That fact is one that is not discussed a whole bunch ...
We suspect that BO went to Occidental College because he said so in his book (although some of that stuff turned out to be "composite") -- however if you do a google on it, all you get are a few right wing, likely nutty stories about if he went as Barry Obama or Barry Sottero and got foreign student aid. The closest you get to MSM curiosity is this, a debunking of one of the right wing stories, and it proudly tells us that his records are sealed, and will STAY THAT WAY! Not going to be any media pressure or sleuthing as there was to expose W's college records.
Then he went to Columbia ... although those records are not available, and there are aspects of it that would be HIGHLY interesting if he was a Republican. As he is a member in good standing of TP, we find VERY little interest in his time there -- so much so that even a not so wingnut publication with at least SOME level of curiosity did an article lamenting kind of "What the hell?" relative to those years. We do however see some of the MSM working VERY hard to say "nothing here, move along", with a complete lack of curiosity about how someone so self centered to write TWO autobiographies prior to turning 50 would fail to say more than a paragraph about 2 years at a major university.
This could go ad nauseum -- most of what is written in "Dreams" might as well as been "sealed" relative to the interest of the MSM. BO's "Choom Gang" weed buddies, doing "a lot of booze, weed and a little blow, but no smack" arouses not a peep from the MSM and most people have a VERY hard time believing it is written in HIS OWN BOOK even when you point out the page to them -- "like cows at the passing train".
The fact of the matter is that Scott Walker will have to deal with constant scrutiny and charges about things real and imagined every step of the way if he chooses to run, and after election if elected. As we have seen now for at least a quarter century, EVERYTHING about a Republican candidate that could even be IMAGINED to be a negative ( Was Mitt Romney a bully in High School?) will be taken out of context, blown up to the maximum, and will receive extremely strong and leading media coverage "Mr Romney, why did you bully kids in HS? ... oh, and have you stopped beating your wife?" ..
We MUST accept that this is just "the way it is". Anyone that wants to challenge the dominance and power of TP MUST go through massive attacks including those that are completely fabricated -- like Rather's "fake but true" memos if they want to reach the White House. A non-TP candidate needs 3x, 5x, or even more money to attempt to counteract the TP media onslaught that is a fact of life for those that are willing to stand up to the TP juggernaut. Any person willing to run for the presidency as a Republican is an exceedingly courageous person with a strong backbone.
If Hillary runs? Rest assured that outside of Fox and a few other conservative sources, things like Benghazi, Whitewater, Cattle Futures, Don't let anyone tell you that corporations create jobs , will be hard to find except in rebuttal form ... in fact, the number one link on the corporations/jobs one is already an MSM attempt to claim " nothing here"!
This is why any freedom loving person needs to fight TP -- even if they WERE good (which they are not), that much power MUST be fought if free men are to survive!
A little side-trip to the link can assure you I'm not nuts. There really is a "Whig Theory of History", and it is essentially as simple as the belief that "things are getting better".
You likely haven't thought about it much, but you probably have this theory as an unconscious belief. It is hard not to, it is after all the basis of "Progressivism", the dominant stated political theory of "The Party" (TP-Dem) which controls all our media and educational system. It has LOTS of support! It is also something that seems very nice to believe -- things will be better ten years from now, life will be grand when you retire, your kids will have a better life than you did, etc, etc.
It might FEEL nice to believe, but is it true? If you are a Christian or really any kind of a religious person, you ought not really believe it -- God has a plan, but the goal of that plan is eternity in heaven. The earth will explicitly pass away, and the predictions for whatever time the old ball of rock has left are for wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, floods, famine, etc, etc. So no go for a Christian on the "it's getting better and better for sure" outlook.
Atheist? How exactly would there be a "plan" or "direction" of history? And why oh why would it be inevitably toward "better"? Not to mention what "better" might mean in a purposeless universe. The atheist creed ought to believe in NOTHING, as in nihilism. Clearly to them the universe is some grand accident, and since at least a huge number of atheists claim to arrive at their "faith" (the faith they are soulless) because of "the problem of pain and suffering in the world".
Since they can't accept a God that would allow any pain and suffering, they are stuck with a universe that they admit has pain and suffering, but also has no purpose. I always wonder how they arrive at the conclusion that meaningless pain and suffering is far superior to meaningful pain and suffering that they don't understand?
Or maybe the purpose IS pain and suffering? A number of prominent historical atheists seem to decide that INFLICTING pain and suffering may be at least their personal purpose -- see Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the people that outlawed DDT, etc.
"Progressives"? We might refer to these as people that decided to ignore most of the 20th century, where the leading "progressive" ideologies of Socialism and Communism (including National Socialism - Nazi) managed to murder something over 100 million and cause a good deal of property damage while doing it. I suppose it would truly be a "Progressive world" today had Hitler won -- in which case I would dare not be writing this, thus proving (to some) that history had "gotten better".
So, most of us run around believing a theory that has no philosophical or religious grounding, and is absurdly false based on empirical evidence (see middle ages, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, 9-11, lite beer, etc, etc).
Why?
The biggest reason is that we WANT to see history that way and there are certainly a goodly set of people that would like to take our money to tell us that they are making "progress" (See Hitler, Stalin, BO, etc). What's more, they are very happy to indoctrinate us with a specific way of teaching "history" that makes it SEEM like the Whigs produced holy writ -- doubly dangerous, because it is what we "feel" might be right. It is like someone taught you day after day that the sun goes around the earth, and since it looks that way, you are VERY CONFIDENT that you KNOW the right answer!
Only you don't know the right answer!! You need MORE DETAIL. Which is where books like the Churchill biography come in. If you sit down and read DETAILED history about virtually anything, the "inevitability illusion" fades like morning mist at sunrise. You see that history is made up of individuals, countries, events, ideas and "fate" interacting in highly unpredictable ways. It is completely the opposite of "inevitable"!
In fact, what appears to be inevitable even moments before it happens OFTEN turns out to not even happen as it is OBVIOUS minutes, hours, days, etc before that it MUST happen!
The French could have ended Hitler by having one soldier march across the border to into the Rhineland, nearly everyone but Hitler thought that was "inevitable", but they failed to act.
Same with Britain making a treaty with Stalin prior to Poland being invaded -- it was OBVIOUS, only they didn't make it and the opportunity was missed.
Had Hitler not called a halt to offensive panzer operations on the 24th of May 1940, rather than 330K British and French troops being evacuated from Dunkirk, there could have been 330K allied forces killed or captured, enough at that stage to likely swing the war to Hitler.
I could go on and on from this book -- but there are A LOT of options -- Six Frigates, 1776, and Coddington: The Gettysburg Campaign are a trio I would personally recommend ... and the linked reviews can give you a little ammo to take on the Whigs!
“There’s been a shift of thinking,” he said. But the change on dietary cholesterol also shows how the complexity of nutrition science and the lack of definitive research can contribute to confusion for Americans who, while seeking guidance on what to eat, often find themselves afloat in conflicting advice.
No, actually there tends to be ZERO "conflicting advice" among at least government funded "experts" ... they weren't in ANY doubt about cholesterol being bad! The rule of the "expert" is "Always certain, frequently wrong". Often, they are even willing to tell you "it's settled" -- not that we ever hear that in these "enlightened times".
No doubt this will go the way of "wait an hour before swimming or you will get cramps" -- absolute gospel back when us Boomers were kids, forcing us to sit on the shore for the mandatory full hour after lunch!
The list is a long one -- parents being told their babies MUST be on their BACKS ... an especially sore point for our family since 25 years ago it was every bit as COMPLETELY CERTAIN that kids MUST sleep on their STOMACHS! Naturally, our first son HATED to sleep on his stomach, so we had rolled towels alongside him to keep him on his stomach.
Crib death ... like autism and vaccines, or like early heart attacks is something that we believe "there must be a reason for", so we are very suggestible when someone gives us one. Our brains are wired to "look for solutions / rules of thumb" and IN GENERAL that is a highly adaptive trait.
A place it breaks down however is dealing with rare events, or events that take place over long periods of time.
Crib death is (thankfully) rare ... like plane crashes. Any new parent is afraid of crib death, so very suggestible. They want to do "everything they can" -- so they are prone (as we were) to believe what the "expert" tells them. BTW, there is some evidence that SIDS may be caused by the same gene that makes one susceptible to dying in sleep apnea.
When something is rare, it is harder to pin down a "cause", and indeed, the incidence may be so low as to not allow a "cause" to be found. The theory at the time we had our son was that the baby spit up and choked on their vomit when they were on their back ...
The danger of "the expert" like all con artists and confidence men is greatest when one assumes their own ignorance -- the idea that "the expert", MUST know more than "poor little me".
ALWAYS look for alternative views, historical wisdom, "laws of large numbers" , ie if the condition is very rare, then any attempt to "fix it" is highly questionable. If something like climate is known to shift over many thousands of years, then someone making claims of "climate shift" in a period of 100 years or less is lying to you for certain.
We could go on ... but for now, enjoy those eggs in good health -- turns out we are back to being as smart as we were 45 years ago.
I suppose those old paint by numbers pictures may just be a figment of my youth -- they put numbers on little parts of the picture that indicated what colors you ought to use.
TP (The Party-D) through their own instruction and especially given the megaphone of the media does much the same with the minds of the easily led. The linked article gives a few examples which I'll touch on, but then continue for a bit. My sample will be minor -- really the whole landscape of modern thought is carefully and oppressively created and numbered by TP.
Terrorism -- NOT a serious problem. It is like "random crime". NOT to be worried about! (Pay no attention to that young woman just killed!)
Climate Change -- SERIOUS PROBLEM -- everyone needs to get wildly excited about this! RIGHT NOW ... why, in 100 years, it could be as much as a degree or two warmer!! ( the fact that it hasn't moved in 18 years is meaningless)
Vaccinations -- Anti-Science! ... er, well now it is. Pay no attention to Marin County, noted liberal enclave having vaccination rates like Somalia ...
GMOs? Now THAT is some science not to be trusted! Oh, and fracking isn't safe no matter what science might say -- get your mind right! TP CHOOSES which science is "settled" and which is not.
Oh, 50 million lives lost to malaria due to DDT ban? Never mind -- those are black lives that DON'T matter, just like the 6K young black men that shoot each other in our TP socially engineered inner cities every year!
18 Trillion and debt and rising -- No biggie. Remember back prior to 2009 when any deficit at all ... including the W $175 B in '07 was a HUGE issue? Wonder what changed?
The US is out of oil! ... Oh wait, it has a lot of oil -- and it is all due to the policies of TP!
The Keystone Pipeline is bad, Fracking is bad! Oil is bad! ... oh wait, TP is good! You might have to kinda fudge that mental square ... oil and everything to get it is bad, but $2 gas is good and due to the TP policies -- "somehow".
If you listen to NPR and follow some right wing media, this is pretty much what the mental landscape looks like -- including HUGE gaps like 50M and 6K a year lives lost that nobody talks about! TP presents the pieces of the picture they want to present, AND tells you what to think about what they choose for you to see.
It is easy to understand why TP believers hate Fox News, Talk Radio and Blogs so much!
"What if you knew her and saw her dead on the ground, how can you run when you know?"
Back when I was in HS the young were awfully anxious to go after Nixon and ill trained, wet behind the ears guardsmen no older than themselves who and killed four protestors at Kent State in a horrible accident. Mao, who killed 10's of millions was considered a great guy and so were war ballads against America.
Songs are powerful, I can still remember the strains of "Ohio" playing in the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire student union as I toured the campus in preparation for college. It seemed so "revolutionary". The modern leftists cry of "Chicken Hawk" when anyone that thinks that Freedom, America, and young women like Kayla Mueller are worth fighting for.
Better to avoid getting on any "high horse" and claim that "bad things have been being done for a long time".
Better a "Chicken Hawk" than a Chicken Shit.
Had the current "Chicken Shit in Chief" kept just a few troops in Iraq, the rise of ISIS could have been prevented entirely, but now it will take a lot more sad and brutal deaths before we get back to more of aggressive ballad footing -- but here is a start.
Better to die with you finger on the trigger (preferably a BIG one) than on your knees, especially with your head being hacked off by a raghead in black.
